Two weeks after Jack Parker’s body was found beside a Lebanon highway and just less than a month after the murder of Marshal Dumele at the Pelican Cafe, Hamilton County detective Joe Schaefer receive a break in the latter case when he took into custody Breck Lutes, a 28-year-old Middletown electrician, from “a disorderly house” in Newport, Kentucky. Three women were arrested at the same time, including one who gave her name as “Mary Hamilton” and turned out to be Jack Parker’s widow.
Schaefer had tracked him to Newport following an incident on May 30, 1928, in which two Cincinnati motorcycle police chased a speeding car containing two men and a woman across the bridge into Covington. One of the men in the car began firing with a revolver over his shoulder at the motorcycle cops, hitting one of them three times in the shoulder and the other once in the foot. They gave up the chase, but one of the officers said he recognized the driver of the car as “Crane Neck” Nugent, who had been acquitted of the murder of Bob Schief in Hamilton. He was reasonably confused, as it was actually Todd Messner, Nugent’s co-defendant in the Schief murder, also acquitted. Investigators traced the car to a rental agency in Covington. Lutes admitted being in the car when it was rented, but said he was not in the car when the motorcycle cops were shot. He wasn’t, but three people identified him as one of the Pelican Cafe bandits. Schaefer let Lutes go, however, hoping that he would lead detectives to the other bandits in the case.
Nearly five months would pass before the first solid arrests in the case, all three tinged with serendipity.
On the afternoon of Sunday, September 30, Hamilton police responded to a disturbance at a fishing camp along the Great Miami River north of town near Woodsdale. Several people had been drinking at the camp, and when some of the party decided to leave, a very drunk and belligerent Toddy Messner shot the tires of their car full of holes. “I’m staying and now so are you,” he told them.
Somehow, the departing partiers managed to call a cab and took the tire into town for repairs. The garage owner tipped off Hamilton police, and a posse of seventeen officers from Hamilton and Middletown set up a stake-out at the entrance to the narrow lane that led to the fishing camp. When Messner, another man, and two women left the camp, police surrounded the car and took them all into custody. The man, a bus driver from Bond Hill, broke down under questioning and gave police the address of the Newport apartment where Messner had been living. There, they found a stash of yegg’s tools and the clothes that would place Messner at the Pelican Cafe the night of Dumele’s murder. Hamilton police turned him over to Hamilton County authorities, and the owner of the Pelican Club identified Messner as the man who directed the other bandits during the raid.
The very next weekend, Detective Schaefer and his partner found Rodney Ford, a 30-year-old Cincinnati man, parked in a car a couple of blocks from his home in the West End. They saw him drop a revolver over the back seat. They took him into custody and witnesses identified him as one of the bandits from the Pelican Club. During his trial, he revealed that he had just dropped off the fugitve Robert Zwick, also known as “The Fox” and “Foxy Bob,” who was also wanted for Dumele’s murder and other crimes, and was on his way to buy some whiskey. It was the first of many narrow escapes for Foxy Bob.
The same day Ford was arrested, Breck Lutes showed up at Mercy Hospital in Hamilton after having been shot in the hip at a fishing camp near Venice. Charles Fiehrer, a Hamilton man who owned the camp, said he was cleaning his gun when it went off and shot his friend. Schaefer and Hamilton police arrested Lutes when he left the hospital three weeks later, and a Hamilton County grand jury indicted Messner, Ford, Lutes, and the absent Zwick on first degree murder charges.
The three prisoners appeared at a preliminary hearing together on November 15 and were granted separate trials. Ford was to be the first to face the jury, but with Zwick on the loose the gangster war raged on even while these three were in custody.
On the night of December 12, the day the Hamilton County court began questioning potential jurors in Ford’s trial, Martin Lewis, who lived on West Miami River Road, just north of Venice but across the river in Hamilton County, saw his barbecue stand about 250 feet from his hillside home consumed in flames. He rushed to the scene and with some of his neighbors watched the small frame building quickly burn to the ground. The stand had been closed for the season and there was nothing flammable inside, but it burned so quickly that Lewis presumed it was arson. Still, he was shocked when the falling flaming timbers revealed a body lying on the floor.
The coroner discovered a bullet wound in the chest, three knife wounds, and a broken left arm on the charred remains. The body was lying face down. The coroner asserted he had been killed elsewhere and the barbecue stand, just a few yards where the body of another gangster had been discovered a year earlier. A belt buckle and the remaining teeth helped identify the body as that of Robert Andres, a 28-year-old railroad worker who was present at the Pelican Club the night of Dumele’s murder. He was one of the few men present willing to go on the stand to identify the bandits and had testified at Ford’s arraignment. There was no doubt in Schaefer’s mind that this was the reason for his murder, and he laid the crime on Foxy Bob Zwick and Crane Neck Nugent, by now a gangster all-star having been in on the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Three days later, Nugent and Zwick struck again, by Schaefer’s reckoning. Bob Kolker, who was close to the late Jack Parker, had been drinking at his Parrish Avenue home with a fellow named Kenneth Richardson. At about 4:30 in the morning they both got into Kolker’s car, Richardson driving, to take the latter home on Dixie Highway. In front of Richardson’s house, Kolker got out of the car and was about to take the driver’s seat when the glare of bright headlights blinded him from the rear. A sedan slowly passed near and a man leaned out of a window, firing five shots. Four shots missed, but one caught Kolker in the chest, just below his heart, and lodged in his left lung. He had been picked up several times by the police in connection with Parker’s death, and Schaefer insisted Kolker never talked and said he believed that the gangsters believed that Kolker had been giving “tips.”
Kolker managed to survive the attack and appeared as a defense witness at Lutes’s trial, offering an alibi, then went into the wind. All three of the captured bandits were convicted in the Dumele murder, Messner and Lutes both receiving life sentences in the Ohio Penitentiary, and Rodney Ford executed July 1929. Foxy Bob Zwick was still on the move, but still spent a good deal of time in Hamilton, and was there on May 19, 1929, when the gangster war began its boldest string of skirmishes.
A Lindenwald street car passed Seventh and Heaton streets about 10:45 p.m. that evening, and in spite of the rattle, several in the neighborhood heard what sounded like gunfire or a car backfiring. But they minded their own business. Several alleys in the neighborhood contained garages filled with all sorts of contraband, and most residents fearfully parked their cars on the street to avoid stumbling onto something.
But shortly after 11 p. m. Walton Finfrock drove into the alley off the 300 block of North Sixth Street and in the beam of his headlights saw a man lying on the ground, sort of wedged up against a garage door. “Just a drunk,” Finfrock’s passenger, his father, said. Then they noticed the pool of blood. Finfrock abandoned his car there and notified police.
The dead man was George Murphy, known around town as a night clerk at the Grand Hotel when it was run by former Butler County Sheriff Rudy Laubach. He was originally from St. Louis and was known to have run liquor to Hamilton from Detroit, Kansas City, Louisville, and St. Louis. Other than talking about his war experience in the Canadian army, he revealed very little of himself to people in Hamilton, who noted that he was often out of town for months at a time. Even his family was in the dark about his occupation and didn’t know any of his friends, but they knew he always had money, dressed in the finest clothes, and always drove a new car.
The law enforcement system knew Murphy better than the underworld or his family. In addition to being well-known as a liquor runner, Murphy was the chief suspect in a recent attempt to blow up a safe at the Rollman department store in downtown Cincinnati on May 5 along with Hamilton’s own Fat Wrassman and Harry Truesdale, one of George Remus’s lieutenants. He had a long criminal record and had made a daring escape from the Atlanta federal prison. He was such a brazen and reckless operator that no gang would work with him full-time, so he was known as a lone wolf. Nevertheless, he had a reputation as a straight-shooter for the most part, although he had been known to participate in several hijackings of fellow bootleggers.
Murphy, 40, elegantly dressed in a fine gray suit with monogrammed handkerchiefs, bad been dead twenty minutes when the first police arrived. The location of machine gun shells indicated a gunman had lain in wait behind a board fence across the alley. Twenty-eight shots had been fired: ten into the garage door, eighteen into George Murphy. Six bullets went into his back, six more shots nearly tore off his left wrist and arm, and six of the bullets, apparently shot after an initial attack, traced a perfect circle eight inches in diameter around his heart. Murphy had a .38 revolver tucked in his belt. His inside coat pocket was a gold watch that contained a picture of a pretty girl. Detectives presumed it was his sweetheart, the titian-haired beauty Pauline Wilson, 25, but she was nowhere to be found. Murphy and Wilson had moved from last known address, an apartment on Atlantic Ave. in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Cincinnati, in February. They told neighbors they were moving to Florida. Neighbors knew her as “Pearl Murphy” and suspected he was a professional gambler. They paid their rent in advance, in cash, and were mostly quiet but received frequent visitors, including “a big fat man.”
The next morning, in what police believed as evidence of a related incident, travelers discovered a pool of blood on the bridge at Venice, not far from the burned-out barbecue shack that contained Robert Andres’s remains. The river was running high, making it impossible to search for a body.
Although there were many men in and around Hamilton who served in World War I and could wield a machine gun with the precision and panache as Murphy’s hit, but no two were as expert as Crane Neck Nugent and Foxy Bob Zwick. It would later turn out that the bullets in the Andres murder and the Murphy assassination were from the same gun, the kind that Zwick was known to use.
Police were also concerned because the tactic used in the attempt on Kolker’s life and the Murphy assassination–hiding in ambush and taking the victim by surprise–was almost unheard of in Southwest Ohio. A more common method among local thugs was taking the man for a ride outside the city limits. “Victims were often lined up before a battery of weapons and told of the cause for death before his life was snuffed out with led,” the Daily News reported. “Not so with Murphy. No killing quite so well-planned and covered up has come before authorities here in many years.”
As it would turn out, the hit on George Murphy was just a warm-up.
(Next month: The Little Chicago Gang War continues with one of the most notorious assassinations of the Prohibition era, the Symmes Corner hit on Turkey Joe Jacobs and the narrow escape of Foxy Bob Zwick.)