by Alice Echols
If he was aware of the detectives that October, and it seems he may have been, the encounter doubtless further rattled him. Of course, being chauffeured around the city diminished the likelihood that he might be recognized. Maybe the dark glasses that he began wearing in mid-November helped in that regard. Staying in his room and rarely venturing outside would have maximized Walter’s chances for freedom. But the only way he could relieve the feeling of claustrophobia that came with being cooped up in his hotel room was to take long walks, which he did each day. This was risky, as were his trips three or four times a week to the newsstand at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. There he purchased the Denver Post, as the police circular promised he would, and the Kansas City Star. Self-deluded though he could be, he would have understood the precariousness of his freedom.
However, there was no way that my grandfather could have known just how contingent his present circumstances were. It turns out that the detectives who had spotted him that October day in Gramercy Park read detective magazines. Not long after Walter crossed their radar one of the detectives recognized the “nervous man of Gramercy Park” in the pages of his favorite detective magazine. True, the man in the photograph looked unruffled and confident in contrast to the worried man they had spied, but the faces matched up. Now it all made sense: the man’s backward glances, anxious face, and palpable unease, so out of place in that little island of tranquility. It was uncanny, the detective thought, how well the description of the fifty-one-year-old fugitive tallied with the man they had recently seen. He would be well dressed, the write-up promised, and living in a good hotel or apartment building, but he would also appear anxious, and he would likely look haggard, and noticeably slimmer than his given weight.
On Friday, December 9, Walter sat down at his desk in the Parkside and composed what was, for him, an unusually long letter. That night most New Yorkers were caught up in the drama of a projected snowstorm that made the front page of the New York Times. A lot was riding on this storm, the first of the season. While holiday shoppers and store operators hoped the storm would fizzle out, the fifteen thousand unemployed men who stood ready to clear the city’s streets and roads prayed for a blizzard and the opportunity to finally earn a dollar or two. Snow was not on Walter’s mind, however. He began this letter to Lula by offering her financial advice that managed to be both exceedingly precise and curiously opaque, rather like that telegram to Dorothy in June. He identified most of the people he mentioned by initials—initials that would have made sense to Lula but to few other people. He suggested she approach either Roy or some other man whom he identified only by initials, and to say that a friend had lent her $3,500 and had requested in return a trust deed for their Tejon Street house. After giving her exact instructions about trust deeds and insurance policies, he warned her to be careful about what she signed.
The letter then turned shambolic as he lurched from one topic to the next. Proclamations of love collided into possible business maneuverings and stark warnings about others, which then gave way to dark musings about his situation. He accused Roy of “always grinding some ax for himself” and of having “some crooked slant on things I have.” She should not trust him “an inch.” There was only one man he seemed at all inclined to trust, but he admitted he had no idea how he felt about what he called “the whole matter.” Bottom line: “There isn’t a man with sense back there.” He returned to this theme in the next paragraph. She should expect that people back home “will misquote your every word and misinterpret every wink of your eye.” But if others were untrustworthy, Walter was himself an unreliable narrator of his own recent past. Although he had been no further west than Akron, Ohio, he claimed that he had nearly suggested they meet up when a recent trip took him close to Colorado Springs.
Much of the letter concerned their future. Should Lula wait to join him until Dorothy (or “Charlie,” as he called her) and her fiancé, Dewey, were settled together? He emphasized that the only reason he allowed Lula to stay in Colorado Springs was because of their daughter and the fact that she was not yet permanently settled. “A lot of angles,” he mused. He wrote of how unbearable it was for him to have to wait for her, and then he turned self-pitying:
Am just marking time. Have never been to a stage show. Have never listened to a radio. Can’t stand music. You know I am terribly in love with you, honey darling, and as sentimental as a kid where you are concerned, and music, cannot endure it.
Am living so simply. Spending so very little. Keeping it until you and I can enjoy it together. I can do little except work, read, walk. I do not drink and you can buy whiskey for $2 a gallon. Everybody drinks; not for me though. Worry worry worry about you and drinking wouldn’t help.
The plan, to the extent that any emerged from the letter, was that whenever she was ready to join him, he would tell her where he was and they would reunite. All he wanted from the house, he said, were pictures, unmounted, of her and Dorothy. Finally, he encouraged her when she was feeling blue to remember “the millions who were out of work and destitute.” After all, he reminded her, “we could have more to be unhappy about than we have.” He added a postscript of sorts, apologizing for a letter that was “disjointed and badly written.” However, he explained, “it is difficult to write and want to put down things which you can not.”16
The following day he stopped by Brentano’s again and purchased Flowering Wilderness, part of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. For the fourth time he followed the clerk to the shipping department and arranged for his letter, neatly folded into an envelope, to be pasted inside the book’s front cover. In a departure from his normal protocol, he requested that the package be addressed to Walter Clyde Davis at 1628 N. Tejon Street, Colorado Springs.
There was a snowstorm that weekend, but the much-anticipated blizzard never materialized, and on Sunday Walter headed out again with Bogans. Maybe the snow got in the way of a longer drive, because at about two o’clock Walter asked to be dropped off at the corner of 38th Street and Sixth Avenue. As much as he disliked the cold, he disliked being in his hotel room more. And the city, heavy with whiteness, was beautiful. After a lengthy walk, he entered the hotel lobby. As he waited for the elevator, two well-dressed men approached him from behind. “Are you Davis?” one of them asked. Slowly Walter turned around and faced them. Perhaps he remembered the detectives from that day in the park. “I’m your man,” he said, nonchalantly. “He didn’t turn a hair,” one of the detectives observed. “I’ve handled a lot of cool fellows in my time,” said Detective Dominick Pape, “but this Davis fellow is just as cool as any of them.”
Questioned about where all the money was, he shrugged. The $200 he had on him was all he had left, “every cent in the world. I was going to surrender the next day or so,” he said, “because I’m just about broke.” He claimed he had been on the verge of turning himself in more than once. He quickly clarified that although he was without money on him, he did own $600,000 worth of real estate in Colorado, where his family was keeping several million in safekeeping for him. When the detectives asked him how much money he had stolen, he maintained his innocence. All of his troubles stemmed from a misunderstanding. When they pressed him, he clammed up and refused to talk anymore without legal representation. He then bragged about his lawyer daughter.
The detectives took him to the 22nd Street station, where he was booked. He was allowed a phone call, and he rang up Lula. Rather than tell her that he was in police custody, he said only that he was considering turning himself in. Before ringing off, he told her she was his one and only true love. When the police placed him in a cell they thought he seemed relieved to have been nabbed and almost eager to return home. Maybe the police were fooled by how upbeat my grandfather seemed or maybe he slipped the detectives some cash, but Walter was allowed to enter his jail cell without removing his silk tie. Later it was explained that the police extended him this courtesy because he was a banker. But according to established police policy, all prisoners were, without e
xception, meant to be relieved of belts and ties.
Once my grandfather was in his cell with the door locked, he turned gloomy. Whatever relief he had felt about no longer having to outsmart the police and about being able to focus on something other than all the angles of his predicament vanished once he was behind bars. Maybe the visceral reality of incarceration was too much for him. For most of that evening and night he sat on his cot. He appeared neither cool nor relieved. After all, there was a reason he had left Colorado, and six months later the situation had not improved. Would he be able to convince anyone besides his wife and his daughter that his problems were the result of a misunderstanding? More to the point, would a jury believe him? If Fred Bentall with his pint-sized association had had the book thrown at him, what might happen to him when he stood trial? He had read about the angry crowds at Sharer’s trials and at the Depositors’ Committee meetings. He also knew that many townspeople imagined that he was the master swindler behind the wrecking of all their associations. A successful appeal might take years.
I suspect that foremost in his consciousness that night was his family. In his letter to Lula he had said he was living simply so that they could enjoy the money together. But if he still had some part of the money cached away somewhere and it was discovered by the police, it would become part of the association’s assets. Unless he had somehow managed to communicate to his family the whereabouts of the money, it was useless to them, no matter how big his stockpile. And then there is the possibility that he had told the police the truth and that he really was down to his last $200 of cash. All of these scenarios were equally dire for his family. How would his wife and daughter fend for themselves in the midst of this brutal and seemingly endless depression?
It seems unlikely that suicide had not already figured in Walter’s deliberations long before he entered that jail cell. Two people who had contact with him that June before he left Colorado thought it quite likely he would end his life. “If they ever find him,” Eva had told the press, “they’ll find him dead.” His lawyer, Bernard Seeman, told an employee of the City not to be surprised if his boss killed himself. And then there was the wanted poster, which said quite plainly, “Check bodies of all persons found dead.”17
How likely is it that a man facing a $1.25 million shortfall, someone who had amassed over half a million dollars’ worth of universal life insurance, had not considered suicide? And how could killing himself not have occurred to my grandfather when stories of suicide filled the newspapers? That year saw the high-profile suicides of millionaires George Eastman of Kodak and Ivar Kreuger, the match baron, not to mention those of many stockbrokers, businessmen, and professional men. That April, while Lula was staying at the Waldorf Astoria, the head of several large real estate corporations committed suicide while lodging there. The note he left behind read, “To whom it may concern, can’t stand it any longer.” And it wasn’t just stockbrokers diving out of skyscrapers. The papers contained stories of unemployed and underemployed working people who found that they, too, could stand life no longer.18 There is no evidence that shame figured in my grandfather’s calculations. Maybe it was expedience, knowing that life would become a lot less bearable for him and everyone around him if he returned to Colorado.
That night Walter sat on his cot, stared at his cell door, and focused on another angle. Although money was doubtless part of his calculation, this time the angle involved inches and knots and bars. As it happened, there was a rowdy, noisy prisoner at the end of the corridor and the guard on duty that night walked down the corridor several times to shut him up. When he passed Walter’s cell at 3:00 a.m. he saw him sitting on the edge of his cot staring ahead. But at 3:20 a.m. when he again walked past his cell the guard noticed that his prisoner seemed to be standing upright, pressed against the bars and steel shield on the lower half of the cell door. His fingers were gripping the upper part of the bars. The guard, believing that he was staring moodily at the wall, yelled, “Don’t ride the door.”
The policeman assumed his reprimand would have sent him back to his cot, but Walter was still leaning on the cell door when he passed him again. This time, the guard said, he realized that the prisoner’s eyes were glazed and that his tie had been secured to an upper cross bar. The cells in the 22nd Street station did not offer an accommodating space for hanging oneself. When the guards opened his cell door they saw that only two inches stood between Walter’s feet and the floor. My grandfather’s heart was still beating faintly, and the police emergency crew thought there was a chance he might live. They brought in a doctor from St. Vincent’s Hospital, and for nearly two hours they struggled to revive him. He never regained consciousness.
7
Orphans in the Storm
Hugh Harper was the first to receive the call about my grandfather’s capture. The police chief could not take credit for his arrest, but at least he could be the one leading Colorado’s most hated man, in handcuffs, off the train. Eager to bring him to justice, he was already on his way to New York when news of the arrest began to circulate in Colorado Springs. Lula learned of it from a local reporter and Eva from a New York City policeman. But most residents who got wind of his arrest that evening did so on Walter Winchell’s nationally syndicated radio show. Immediately, skeptical callers, anxious for verification, flooded the switchboard at the Gazette and Telegraph. By the time the morning paper hit the newsstands and Harper got off the train in New York City Walter was already dead. For anyone who dreamed of a satisfying trial in which justice was served and the hidden money recovered, news of his suicide was disappointing. The boldface headline “Crime Doesn’t Pay,” accompanied by visual proof—photographs of him looking formidably composed before the scandal and emotionally shredded after his arrest—must have provided little solace.1
In the days following his suicide the authorities behaved as though they thought closure on the affair was just around the corner. Reverting to their original hypothesis, they now said that Walter had absconded with anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 in negotiable bonds and cash. They insisted he had stashed it somewhere. When reporters asked Harper if it wasn’t true that upon his capture in New York Walter had claimed that the only cash he had left was $200, the chief smiled broadly. “We’ll see about that,” he said. Receiver Fertig was also optimistic, predicting that with nearly a quarter of a million dollars of life insurance coming their way, depositors would see a 13 percent dividend before much longer.2
Colorado Springs police chief Hugh Harper wielding an automatic as his colleague, inspector Irvin Bruce, looks on. “Manhunter” Harper counted among his close friends J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation). (Courtesy of the Irvin “Dad” Bruce Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, MSS 0159)
The Gazette ran the same two photos with similar commentary two days later. (Denver Post)
No matter how sanguine the authorities were about the case, my grandfather’s 3,600 depositors remained apprehensive. To begin with, more than a few of them doubted that the man who had committed suicide in the 22nd Street police station was actually Walter Clyde Davis. Six months earlier a C.W. Davis had killed himself in a Long Beach, California, hotel, and at the time the authorities suspected the dead man was Colorado’s most wanted man. Some might have wondered whether he had tried to stage the suicide so that his family and depositors could collect the insurance money while he remained free. There were now so many rumors swirling about that when Harper visited the New York City morgue he arranged for Walter’s corpse to be removed from its casket and photographed. Fingerprints were taken as well. Partly this was to ensure proper documentation for the insurance companies, but it was also to head off any rumors that he was still alive. Yet those rumors had staying power. Long after my grandfather died, Harper said that the police continued to receive “hot tips” about the whereabouts of the “loan baron swindler.”3
People’s suspicion that Walter Davis had put o
ne over on everyone, that he had escaped to that port of missing men, was fueled by broader revelations about scandals in the banking industry. Nothing would do more to burnish bankers’ reputation for greed and corruptibility than the spring 1933 hearings of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, better known as the Pecora Committee. Tasked with investigating the causes of the stock market crash, the committee uncovered a jaw-dropping amount of financial dubiousness and wrongdoing.4 Hidden bonuses, exorbitant salaries, and unpaid personal income taxes—all of it turned out to be business as usual among America’s highest-profile and most respected bankers, including Charles E. Mitchell of the National City Bank (today’s Citibank) and J.P. Morgan Jr. of the House of Morgan. Mitchell and other top officers at National City took $2.4 million in interest-free personal loans from the bank in order to help them ride out the stock market crash.5 Commenting on the country’s bankers, the Denver Post suggested that “if the senate committee can find one who has been paying income taxes the last few years, that will be real news.”6 Another newspaper editor spoke for many when he claimed, “The only difference between a bank burglar and a bank president is that one works at night.”7 In his inaugural address, President Roosevelt made a point of condemning bankers, those “unscrupulous money changers.”8 This was the reputation of Walter Davis: just another “bankster.”9
