Bloody Williamson

by Paul M. Angle

  To the reporters who questioned him about the causes of the gang war he talked freely. He had first met Carl Shelton in the fall of 1923, when he was in the Herrin hospital recuperating from the wounds he had received in the Doering affray. The two men became personal friends and business associates in bootlegging and the slot-machine racket, which they practically monopolized in Williamson County. In all the Klan fighting they stood together against the clean-up forces.

  Birger admitted that he was resentful when the Sheltons, as he charged, skulked the last battle with the Klan in April 1926, while three of his own men were killed, but the real break with his former partners came as the result of his determination to protect the people of Harrisburg from harm and robbery. In late August, according to his story, “Blackie” Armes and several Shelton gangsters—none of the brothers was in the group—robbed a Harrisburg businessman of a valuable diamond ring that they intended to hold until he redeemed it with cash. Birger forced them to return it.

  After that it was war, though as yet undeclared. “The Shelton gang just began to shoot up roadhouses where I had been,” he said, “and I knew what that meant. Every time I would visit a place, ‘Blooey,’ a few minutes later the Sheltons’ armored truck would go by and pour in the lead.

  “Now,” he told a St. Louis Star reporter, “I’m out to get Shelton or any of his men, because if I don’t get them they’ll get me.”

  He continued with no more emotion than most men would display in discussing a business transaction:

  “I showed what I’d do to them when we caught Mack Pulliam, one of Shelton’s friends, on the road in an ambulance a few weeks ago. His mother was sitting beside him, and they had some sort of a procession … to make it look like a funeral and fool us. But I and my men drove up and conked that fellow until he fainted away. We showed him.”

  His gang, he always emphasized, had been formed only for protection. Where the Sheltons were a crowd of “red hots”—“professional trigger-pullers and roughnecks”—his boys were simple coal-miners, farmers, and clerks, brought together by their friendship for a man in a tight spot. Yet he would match them any time against his enemies. “The boys would be tickled pink to have it out on the open road,” he told Roy Alexander of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “We don’t want to have a shooting scrape in any of the towns where someone might get hurt, but we’re glad to meet the Shelton crowd any time.

  “And,” he concluded soberly, “it’s likely we will.”

  The Sheltons were natives of southern Illinois. Their father, as a young man, had come from Kentucky to settle in Wayne County, where he had married a local girl. He was a sober, God-fearing farmer who worked hard but without much success. He and his wife were the parents of numerous children, but for practical purposes, in the twenties, “the Sheltons” meant three of the five brothers—Carl, born in 1888; Earl, two years younger; and Bernie, born in 1899.

  The boys had been brought up on the farm, but from early youth they had shown an aversion to farm work. Carl and Earl took to leaving home for months at a time to drive taxicabs in St. Louis or East St. Louis. When he was old enough Bernie followed their example. All had an aptitude for trouble. In the fall of 1915 Earl was convicted of compounding a felony—a charge arising from a holdup in which he had participated some months earlier in Wayne County—and was sent to the Illinois State Penitentiary at Pontiac, where he served eighteen and a half months. About the same time Carl, in St. Louis, pleaded guilty to a charge of petty larceny and was sentenced to a year in the workhouse. Bernie was arrested in a stolen car while Earl was still in prison, sentenced to a year in the workhouse, but paroled.

  After Carl and Earl had served their terms they worked in Illinois mines, but about 1920, with Bernie, they located again in East St. Louis. Prohibition gave them their chance. They ran gambling houses and bootlegging establishments in East St. Louis and its environs, but the coal counties to the south and east offered a field too tempting to be ignored. John Bartlow Martin describes what happened:

  Each coal town had its own gang of local toughs, gamblers, and bootleggers. The only things needed to weld these into a monopoly were brains and guns. Birger and the Sheltons had both. They allowed the local boys to continue to operate, but only under their protection and selling their liquor.… The advantages of this orderly system were quickly apparent to many law-enforcement officers—it reduced local rivalries that made trouble and it increased the amount and certainty of the payoff to the officials.… Some sheriffs cooperated for money, some “as a matter of survival”—the gangsters became so strong that the remaining honest officials could not cope with them. Soon the Shelton boys were in command.*

  The Shelton brothers were hardly—as Williamson County legend today would have it—wild but essentially good boys who were driven to lawlessness by the persecution of S. Glenn Young and his fanatical Klansmen. They were men with criminal records who fought the Klan because if it succeeded in cleaning up Williamson and other counties it would put them out of a very lucrative business.

  Now, as the Sheltons fought again for survival, newspaper men sought their story of the feud with Birger. Having no fixed headquarters, they were harder to find than their enemy; found, they were less loquacious, but the reporters had some success.

  A representative of the St. Louis Star located Carl Shelton at his home in East St. Louis. Armed men filled the parlor; women and children occupied the rear rooms. The gang leader—tall, dark, heavily built—spoke slowly and softly until the reporter told him that Birger had charged him with the possession of stolen cars. Then he flared up:

  “So Birger says I have hot cars, and that I’m a bootlegger, does he? Well, let me tell you, I’ll run a list of the registry numbers of my cars in the newspapers any day, and that’s more than he’ll dare do.

  “I’ll admit I’m a bootlegger,” Shelton continued, “but he is too, and the people in Williamson County have known that about both of us for a long time.”

  The Shelton brothers, he said, had left Williamson County for good, but he implied that they had no intention of leaving the territory to Birger.

  “I can prove enough on Birger,” he promised in ending the interview, “to make him Uncle Sam’s boarder for a long, long time, and I’m going to do it.”

  Earl Shelton, ill with malaria in an East St. Louis hospital, was more expansive. The Sheltons, he told a Post-Dispatch reporter, were not given to boasting like that “coward” Birger.

  “He’s got himself all hemmed in with armor and machine guns, and whenever you see a man hiding behind a fortress, that means he’s afraid to come out in the open.

  “He talks about wanting to meet us on the highway.… If we didn’t know he was only blowing, we might get excited and go up there to see what it’s all about, but we know Birger and aren’t taking his loud talk very seriously.”

  The first disagreement with Birger, Earl said, came when he and his brothers refused to help smuggle some of Birger’s Russian relatives into Florida. The real difficulty, however, had its origin in the slot-machine partnership. Under their agreement, the Sheltons and Birger were to split the profits on a fifty-fifty basis. After a time the brothers learned, by underworld channels, that Birger had held out three thousand dollars. Confronted with the charge, he claimed that he had spent it for protection. Whereupon, Earl snorted, “we banished him.”

  What about the Shelton “gang”? the reporter asked.

  “Our so-called gang,” Earl replied with an air of innocence, “consists of friends, all natives of Williamson County, who took common cause with us in our fight against the Ku Klux Klan. We were not robbers or gunmen, but we never ran away from trouble. We don’t know whether any of our friends are in the fight against Birger, but if they are, they will take care of themselves. We’re out of it.”

  Despite the talk of their leaders, neither gang moved toward a pitched battle. The in-fighting, however, continued. On a Saturday night early in November 1926, a shady character name
d Milroy was riddled with machine-gun bullets as he left a roadhouse near the mining town of Colp. The mayor and chief of police, called from another roadhouse near by, were shot from the darkness as they stepped out of their car. The mayor was fatally wounded; the chief, who ran at the first shot, escaped with a shattered hand. Both officers, rumor had it, were in the bad graces of the Sheltons.

  A few days later someone tossed a homemade bomb from a speeding car near Birger’s roadhouse. Intended for the barbecue stand by the roadside, it was thrown too soon and missed its mark. Birger’s place was unharmed, but an innocent farmer, two hundred yards away, was terrified and suffered a considerable loss in shattered windowpanes.

  The bomb was thrown about two o’clock on the morning of November 10. At the same hour, on the 12th, machine gunners, supposedly Birger gangsters, shot up Joe Adams’s home in West City. Hours later, in full daylight, an airplane flew low over Shady Rest. After circling the woods around the cabin it returned at a higher altitude. Several of Birger’s men, watching apprehensively, saw three bundles leave the plane in quick succession. One fell apart in the air, but two plumped to the ground near the cabin. They turned out to be bombs constructed of sticks of dynamite bound around bottles of nitroglycerine, but so crudely made that none exploded. The attack was attributed to the Sheltons, repaying Birger for shooting up the home of Joe Adams, their ally.

  The following week a dynamite bomb, thrown from a passing automobile, exploded in front of Adams’s house. It damaged the porch, blew off the front door, and shattered the windowpanes. Had the bomb fallen ten feet closer to its mark, Adams, his wife, and brother—all in the house at the time—might have been fatally injured. As it was, they escaped harm.

  But not for long. On a Sunday afternoon in mid-December Mrs. Adams answered a knock on the front door. Two young men asked whether Joe was at home.

  “Won’t I do?” she asked.

  “Tell him we have a letter from Carl,” one of them replied.

  Mrs. Adams left. A moment later her husband, eyes heavy with sleep, lumbered to the door. One of the boys handed him the note. While he read both drew pistols, fired them into his huge fat body, and ran. He lived long enough to whisper to his wife that he did not recognize either of the men who shot him.

  The next day, at the coroner’s inquest, Mrs. Adams placed the blame for her husband’s death on Charlie Birger. During the last several weeks, she testified, he had telephoned repeatedly, sometimes as often as three times a day. Once, in Joe’s absence, he had asked:

  “Mrs. Adams, have you got much insurance on Joe’s life?”

  “No, not very much,” she replied.

  “Well,” Birger said quietly, “you’d better get a lot more because we’re going to kill him, and you’ll need it.”

  Gus Adams, the mayor’s younger brother, and Arian, his fourteen-year-old daughter, corroborated the widow’s statements. Arian, moreover, remembered the occasion when Birger had demanded that her father turn over to him the tank with which the Sheltons had armored their truck. Standing on the sidewalk, she had heard Birger say: “We’re going to kill you, you big fat son-of-a-bitch.” The girl brought out the ugly word without hesitation.

  Birger, questioned about the murder, told a correspondent for the International News Service:

  “I don’t know who killed Adams, but I’m certainly glad he was killed. Everyone comes to me to ask who did this and that. What am I—a detective force for southern Illinois? What the hell does anyone care who killed Adams?”

  The gang war moved toward a climax. To many people in the community, and elsewhere, that point was reached on the early morning of Sunday, January 9, 1927. About midnight a farmer who lived a short distance from Shady Rest was awakened by five or six shots that seemed to come from the vicinity of the resort. He had no more than dropped off to sleep again when an explosion, apparently at the same location, aroused him. Rushing to the window, he saw the cabin fall apart, and felt his own house tremble on its foundation from a second blast. Flames flickered tentatively for a few minutes, and then lighted the countryside as they consumed the logs of the resort.

  When dawn broke, and curious spectators thought it safe to approach close enough to see what had happened, they found only ashes, burning embers, and the remains of four bodies charred beyond recognition.

  A body blow by the Sheltons, everyone said, and one that would undoubtedly end the gang war. Birger was no fool. Surely he would realize that he was beaten, and that if he attempted to continue hostilities he would lose his life as he had lost his stronghold.

  The analysis was sound as logic but inaccurate as prophecy.

  One of the most frequent visitors at Shady Rest was a state highway patrolman named Lory Price. Rumor had it that he worked with Birger in the stolen-car racket—that Birger’s men would steal a car, hold it until a reward was posted, then park it in some out-of-the-way spot and tip off the officer. Price would “find” the automobile and divide the reward with the gangsters.

  Whether that was true or not, it is certain that Price was on intimate terms with Birger and several of his men. Moreover, he was known to have stopped at Shady Rest only a few minutes before the first of the explosions that destroyed it, and he was one of the first persons to visit the ruins on the following morning. At the inquest into the death of the victims he gave important testimony. On the night of January 8, he said, he had stopped at the Birger resort after attending a motion-picture show at Marion. Steve George, the caretaker, greeted him at the door of the cabin and asked him to come in to meet his wife. While there he noticed a man whom he had never seen before sitting, half-intoxicated, beside the fireplace, and George had shown him a boy whom he called Clarence dead drunk on a cot in an adjoining room.

  “When this man leaves,” George said, pointing to the stranger, “I’m going to bed.”

  By his own testimony, Price remained a few minutes only and then returned to Marion. There, seated at a lunch counter, he heard the two explosions that signalized the destruction of Shady Rest.

  One week after Price appeared before the coroner’s jury, his stepfather, who lived near his home on the outskirts of Marion, became concerned over the fact that he had seen neither the highway officer nor his wife for two full days. When his knocks brought no response, he telephoned the sheriff’s office. Deputies forced the door. Price’s uniform lay on a chair, his pistol and cartridge-belt on the dining-room table. Although the bed was rumpled, Mrs. Price had not retired—her nightgown, neatly folded, was still on the coverlet. The fact that her hat and coat were missing, and that telephone wires leading to the house were cut, pointed to a kidnapping.

  Or a murder. Perhaps two murders.

  * “The Shelton Boys,” copyright 1950 by the Curtis Publishing Company, included in Butcher’s Dozen and Other Murders (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 109. Quoted by permission.

  XIII

  MURDER—AND MORE MURDER

  January 1927–July 1927

  I don’t know what in the hell’s the matter with me.… Every time I kill a man it makes me sick afterwards. I guess it’s my stomach. Charlie Birger, January 17, 1927.

  FROM ALL appearances, Birger was finished. Shady Rest was gone, the men of his gang had dispersed, his rivals had taken over his bootlegging business, he himself was under suspicion of murder.

  Actually, Birger’s round was coming up.

  During the fall of 1926, foreseeing, perhaps, that the Sheltons might win a war of guns and dynamite and armored cars and aerial bombs, he had resorted to finesse. Almost two years earlier—on January 27, 1925—a post-office messenger at Collinsville, Illinois, had been robbed of a mine payroll amounting to twenty-one thousand dollars. So far the crime was unsolved. Birger hunted up a postal inspector, told him that the Sheltons had pulled the job, and convinced the officer that he knew what he was talking about. Early in November a federal grand jury returned secret indictments naming the three brothers. One by one they were arrested and released on bond. />
  Their trial opened in the United States court at Quincy on the last day of January, 1927, with Judge Louis Fitzhenry presiding. Since both Newman and Birger were expected to testify, interest ran high. The authorities, fearing gunplay, scattered deputy marshals and detectives around the courtroom; spectators were searched as they entered.

  Newman, the government’s first important witness, held the stand—and the spotlight—for three hours. Small, trim, dapper, hard, he sat in the witness chair with legs crossed and hands clasped over one knee, an embodiment of self-assurance. Whenever he mentioned the Sheltons in his story of their former friendship his voice dripped with contempt.

  Early in January 1925, he related, Carl Shelton had asked him if he wanted in on a good thing.

  “I said sure, but when he told me it was a mail robbery, I backed out.”

  He heard nothing more until the morning of January 27, when Carl telephoned him at his home in East St. Louis. That was the day Ora Thomas was to be buried, and Shelton wanted Newman to drive him and his brothers to Herrin for the funeral. Newman demurred.

  “I told him I was tired and that he would get in trouble going there.”

  “Well,” Shelton answered (so Newman said), “we pulled that Collinsville job this morning and we must have an alibi and it’s up to you to give it.”

  Newman yielded, and started for Herrin with the brothers in his car. At Marion, however, Delos Duty dissuaded them from continuing. In the afternoon they loafed around the county seat and then returned to East St. Louis. Late that night Newman dropped in at Shelton’s saloon. There, in a back room, were Carl Shelton and Charlie Briggs, with bundles of money on a card table before them.