Terror in the City of Champions (41 page)

On Gulley Road, Harvey Davis directed Dean to get Poole from the car. Dean pulled his guns—a .38 and a .45 he had bought for five bucks from state commander Arthur Lupp—and ordered Poole out of the car. Poole didn’t fight. “OK,” he said. Dean ushered him to a spot near a ditch and stood six feet from him. Lee was to Dean’s left. Davis stayed behind both of them, armed with a revolver.

Poole said he hadn’t done anything and asked why they had pulled guns.

“You’re a dirty liar,” Davis said. “You know what you’ve done and what you have been brought out here for. You know you beat up your wife—”

“Boys, there must be some mistake,” he said. “I never—”

Davis swore at him. “You’ll never live to do it again,” he said.

Dean looked around. There wasn’t much light and he couldn’t see Poole’s face. In the brief, quiet pause, Dean figured it was time. He fired at Poole. Lee shot too, but off to the side so as not to hit the man. Dean shot eight times from the hip, unloading with both hands. Lee used three bullets. Poole collapsed into the ditch. He had been struck six times. They waited to make certain he was dead. The pop of the gun awoke farmer Fred Shettleman. He reasoned that the sound must be a backfiring car. He fell asleep.

Davis scolded Dean for shooting too early; he had wanted to lecture Poole some more. Davis told the men to keep their mouths shut about the killing. They drove back to Fort Street and a few of them went to a German inn, where they sat amid the cigar and cigarette smoke in the tawny light of a half-curtained barroom and chatted over beers. Davis walked home. The fresh air might clear his mind.

A farm woman toting heads of cabbage discovered Poole’s body before six o’clock the next morning. She noticed something in the ditch, approached, and screamed. A couple sleeping in a nearby car startled awake. They drove to a grocery store to call the police. Poole had no identification on him. The first officers to the scene thought the man might be handsome Harry Millman, a mobster affiliated with the Jewish Purple Gang. But Detroit homicide chief John Navarre, who had helped put some of the gang in prison, recognized on sight that it wasn’t Millman. He thought the dead man might be a gangster involved in a $65,000 robbery of a Detroit bank. Witnesses said one of the gunmen had been biting his nails while holding a gun. Examining Poole, Navarre noticed his gnawed nails. But the other evidence didn’t make sense. Fellow gangsters would have executed him cleanly with a shot to the head, not several shots delivered haphazardly to the torso. As newsmen snapped photos, police took Poole’s fingerprints. Failing to find a local match, they wired them to the FBI in Washington, speculating that the victim might be a mobster.

Within four hours Director J. Edgar Hoover himself called Detroit’s chief of detectives. The FBI had a match, he said. The prints belonged to Charles Poole, who a decade earlier had been arrested for hopping a train in Dodge City, Kansas. The victim was identified in the evening editions of the Detroit dailies. A
GAIN THE
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-
M
EN
S
CORE A
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RIUMPH
, heralded one headline. Reporters had no idea that the whole affair could have been prevented had the police or the FBI more diligently investigated myriad crimes and complaints.

Gulley Road in Dearborn was outside the city limits, but Poole lived in the city, so both Detroit police and the county sheriff’s department investigated. Navarre assigned detectives Andrew Jackson “Jack” Harvill and Charles Meehan to work with Deputy Mickey Farrell, a colorful figure who had been a cop for two years. Farrell had grown up near the ballpark and worked there as a young man, even encountering Ty Cobb. Before joining the force he had been an amateur prizefighter, a taxi driver, and a barroom bouncer. Physically daunting, he played the bad cop well.

Interviews with Poole’s widow, family, and neighbors turned up no motive. Poole didn’t have money. He didn’t gamble. He didn’t step out on Rebecca. He didn’t drink much. He had no known enemies and didn’t associate with criminals. His life mainly revolved around family, friends, and baseball. Everyone seemed to like him. At the morgue Marcia and Owen Rushing confirmed that the bulleted body inside the refrigerated glass case was that of their brother-in-law. Poole’s aunt identified him too, as did Mrs. Robert White, owner of the Junction Restaurant who once employed him.

“Poor Charlie,” she remarked to Harvill. “To think that two of the boys who work for me was out with him the night before he died.”

Harvill, a veteran of the Detroit force, had just gotten a break. He, Meehan, and Farrell interviewed Poole’s friends Sherman and Hyatt. They learned of the baseball meeting and then fanned out to bars and restaurants along Fort Street. They came up with descriptions of three men who had been looking for Poole the night he disappeared: a thin, pasty man whom Sherman had let into Poole’s flat; a short, solid, tough-looking chap who had asked a bartender if he had seen a ballplayer named Poole; and a young, blond, athletic guy who had escorted him from the bar and into a waiting vehicle. But police had no plate numbers and no names. Though someone mentioned that “Tennessee Slim” fit the first description, the nickname wasn’t distinctive enough to lead them to their man. And no one at Timken Axle knew of Poole or a baseball meeting.

Harvill and Meehan went to the funeral, as did Poole’s friend Sherman. They hoped he might recognize the graceless man who had invited Charles to join the ball club. But he wasn’t there. Harvill gave Sherman his business card and told him that if he ever spotted “Tennessee Slim” to give the card to a police officer and have the man arrested. At the funeral police noticed that Marcia Rushing, Agnes Gill, and Ruby Lane were strangely quiet. They appeared to be fearful. They wouldn’t talk. Over the next days the leads withered to almost nothing.

On May 14, the day after the Poole discovery, an employee of Michigan Alkali found Roy Pidcock’s strung-up, scarcely clothed body on Fighting Island. Canadian authorities investigated and quickly decided he had taken his own life.

Several clues, though, should have raised questions. How did Pidcock get to the island? There was no boat on the shore and his underclothes had not been wet. Why were his feet clean? Ash covered the floor but no traces of dust appeared on him. Whose fresh shoe prints showed in the ash? No shoes were discovered in the shed. What about the gash on his head? No autopsy was performed. Canadian police pointed to the note that had been left at his house, to his odd behavior, and to his previous disappearance as evidence of suicide.

Secrets

Detective Jack Harvill worried that he had struck a stone wall. Rebecca Poole had no clue why her husband had been targeted. She couldn’t imagine who would kill him. “Charles was good to me,” she said. “We didn’t have anything but I was happy and a man’s got to be good to you if you’re happy with him under the condition in which we had to live.” Rebecca liked that her husband was kind, cared about their children, could fix anything, didn’t drink to excess, and even helped with washing and ironing.

Police interviewed friends, family, and former co-workers, but their words led nowhere. If Poole had been found with a union application tucked under his head, as John Bielak had, or been linked to the communist party, as was George Marchuk, police would likely have attributed his death to radical elements and closed the case. If he had been black, like Silas Coleman, the investigation would probably have been abandoned at the first roadblock. Something about the Poole murder pricked Harvill. Maybe it was the sight of Poole’s infant daughters or his hapless wife, or maybe it was that Poole was a fellow southerner, born in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Harvill was from Tennessee, at Tottys Bend, fewer than two hundred miles from Owensboro. He was one of twelve children. Soft-spoken and reserved, he had become a teacher near his hometown. When the Great War called, he went with the 83rd Division to France. Afterward he landed in booming Detroit and found work at Paige Motor Company, which had a plant not far from where Poole would live eighteen years later. At age twenty-four he had joined the Detroit Police force, walking a beat near the headquarters on Beaubien Street, a block from Monroe, where Greeks socialized, ate moussaka and pastitsio, and admired scantily clad belly dancers. Harvill and his wife, Hildegard, were gardeners. He grew flowers, she grew vegetables. They had no children. Now a homicide detective, he had spent his entire career based at the central station. The Poole case would be his most significant.

The break came almost a week after Poole’s disappearance. Near Fort Street, Gene Sherman spotted the gangly man who had visited Poole’s house. He handed Jack Harvill’s business card to a police officer and the cop arrested Harvey Davis. At headquarters Harvill, Meehan, and Farrell told Davis that they knew about Poole and the baseball meeting. Davis blanched but offered little. He denied knowing Poole, but during a string of questions admitted being an acquaintance of Marcia Rushing. Harvill headed to the Rushing home. He told the Rushings that police had Harvey Davis in custody. The detective bluffed his way through the conversation, letting on that he knew more than he did. He hoped to scare her into talking. It worked. She revealed that they were terrified of the secret society.

“Nobody is going to harm you,” Harvill said.

“You don’t know these people,” Marcia Rushing replied.

It was the first Harvill had heard of it, but he didn’t let on. They said they had warned Owen’s brother Lowell, who lived in their house, against joining the group. Who else did they know in the organization? Harvill asked. Marcia Rushing offered some names. Harvill arrested Lowell Rushing and police grabbed the other men and raided their houses. They discovered guns, ropes, whips, black robes, ammunition, and literature for the Wolverine Republican League. Harvill found the men—even those not directly involved in Poole’s disappearance—unwilling to talk. The prospect of being punished by the society frightened them more than jail time. But as the circle of suspects widened, detectives drew out bits of information and began playing suspects off one another. Over the next twenty-four hours the vague skeleton of a sinister organization and the specifics of Charles Poole’s murder took shape. The key moment came when Dayton Dean opened up. At first he supplied little. But as police charmed and coaxed him and patted him on the back he shared more.

Overnight the story of the terrorist cult exploded in banner headlines:

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OOLE A
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EGION