Bloody Williamson (36 page)

To the amazement of everyone, Arlie Boswell turned up at the hearing and urged that Birger’s plea be granted. Only the day before, he said, he had visited the condemned man, and had learned that he was willing to tell what he knew about the murder of Lory and Ethel Price. The Williamson County State’s Attorney wanted that evidence to use in the prosecution of the Price cases, and asked that the execution be delayed so that he could secure it.

Boswell’s performance aroused State’s Attorney Martin. He charged that Boswell had known for months everything that Birger was willing to tell about the Price murders.

“A majority of the people in Williamson County,” he added ominously, “do not believe that Boswell wants to prosecute Birger or any of his gang.”

After Martin’s argument the board announced its decision: no clemency, no stay of execution.

Smith left Springfield, where the hearing was held, as soon as the decision was announced and rushed to Benton. There, in the name of Nathan Birger, a nephew of Charlie’s, he filed a petition for a sanity hearing. Martin, anticipating the move, was in court to oppose it. When the judge indicated that he intended to allow the petition, the State’s Attorney demanded that the hearing be held immediately. The court, however, set Monday, April 16, as the date.

Selecting the jury that would pass on Birger’s sanity took a full day. During that period the defendant made his last desperate effort to escape death. He frequently cursed the newspaper reporters who sat at a near-by table, in the vilest possible language. He cowered, rolled his head from side to side, stared wildly at the jurors and spectators. Time after time he tried to rise from his chair, only to be restrained by the guards who sat beside him.

Smith offered only one witness—the operator of a barbecue stand who had known Birger for years. The man testified that he had visited the defendant in jail two months earlier and had believed him to be insane at the time. His story convinced no one.

The state relied on several deputy sheriffs and jail guards. As they gave their opinion that the prisoner was sane Birger interrupted repeatedly, sometimes rising to his feet despite his guards.

“Aw, you’re crazy yourself!” he shouted at one witness.

As another witness was about to take the oath he said in a voice audible throughout the room: “Let him swear. That’s the way he makes his living.”

Once he burst out to Judge Miller: “Hey, Judge, I want to take a smoke and you can’t stop me. You’ve done all you can to me.”

There was laughter when one jailer testified that Birger had told him he wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. That was the last place, the gangster had explained, the Devil would ever look for a Jew.

The jury took twelve minutes to find the defendant sane. With the verdict in, the court ordered the original sentence to be carried out on April 19.
^*
As Birger was led from the courtroom that he would never see again, he walked with a quick step, his body erect, his eyes straight ahead. But his hands trembled so violently that the handcuffs rattled.

All through the night of April 18, while thousands crowded into Benton in the hope that they might see the execution, Birger talked—to his jailers, to newspapermen, to his lawyer, to the rabbi whom he had refused to see until these last hours of his life. He talked of everything that came into his mind—of his boyhood; of his years in the army; of his first wife who, he said, was the best of the four he had had, though he didn’t have sense enough to know it when he was married to her; of the crimes he had committed and of those he was charged with. He prayed with the rabbi, and told him he wanted to do what was “right toward God” for the sake of his sister and children.

“Good-bye, Bob, old boy,” he said to Smith when the lawyer finally left his cell. “I know you have done all you can, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

To the last he denied that he had plotted the murder for which he was to die. Yet he spoke with no resentment. “They’ve accused me of a lot of things I was never guilty of, but I was guilty of a lot of things of which they never accused me, so I guess we’re about even.”

At seven o’clock on the morning of the 19th he ate a hearty breakfast. When a doctor offered him a hypodermic he refused it.
^†
The barber entered his cell to shave him, but the man’s
hand shook so badly that he could not continue. Birger took the razor and carefully went over his face himself. Then he dressed in a gray suit, tan shirt, and dark striped tie.

At nine thirty, surrounded by guards, he left his cell. As he passed other guards in the corridor he called out in a voice that carried no hint of nervousness: “Good-bye, boys, be good!” When he stepped into the jail yard and saw the mounted machine-guns he remarked: “Looks like the western front here.”

Smiling, he walked briskly to the scaffold and mounted the steps. He looked at the crowd in the enclosure and at the other hundreds at windows and on rooftops outside the stockade. The spring sun came out from behind a cloud, and he turned his head to the sky.

“It
is
a beautiful world,” he said.

Looking down again he waved to an acquaintance. Then he spoke to the faces before him in a quiet, even voice.

“I have nothing against anybody. I have forgiven everybody, all because of this wonderful Jewish rabbi. I have nothing to say. Let her go.”

Those near the scaffold saw that he was still smiling when the black hood came down over his face. The hangman fastened the noose, and the sheriff sprang the trap.

In a few minutes life left the body of the man who had sworn that he would kill Joe Adams and that there was nothing “the God-damned Franklin County law” could do about it.

August 1928–August 1930

L
ATE
in August 1928, Oldham Paisley, editor of the
Marion Republican
, put into print some pointed questions that had been disturbing people in Williamson County and southern Illinois for many months.

In an editorial entitled, “Somebody Has Quit,” Paisley recited that Highway Patrolman Lory Price and his wife Ethel Price had lost their lives on January 17, 1927, in “one of the most brutal murders in the history of Williamson County.”

“Since then,” he continued, “… confessions have been made by two of the principals in the killing. One of the leaders is now serving a life term for another murder, while another awaits trial in the county jail and a third is in a federal prison. The leader has already been executed for another crime.”

Paisley recalled that on June 11, 1927, a grand jury in Washington County, where Price was believed to have died, indicted five Birger gangsters for his murder; and that on June 15, 1927, a Williamson County grand jury returned indictments for the murder of both victims.

“What has been done about those indictments?” he asked. “Nothing yet.”

“Murdered in January, 1927,” Paisley summarized. “Indicted in two different counties in June, 1927, and now it is August, 1928, almost September—twenty months after the murder, fourteen months after the indictments—and still no trial.”

To be sure, several of the men charged with the crime were still at large, but was that any reason for not proceeding against the three who were serving other prison sentences—Art Newman, Freddie Wooten, and Riley Simmons?

“Why wait,” Paisley asked, “for the capture of others that may never be caught and who may be tried at any time they are caught? When will Washington or Williamson County start action?”

One reason for the delay came out three weeks later when a telegraphic dispatch from New York announced that State’s Attorney Boswell and Coroner Bell had arrested Leslie Simpson, one of the men under indictment, when his ship docked there. Boswell, it was reported, had been working for months on a tip that Simpson, Connie Ritter, and Ernest Blue, all fugitives, were members of the crew of the Roosevelt Line S.S.
Stanley.
For several days he and Bell had been in New York waiting for the ship to reach port. Simpson, who had taken an alias and had grown a mustache by way of disguise, was readily identified. The other two men were not on board.

As soon as Simpson was behind the bars in Williamson County, Boswell announced that he planned to bring the Price murderers to trial at once: his term in office would end in early December, and before that time he was determined to prove the falsity of rumors and insinuations linking him to the Birger gang. Not until the middle of October, however, did he ask Judge Hartwell to set the trial—a lapse of time that the judge characterized publicly as “an awful delay.” Before the prosecution and the attorneys for the defendants could agree on a date, Freddie Wooten forced a further delay by escaping from jail.

On November 5 Simpson was brought into court for arraignment. The young man—tall, dark-haired, pleasant-faced, without a touch of a gangster’s hardness about him—stood before the bench in apparent contrition and pleaded guilty to the murder of Lory Price.

“Do you know you have a right to a trial by jury?” the judge asked.

“I do.”

“Have you been promised leniency, or have you any hope for leniency by throwing yourself on the mercy of the court?”

“I have not, Judge. I just want it settled.”

Hartwell announced that he would reserve his decision on the plea, and also on Boswell’s petition that Simpson be sentenced to life imprisonment and used as a state’s witness in the impending trial. Two days later he accepted the plea, but deferred sentence indefinitely. At the same time, in spite of the fact that Wooten was still at large, he gave notice that the trial of the other men under indictment would begin on November 26.

Ten days before that date a federal grand jury, sitting at East St. Louis, indicted Arlie Boswell, Coroner George Bell, and several other city and county officials for conspiring with the late Charlie Birger, Art Newman, and others to violate the national prohibition law. Judge Hartwell immediately postponed the Price trial until December 7, when the new Williamson County State’s Attorney, Roy Browning, would be in office.

Actually, it was January 7, 1929, before the alleged murderers were brought into court, for Browning had needed time for preparation. Wooten, recaptured several weeks earlier, sat with Newman, Simmons, and Simpson as the judge called four cases—one for the murder of Lory Price, one for the murder of Ethel Price, and two for conspiracy to commit murder. One by one, attorneys for the defendants entered pleas of guilty, which the judge accepted. He stated, however, that before passing sentence he would hear the evidence of the prosecution in order
to ascertain the degree of guilt of the prisoners—a procedure that Illinois law made mandatory.

Art Newman, unperturbed as ever, took the stand first. A bank robbery, he related, had led ultimately to Lory Price’s death. The gang—Birger, Newman, Ritter, and several others—had “pulled the job” late in November 1926. The loot included bonds to the amount of $3,400. Not knowing whether they were negotiable or not, Birger and Newman took them to Boswell.

“He told us that $2,700 worth of them were O.K. for the market,” Newman asserted, “so we left them with him. I never saw them again.”

Boswell also informed the gangsters—so Newman charged—that Lory Price knew that they had committed the robbery, and that the highway officer had written a letter to the bank president offering to tell what he knew. Price, confronted with Boswell’s story, denied it vehemently, but Birger suspected that he lied.

Price and Boswell, Newman continued, both participated in the car-stealing that was one of Birger’s activities. Birger reported the license numbers of stolen cars to Boswell, who passed back word as soon as a reward for recovery was offered. When Price “found” the car, all three divided the reward.

But Boswell distrusted the officer. Early in January 1927, he stopped at Shady Rest to pass on his suspicions. Price, he told Birger, was talking too much to Oren Coleman, the sheriff.

“Charlie, you’d better take that son-of-a-bitch out and kill him,” he warned. “He’s going to cause lots of trouble.”

A few days later Shady Rest was destroyed. That, Newman declared, marked Price for death. Birger believed that the officer was responsible for the burning of the resort, and made up his mind to kill him.