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By Root 2366 0

with Dillinger meant instant respect, and prestige, things Nelson craved; this, after all, was a twenty-four-year-old who just twelve months before had been a gangland chauffeur. Now he would “command” the nation’s most wanted bank robber. Dillinger gracefully accepted a secondary role in Nelson’s gang, but it was a distinction that would be entirely lost on the press. When the two were eventually linked the newspapers dubbed them “The Second Dillinger Gang,” a view that angered Nelson. Before long his envy would curdle into jealousy.

It is unclear whether Dillinger realized he was joining forces with a psychopath. The night Dillinger arrived in the Twin Cities, Nelson was driving through Minneapolis with his gofer Johnnie Chase when the two cut in front of a car driven by a thirty-five-year-old paint salesman named Ted Kidder, who was returning from a birthday party with his wife and her mother.

“Damn it, they can’t do that to me,” Kidder said as Nelson’s car veered in front of him.

Irritated, Kidder sped up and cut back in front of Nelson’s Hudson. This enraged Nelson. He pulled alongside Kidder’s car and attempted to force it into the curb. Kidder pulled ahead, but Nelson stayed directly behind him as they neared the salesman’s home in the St. Louis Park section of Minneapolis. Not wanting to lead the angry driver to his house, Kidder headed toward a drugstore to call the police. Reaching the store, he had just leaped out of his car when Nelson drove up and shouted something. A moment later three shots rang out. Two struck Kidder in the midsection, and he fell, dying.

His wife, Bernice, ran to his side.

“You’ve killed him!” she screamed.

“Keep your damn mouth shut,” Nelson snapped, “or I’ll let you have it, too.”3 He backed up the car and drove off.bq

This was John Dillinger’s new partner.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota Tuesday, March 6

The temperature hung at the freezing point as the green Packard sedan pulled up in front of the Security National Bank & Trust Company a few minutes before ten. Six men in dark overcoats stepped out into the street, glancing about, wisps of steam rising from their lips. Stern, unsmiling, and unshaven, wearing fedoras tugged low over their foreheads, they were a rough-looking bunch. A bank stenographer saw them through a window. “There’s a bunch of holdup men,” she joked to a clerk. “I don’t like the look of this,” the clerk said.

Just three days after his escape from Crown Point, Dillinger was about to rob a bank. One of the men remained by the car as Tommy Carroll took a position on the sidewalk by the front door, a submachine gun beneath his coat. Dillinger led Nelson and the others inside. Nelson threw open his

A clerk pressed a button, and as the dozen or so employees and customers inside the bank lay on the floor or backed against the walls, the alarm began ringing loudly outside the bank. At the sound of the alarm, Nelson flinched. Dillinger, by now accustomed to working to the sound of an alarm, strode coolly behind the teller cages and, with Van Meter, began clearing stacks of cash off the counter. The alarm enraged Nelson. In contrast to his partners, who remained calm, he began pacing the lobby nervously, sticking his submachine gun at people.

“I’d like to know who set that alarm off!” Nelson shouted. “Who did it? Who?”

As Dillinger and Van Meter shoved the bank president toward the vault door, Nelson seemed to be working himself into a frenzy. He pointed his gun at one frightened employee after other.

“If you want to get killed, just make some move!” he announced. “If you want to get killed, just make some move!”

Within minutes policemen began to arrive. A traffic cop, Homer Powers, was the first to run up. Tommy Carroll met him with his submachine gun, and within moments Powers was standing on the sidewalk, hands above his head. The police chief, M. W. Parsons, and a detective arrived next. They were disarmed and joined Powers on the sidewalk. A crowd of townspeople began gathering, drawn by the alarm and the spectacle of three policemen standing with their arms