Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [56]
When newspaper articles described an unidentified bank robber as having leaped over a railing to rob the bank in Dalesville, Leach was intrigued. This yegg had a flamboyant streak, which suggested to Leach that he might move on to bigger and better targets. On a hunch, Leach drove to Muncie to interview Dillinger’s teenage partner, William Shaw, who was in the jail. Shaw named Dillinger. Leach checked with Dillinger’s parole officer, who reported that he had disappeared.
Two weeks after the Dalesville job, on Friday afternoon, August 4, farmers spotted a dark blue Chrysler sedan cruising past the green cornfields outside the eastern Indiana farm town of Montpelier. At precisely 2:40 P.M. the car stopped in front of the First National Bank on Main Street, which had been robbed just three years earlier. Dillinger, wearing a straw boater, walked inside, drew a revolver, and smiled. “This is a stickup,” he announced, chewing a piece of gum.
As his partner Harry Copeland forced three employees onto the floor, Dillinger leaped a low railing and asked the bank manager, Merle Tewksbury, how much money the bank had on hand. As Dillinger scooped cash off the counters, Copeland corralled a pair of arriving customers, also forcing them to the floor. At one point a teller reached for an alarm. “What are you trying to do, set off that alarm?” Dillinger demanded, still chewing his gum.
“I would if I could,” the woman snapped.
It was a perfect robbery. After herding the employees and customers into the vault, Dillinger and Copeland stepped back onto the sidewalk ten minutes after entering the bank, carrying $10,110 in cash and coins in a single sack; they had left behind exactly forty cents. “Looks like the bank’s being held up again,” an old man standing on Main Street remarked as they emerged.
Dillinger turned and smiled. “I’m not surprised,” he said, before ducking into the Chrysler and driving off.20
Neither was Matt Leach. The rail-leaping stunt convinced Leach that Dillinger was behind the Montpelier robbery, and he redoubled his efforts to bring him in, putting the homes of Dillinger’s father and sister under surveillance. A few days later, Leach received unexpected assistance from a private detective named Forrest Huntington, who worked for the Montpelier bank’s insurance company. At the Muncie jail, Huntington grilled William Shaw for names of anyone Dillinger might contact. Shaw produced the name of an ex-con in Lebanon, Kentucky, and from the Kentucky man Huntington wrangled the address of an apartment Dillinger was using in East Chicago, Indiana.w
On Monday, August 14, Leach and a squad of state police raided the East Chicago apartment and arrested three ex-cons. One claimed Dillinger had been staying off and on at East Chicago’s Inland Hotel. A few days later the snitch volunteered he had heard that Dillinger had relocated to an apartment in Gary. Leach raided that apartment, but Dillinger had moved on, taking an apartment in Chicago.
By late August, the manhunt was gaining momentum. More insurance investigators joined the chase, and on August 25 one of them, a divisional manager for the Pinkerton Agency in Cincinnati, passed a tip to the Dayton Police Department that Dillinger was dating the sister of a state prison inmate named Jenkins. A phone call to Michigan City produced the name of Mary Longnaker. Two Dayton detectives swung by Longnaker’s rooming house on West First Street and, ushered in by the landlady, searched her room. They found a letter from Dillinger.
The landlady volunteered that this Mr. Dillinger wrote regular letters to her tenant Miss Longnaker; she volunteered