Tracking Down Mail Robbers

    Four years ago, three brothers out in Oregon dynamited a mail car, killed four trainmen and escaped, leaving behind a piece of burlap foot covering coated with pitch to throw bloodhounds off the scent. Under the microscope, a criminologist discovered three tiny grains of salt in the burlap, and with that slender thread named the three slayers. More than three years later, one was arrested in the Philippines, where he had joined the army under an assumed name. Three years and eight months after the crime, the other two were caught near Steubenville, Ohio, where one had married and the two were living quietly on a farm. The three confessed and were sentenced for life.
    Like the Canadian mounted, the postal inspectors who form the manhunters that guard Uncle Sam's mails never quit a case until it is closed by arrest and justice, or, in some cases, by the death of the culprit.
    The identification of the three d'Autremont brothers as the perpetrators of the attempted mail robbery at Siskiyou, Oregon Oct. 11, 1923, is a story that outdoes anything Sherlock Holmes ever dreamed of. Their arrest years later is a story of dogged perseverance and unrelenting chase. Every resource of the government backed the postal inspectors in their long pursuit. Two million pamphlets, with the pictures and descriptions of the three slayers, were printed and spread broadcast. Every post office under the American flag was decorated with posters carrying the pictures and offers of $15,900 in rewards.
    C. W. B. Long, postal inspector, who led the chase for more than three and a half years, closed it when he flew by airplane from San Francisco to Steubenville, Ohio, to identify the two brothers arrested there in June. The real story of the capture, however, goes back to a few days after the attempted holdup, when Prof. Edward Oscar Heinrich, of the University of California, found the three grains of salt and built up the chain of evidence that fixed the crime on the three d'Autremonts.
    In their flight, one of the brothers lost the burlap foot covering which had been designed to shake off pursuit by bloodhounds. Prof. Heinrich found the three grains of salt adhering to the burlap and put them under his microscope. They were revealed to be grains of a form of rock salt used in salting cattle. A survey of the dynamiting scene, in which the engineer, fireman and a brakeman had been shot down in cold blood and the mail clerk killed in the dynamiting of his car--the blast at the same time destroying the mail, so that the robbers got nothing--disclosed only one place nearby where salting was done. Near it was a cabin, in a grove of Douglas firs. The homemade pitch on the burlap had been extracted, the microscope showed, from the same species of tree.
    In the cabin, Prof. Heinrich found a towel on which a razor had been wiped, and, under the microscope, removed from the towel hairs from the beards of three men, along with pieces of skin scraped from their faces while shaving. After examining them carefully, he announced the three men who had used the towel were of French-American descent, blond in complexion, and between eighteen and twenty-five years of age. Further search of the cabin revealed more burlap saturated with the pitch, both material and coating corresponding to that found near the railroad.
    Convinced he had found the robbers' hangout, the professor returned to the railroad and, on hands and knees, quartered the ground for 100 yards around. At length, buried under leaves and dead wood in a clump of thorny brush, he found a pair of overalls. In the pockets were other grains of the same type of rock salt, and one pocket still sagged in the shape of a heavy revolver, while another yielded three hairs, evidently scratched from the head of the one-time wearer. The hairs, under the microscope, proved to have come from the head of one of the three who had used the cabin towel after he had shaved himself.
    Circling the scene farther, the revolver was found which had bagged down the overall pocket. The gun had evidently fallen into a badger hole while the disguising overalls were being removed. Identification marks on the gun had been filed and burned off with acid, but inside the mechanism, where the owner had forgotten to look, was the manufacturer's serial number. Through that the gun was traced to the dealer, and from his records to a man giving the name of William Elliott. The purchaser's description was obtained, and it tallied with the height, length and waist measurements of the overalls. That detailed description fitted one of the three d'Autremonts.
    The French-American descent and the blond complexion fitted all three of them. They had disappeared from their usual haunts a week before the robbery attempt, and their father admitted they frequently stayed at the cabin on the range, so the worldwide search for them was actually started within a few days after they had committed the crime and fled from the dynamited train.
    The 535 postal inspectors annually solve more than ninety percent of the cases of mail theft, according to Grant B. Miller, chief of inspectors. Last year, they sent sixty-six men to penitentiaries in major holdup cases, while over 3,000 were apprehended on minor theft charges. In 1926, of fourteen major crimes against the mails, in which $1,408,340 was stolen, the inspectors recovered $760,634. The year 1924 was a high-water mark for mail bandits, their loot totaling $2,509,157, but of this $1,467,444 was recovered.
    That was the year of the Rondout robbery a few miles out of Chicago, probably the most daring mail robbery in history, and the largest in point of loot taken. Planned with the connivance of a postal inspector who went wrong--the only case, incidentally, on record in which that has happened--the Rondout robbers introduced the latest thing in bandit technique, forcing the mail-car crew to open the doors by throwing tear-gas bombs through the windows, while the robbers came provided with gas masks to enable them to do their work. They got away with $2,200,000. Eight men were involved, including the postal inspector.
    The Rondout holdup was followed by drastic changes in postal routine. Marines were called out to ride the trains and orders were placed for bulletproof steel mail coaches by hundreds, while the clerks were given increased armament, gas masks to resist tear gas and provided with gas equipment of their own, so the fumes could be released along the sides of the cars. Special portholes turned the cars into serviceable forts.
    Under such conditions attacks on mail trains are almost impossible of success, and the major banditries nowadays usually take the form of an attack on a postal truck, or some isolated station just after a factory payroll or a bank shipment has been received.
    Miller, who personally has run down sixty-two bandits, sent them to prison for combined terms of more than 2,000 years and recovered from them more than $3,000,000 in loot, participated in unraveling one such crime in 1926 just before he was made chief inspector.
    On April 14 of last year, a mail truck, bringing a load of registered mail to the post office in a Chicago suburb, found a touring car blocking the entrance to the rear door. The driver got out, apparently to see why his car wouldn't run, drew a revolver, seized two pouches of registered mail, then ordered the postal employee into the touring car and forced him to drive it to Joliet, Ill. The bandit sat in the rear seat and searched the pouches during the drive, extracting $37,000 in cash.
    Just outside of Joliet, the bandit's car stalled on a slight incline. Though threatened with death, the mail driver, a boy of nineteen, was unable to make the grade, and even the bandit, who took the wheel, couldn't negotiate it, so he decided to back to a garage and have the clutch fixed. He tried to keep the driver covered with a revolver in his coat pocket while the garage man worked on the car, but the driver succeeded in getting the car between them and ran to a farm house to telephone for the sheriff.
    The bandit, becoming nervous, got the two mail pouches, walked out the garage door and disappeared--and then enters the one unsolved mystery of the case. The Joliet police blotter shows the boy reported the robbery at 10:10 in the morning, and at 10:25 a physician in a village twelve miles away reported he had been held up by an armed man who stole his car. Later it was shown the bandit was the auto thief, though how he traveled the twelve miles in not more than fifteen minutes continues to be a mystery, for he refused, when captured, to explain it.
    At any rate, a deputy sheriff from the doctor's village started in pursuit, driven by a garage man, and overtook the bandit, who shot him dead, but not before the official had fired one shot through the windshield of the stolen car, the flying glass cutting the bandit's face. A taxicab chauffeur was found later in the day who recalled a passenger bleeding from cuts on the face and carrying two bags, the first intimation that the mail robber and the sheriff's slayer were one and the same person.
    Various clues fixed the bandit's identity, and his home was searched, but it had been abandoned. Confident the man had not left Chicago, the inspectors arranged with a friendly newspaper reporter to publish an item saying the sheriff had been killed by a foreigner whose body was found nearby, and that the post office inspectors believed the foreigner was the mail robber and that he had hidden the loot.
    That item inspired the bandit with a false sense of security, and, six days later the inspectors, who had been following every clue, tracked him down in his room in a Chicago hotel, where he had been living in the belief that no one was looking for him. He got life for the killing and twenty-five years more for the mail robbery, and all the loot, with the exception of $148, was recovered.
Popular Mechanics, December 1927, pages 898-904