Outside Looking In

Persistence pays off

Last Thursday night, I was the speaker for the Kandiyohi County Museum's annual meeting.
I was asked to give a talk on how, after 10 years trying, that I was able to identify a gang of five men involved in the Bank of Willmar robbery that occurred on July 15, 1930.
When I was a sports reporter and editor in Willmar, I spent the first 15 years of my 27-year career there writing nothing but sports stories from the 25 schools in our coverage area.
I had always wanted to write some type of historical story, but I didn't want to step on the toes of the news reporter. After talking with Dana Yost, who was the news editor at the time (1997), I asked him if it would be okay for me to write a story on the many interesting people that were buried in Fairview Cemetery in Willmar. I had been researching the people buried there for two years as a hobby. When I informed Dana of some of the things I had uncovered (no pun intended) during my research, he agreed that it would be of interest to readers.
There was a man buried in the cemetery (D.N. Tallman) who had established several communities in North Dakota and had also once played golf with Babe Ruth, another man (Cushman Rice) whom a writer in the Twin Cities felt convinced was "The Great Gatsby", a tragic drowning of three teenage boys in 1903, and a train engineer (George Floody) who got drunk and drove the train as fast as it could go around a sharp curve where it derailed between Willmar and Atwater with many cars tumbling down a steep embankment, killing 20 men, including Floody.
Two other men included in the story were George Robbins and Albert Nordstrom, who were bank tellers when the Bank of Willmar was robbed in 1930. The five men who robbed the bank (a sixth provided a getaway car in the Twin Cities upon their return) were never arrested or identified until I discovered their names almost by accident seven years ago.
I had always wanted to try and find out the robbers' names, so I made it a hobby, checking various accounts of Minnesota bank robbers from the 1930s to see if there was any connection to Willmar. I perused newspaper stories, obituaries, historical museums, social media and more for over 10 years off and on when I had time. I soon researched bank robbers in other states, too.
The hobby turned into frustration, which then made discovering the names a quest and I began to spend more time on it.
I stumbled across a raggedy-looking book online in 2015 in which an author wrote an autobiography on J. Harvey Bailey, who claimed to be the "Dean of Bank Robbers". If I could get my hands on that book, I thought, there just might be a one batch of names that I could research since robbers usually worked with gangs. There were only five books in existence as Bailey wanted to write the book for family members as a way to brag about his 26 bank robberies over a 13-year career.
Online, the book could be purchased for around $1,000, even though those sites selling books for that much are usually a scam. The online site also said that one college library in Texas had a copy of the book. So, I called colleges in Texas until I found the one that did have the book. The library refused to borrow or sell the book to me. I informed the intern why I was searching for the names and asked him if he ever had some down time, would he mind looking through the book and jot down 10 or 12 names of bank robbers and then let me know the names so I could research them. I figured I would never hear back from him, but I had nothing to lose at this point.
Two days later, the intern called me back and said he had six names for me.
"Have you ever heard of Jew Sammie, Frisco Dutch or Dutch Joe?" he asked me.
After telling him I needed regular names and not nicknames, he asked if I had heard of Tommie Holden or George Kelly. I had heard of George Kelly, known as "Machine Gun" Kelly, but I didn’t figure he was the same person.
I asked the intern why he chose those names and he informed me that those were six men involved in the Willmar bank robbery.
When I asked what makes him think those are the men, he replied that there were three pages about it in Bailey's book, including one full page that included the headline of the bank robbery that appeared in the Willmar paper the day after the robbery.
Ten years of research with not one name found, and all of a sudden I had all six names at one time. I then asked the intern how they were able to get a copy of the book and was told that a relative of Bailey's donated it to them after he died in 1979.
When I asked if he knew who the relative was, I was shocked when he said that she still comes in the library every now and again. So, I gave the intern my number and told him to ask the woman if she would call me, figuring that was unlikely. Two weeks later, the woman called me and I was told that the other relatives in Bailey's family disowned him for his troubled life, but this woman thought his exploits were "pretty cool".
It turns out that Bailey was extremely organized and detailed accounts of each of his robberies in journals, so I was able to learn the identities of the three nicknames the intern gave me, as well as confirmation that "Machine Gun" Kelly had indeed been one of the robbers.
One of the bank tellers pulled the bank alarm while the robbers were still inside and local businessmen started shooting at the robbers, killing one of them. The police station was next to the bank, but the robbers had called in a false alarm that led the police on a wild goose chase in the other end of town.
The robbers made off with $70,000 but were never caught.
Bailey, Kelly and Cretzer spent time in Alcatraz at one time or another for various crimes.

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