100 YEARS AGO, NOVEMBER 21, 1925
Age: 50
Served: 12½ weeks
September 1, 1925 to November 21, 1925
BACKGROUND
Prohibition was conceived in Ohio by Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League. The results were anything but those which were intended. Criminal syndicates formed. The federal government’s use of national law enforcement expanded. The two went to war with each other and The People, especially local law enforcement officers, got caught in the middle. See our article on Prohibition.
After the Anti-Saloon League’s success in outlawing alcohol, they focused on the strict enforcement of the Volstead Act. Ohio passed another statute that allowed justices of the peace and mayors of mayors’ courts to enforce the Prohibition laws outside their jurisdictions, anywhere within their respective counties, and to keep the assets that they seized. Morris Y. Shuler was a Justice of the Peace for Wayne Township in Butler County and Mayor of the Village of Seven Mile. In 1922, realizing the opportunity for a fiscal windfall for his village and himself, he hired six agents to enforce the state statutes throughout Butler County. They became the scourge of bootleggers, rum runners, and “soft drink parlor” operators, making 400 or 500 arrests a year with an 82% conviction rate in the Mayor’s Court, with the village cashing in with the fines that were paid. The mayor and agents also cashed in with higher-than-average salaries taken from the fines that were paid.
As the liquor war escalated in Butler County, so did the war on those enforcing Prohibition. On June 12, 1922, North College Hill Marshal J. W. Smith and Deputy Marshal Howard “Bud” Seaman were in a motorcycle with sidecar chasing an apparent bootlegger north on Dayton Pike. Shortly after entering Butler County, the vehicle they were pursuing rammed them. The resulting injuries received by Deputy Marshal Seaman proved fatal. In November 1922, Fairfield Township Motor Constable Emery Farmer was run off the road and killed, also presumably by bootleggers. Several of Mayor Shuler’s agents had close calls with the violent offenders. Mayor Shuler himself had a stick of dynamite explode in his car and an attempt was made to firebomb his home.
In January 1924, George Remus, the greatest bootlegger in the country and based in Cincinnati, was sent to a Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. Bureau of Investigation Franklin Dodge tried to take over Remus’s operation, but it collapsed and factions within it split and tried to fill the vacuum with their own organizations.
On April 10, 1925, Edward Schief, “owner” and operator of a café at 328 Court Street, was gunned down, mob-style, on Wood Street while on his way home after being ‘visited’ by Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent and John Todd Messner regarding the purchase of liquor from the “wrong” bootleg ring. Nugent, Messner, and one accomplice, Edward Scott, were rounded up and charged with the murder. Nugent was also wanted by Cincinnati Detective Joseph Schaefer for a murder in Cincinnati. Three days after her husband’s murder, Mrs. Francis Alberta Schief also died by gunfire, reportedly accidentally by a revolver falling from a shelf in a closet, which is highly unlikely considering the construction of post-1900 revolvers.
Then, on June 20, 1925, one of Mayor Shuler’s agents, Wilber F. Jacobs, was shot and killed during a raid in Coke Otto (now New Miami).
FRED GARY
In the summer of 1925, 37-year-old Fred Gary joined Shuler’s court as Chief Deputy. Fred was a World War I veteran, had bounced around in various occupations and cities, including Marietta and Columbus, and by March 1922 was working as a State Prohibition Agent working out of Columbus. He had a talent for finding informants and evidence sufficient for the issuance of search warrants for bootlegging joints. But Mayor Shuler’s court paid better than the state.
On August 12, 1925, Chief Deputy Gary led a raid at the Grand View Dairy on Deerfield Pike in Hamilton. They arrested John Hoelle, Joseph Hoelle, Earl Carter, and Frank Clark. Participating in the raid were other members of Shuler’s Court, Prohibition Agent Lewis Bolser, Butler County Coroner Hugh Gadd, and Butler County Deputy Sheriffs Wesley G. Wulsen and Ernest Legg. They discovered the largest and most complete apparatus for the manufacture of moonshine ever found in Butler County, including two 100-gallon stills, 55 gallons of liquor, and 44 barrels of mash. It was a huge hit to the criminal factions trying to organize in the Ross Township and Hamilton region, and almost certainly energized the bootleg rings operating in the region.
On August 21st, Chief Deputy Gary raided William Sauter’s café at Front and Walnut Streets. That café had been owned by former dry agent Peter Pochard until he went to jail in Troy, Ohio. Since Gary took charge of the enforcement activity of Shuler’s court, had been averaging almost one raid a day.
On August 22, 1925, Gary led another raid on former Hamilton City Councilman George J. Renners’ café, indicating possibly that an organization was or had been symbiotic with the politicians in and around Butler County. On the same day, they raided 328 Court Street and arrested Olney T. Wells, who was appointed “owner” and operator after the mob hit on the former “owner” Edward Schief.
Coincidental to the two raids on August 22nd, Crane Neck Nugent posted a $5000 bond and was released from the Butler County jail just before Cincinnati detectives arrived to bring him to Cincinnati on their murder warrant. There is no indication that he was ever prosecuted for any murder. By December 1929, he was a member of the “Killer” Burke gang, implicated in the murders of 15 men in Butler, Campbell, Hamilton, and Kenton Counties, all underworld figures, possibly involved in the 1928 murder of North College Hill Peter Dumele, definitely involved in the murder of two Toledo policemen, and the later wounding of Robert Zwick who was additionally wanted in the murder of Marshal Dumele. In 1930, for reasons unknown, the mob took him on a one-way ride somewhere between the Florida Everglades and the Ohio River.
It was this environment into which Chief Deputy Fred Gary recruited his 13-years-older brother, Robert “Bob” Gary.
THE OFFICER
Bob was born on April 21, 1875 in Plymouth Township, Ashtabula County, Ohio to farmers James Oliver (of Meadville, Pennsylvania) and Lucy T. (Harris of Ashtabula County) Gary. He could trace his lineage to mid-17th century Connecticut and was very possibly a Son of the American Revolution.
On September 6, 1898, Bob married Anna Laura Swift at St. Peter’s Church in Ashtabula County. Together they operated a farm for at least two decades, but in 1921, at 46 years old, he and Anna moved from the farm to 13 Jefferson Road, and he was working as a laborer.
Bob and his wife moved to Butler County on September 1, 1925 and he joined his brother as a Prohibition Agent at Mayor Shuler’s Seven Mile Court. That day, there were more than 20 cases on two dockets at the Seven Mile Court, including Olney T. “Alabama” Wells and his café on Court Street.
On September 5, 1925, Chief Deputy Gary led a raid at 1211 Central Avenue in Hamilton and arrested George Thompson. We assume new Agent Robert Gary was also on that raid. They also arrested George Riemer at the Lighthouse Café at 714 Greenwood Avenue. On September 10th, there were 22 more cases on the Seven Mile docket.
Agent Gary proved to be resourceful. On October 14, 1925, Chief Deputy Gary, Agent Gary, State Agent Arnold Skinner, Coroner Gadd, and Mayor Shuler’s son again raided the café at Front and Walnut Streets. Mrs. William Sauter threw a satchel into their cistern. Agent Gary went back to the municipal building and brought back the Fire Department’s new pumper to the scene. They pumped out the cistern, found the satchel with seven bottles of liquor inside, and charged the owners.
On October 30, 1925, the two brothers finalized plans to move their families into a vacant store building that was being renovated for that purpose.
On November 12, 1925, Chief Deputy Gary led a raid on Grandpa’s Dry Cleaning Company’s plant at Front and Wood Streets, found another 100-gallon-capacity still and liquor, and arrested William Hilz and Mrs. Eleanor Hilz. It was the Hilzs’ second violation in less than two years.
November 16, 1925, Bob and Fred Gary and their wives went to Blanchester on a hunting trip. When they returned home, they intended to complete an investigation that would result in another search warrant at Olney Wells’s café at 328 Court Street.
MURDERER
Olney T. “Alabama” Wells was born in Ensley, Alabama on July 24, 1894. His mother died three weeks later and his father a year or two after that. He was raised by aunts and uncles and reportedly, at the age of 15, took up a trade as a molder for the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Steel Company. By April 1910, at 16, he was unemployed and living with his sister and brother-in-law’s family at 719 Seventh Street in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1917, at 23, he moved to Middletown, Ohio and worked at the Black and Clawson Company, then the American Rolling Mills Company.
By April 26, 1918, at 24, he was back in Ensley and joined the Alabama National Guard and entered active duty during World War I. He was promoted to Corporal on July 8, 1918 and to Sergeant on August 24, 1918. Less than eight months after induction, having never even left the 156th Depot Brigade in Alabama, he was honorably discharged on December 9, 1918.
Wells moved to Hamilton, Ohio in 1919. We can reasonably assume that he was intelligent based on his quick success in the military. We can also assume that he was cognizant of the opportunities that Prohibition presented in 1919 for someone who didn’t mind breaking the law. We know for certain that he was involved in bootlegging after arriving at Hamilton.
On March 24, 1923, Wells was caught in a dragnet when Mayor Schuler and dozens of federal, state, and local prohibition agents raided more than 40 liquor outlets in and around Hamilton, Ohio. He was likely found guilty and fined. On February 23, 1924, he and Thomas and John Welch were arrested at Thomas Welch’s café at Fifth and Sycamore in Hamilton. On March 11, 1924, Hamilton Police charged him with having 46 gallons of liquor in his car at 6th and Sycamore Streets. He and Thomas Welch were indicted by a federal grand jury on March 19th for violations of the Volstead Act, but Judge Smith Hinkenlooper showed leniency because of their lawyers’ contention that they had served in World War I. Each was fined $175.00. On January 25, 1925 Wells was arrested, this time in Eaton, Ohio, for transporting liquor. After 11 days of incarceration, he paid another fine.
Edward Schief hired Wells to work for him. When Schief was assassinated in April 1925, the new “owner” operator of 328 Court Street was Olney Wells, with a license issued by Hamilton Mayor Howard E. Kelly. Soon after, on August 22, 1925, Chief Deputy Fred Gary led a raid at his café. Besides the moonshine he lost, he was fined $500.
On September 12, 1925, Wells reported to police that his car was stolen while it was parked in front of his café. Whether or not this was an unrelated incident or the mob getting some return on their lost investment is not known, but clearly Wells was getting tired of being arrested. And now he had a new nemesis, Chief Deputy Gary of the Shuler’s Court. He probably had some concerns for the mob as well. Within his ring, he was losing product. Those outside his ring were probably looking down on him like vultures. Regardless of the concern, or concerns, Wells acquired a Colt .38 caliber revolver from Greely Owsley, a Hamilton resident who worked in Cincinnati.
INCIDENT
On November 21, 1925, Deputy Chief Gary, Agent Gary, and Coroner Gadd, having concluded their preliminary investigation, arrested three men they saw coming from the café at 328 Court Street, Walter C. Harmon, Eugene R. Harmon, and Arthur Laubenstein. With their investigative findings, likely informants, and those arrests, Mayor Shuler’s agents developed sufficient probable cause for the issuance of a search warrant.
They came back to the café to serve the warrant. Coroner Gadd and Agent Gary went in the front door while Deputy Gary went to the rear door. Wells delayed Agent Gary’s reading of the warrant by asking inane questions about the definitions of some of the wording, taking telephone calls, selling merchandise, and finally, arguing with Gadd. Wells cussed at Gadd and said, “why don’t you just search the back of the bar?” Gadd replied, “The whiskey is in the back room.” Wells cussed again. Gadd offered that they had come in as gentlemen and would like to be treated as such.
Meanwhile, Fred Gary knocked on the rear door and a voice from inside saying, “You come in here and I will pour some hot lead into you!” It was heard by the agents in the front room as well as by Deputy Gary in the rear. None knew who the disembodied voice was addressing, but clearly liquor was going into the sewer.
Wells told Agent Gary to go ahead and search. When Agent Gary went behind the bar, at 7:40 p.m. and while his back was to Wells, Wells pulled his Colt .38 caliber revolver from his right hip pocket and shot him in the neck. The steel jacketed round entered below his left ear and exited below his right, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. Coroner Gadd saw the revolver coming out, but his .45 Colt Automatic pistol stuck in his holster, and he could not intervene in Agent Gary’s murder.
Wells turned toward Gadd and shot at him twice. His second shot took out a knuckle on Gadd’s left index finger as he held it up as if to stop the bullet. After each shot thereafter, Wells ducked below the bar and then bobbed up and fired another shot. Gadd was able to pull his pistol while dodging Wells’s shots. When Wells came out low from behind the bar, Gadd got off one shot, grazing Wells’s head, and then the pistol jammed. Gadd tackled Wells and, using his pistol as a club, beat him into submission. During the struggle, the gas stove in the back of the room was toppled.
At 7:50 p.m., Chief Deputy Gary heard the shots and called the Hamilton police for backup. Someone else called at 7:55 p.m. to report the killing of Agent Gary. While Gadd and Wells were still wrestling on the floor, police reserves and detectives swarmed into the café and restored order. Deputy Gary came from around back to the front door and asked, “Where’s Bob?” Gadd advised that Agent Gary had been killed. Gary asked, “Who killed Bob?” When Gadd pointed to Wells, he went to Wells and asked, “Why did you kill my brother?” Wells answered, “I don’t know.” Deputy Gary put handcuffs on Wells.
The man or men in the fortified back room escaped when the shooting began. Ten or twelve patrons fled the bar during the ruckus. Gadd also saw faces peering into the café through the front windows, but they, too disappeared.
Detectives Herman Dulle and Albert Mueller, who were working that night and just blocks from the incident, responded and investigated the shots fired. When they arrived, they placed Wells under arrest. Officers Klingler and Kuedel then arrived and lifted Wells up into a chair. Dulle and Mueller removed the license issued to Wells by Mayor Kelly and ordered the cafe closed.
A police ambulance transported Coroner Gadd and Wells to Mercy Hospital.
DEATH
Agent Gary was transported to C. W. Gath’s undertaking establishment. An examination of his remains determined that he died instantly when shot due to a severed spinal cord.
Agent Gary was survived by his wife of 27 years, Anna Laura (Swift) Gary; mother, Lucy T. (Harris) Gary; and siblings, Willis Leon (Gracie) Gary, Hattie M. Gary, Charles Gary, and Fred E (Mary) Gary.
The day after the murder, after leaving the hospital on November 22nd, Coroner Gadd signed the death certificate. Chief Deputy Fred Gary and Agent Gary’s wife, Anna, accompanied his remains back to Ashtabula County. Services were held at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, November 25, 1925 out of D. B. Swift’s (Anna’s father’s) home on Austinburg Road. Agent Gary was buried in Edgewood Cemetery.
INVESTIGATION
After Wells was secured, Coroner Gadd retrieved the revolver Wells used. The revolver contained six empty shell casings in the cylinder. He then went to Agent Gary and removed his Colt .45 Automatic from its holster. It had not been fired. When Sheriff Epperson arrived, he handed the Colt .38 to him.
Olney was placed under heavy police guard at the hospital. Other than asking for a drink of water, Olney refused to speak a single word to law enforcement officers. He sent immediately for Attorney Warren Gard.
Warren Gard
Gard had been a Butler County Prosecuting Attorney, then Common Please Court Judge, and from 1913 to 1921 a United States Congressman during the Wilson and Harding administration, and for a time chaired the Judiciary Committee. After his last term in 1921, he opened law offices in Hamilton and Washington D.C. Judge Gard spent the next few years as the attorney of record in several cases of note around the country and spoke at hundreds of assemblies. As a personal friend of Republican President Warren G. Harding, when Harding died in August 1923, Gard was selected to deliver Harding’s eulogy at a public gathering of mourning as the Hamilton High School gymnasium. Six months later, when former Democrat President Woodrow Wilson died, he was again chosen for the eulogy. And when this “soft drink café owner,” Olney Wells, called, this high-powered, expensive lawyer immediately responded to the hospital.
Early Sunday morning, on the 22nd, Butler County authorities conducted a thorough search of the crime scene. They found a .38 caliber, steel jacketed, flattened bullet lying on a shelf at the back of the bar. Forensics determined that after passing through Agent Gary’s neck, it struck part of a bar fixture, flattened out, and dropped to the shelf. Five other .38 caliber holes were found in the café wall around the main room. Three .38 caliber bullets were dug out of the café walls and one that penetrated and was found lying on the ground near a neighboring garage. A .45 caliber hole was found in the floorboard and when removed, the bullet was found beneath it, thus accounting for all seven shots fired the night before.
In the back room they found a tile with a funnel sticking out of it and it led to a sewer. Also found was a bootlegger’s “due book,” containing names of the merchant, laborer, professional man, and regular café habitue, and amount owed for liquor purchases.
Of the ten or dozen men in the café that night, and the several peering in through the window, none could be found to provide their eyewitness of the event to the investigators.
Soon after the incident, rumors circulated that Wells’s defense was that Gadd shot first at Wells but struck Agent Gary. That was immediately discounted as the entry wound was clearly the size of a .38 caliber (.357 inches) and not a .45 caliber (.455 inches, more than 27% larger). With Gadd’s conflict of interest, a revolver expert was called to examine the wounds. Also, the .45 slug was found under a floorboard where it could not have been had Gadd been shooting from one side of the bar into Agent Gary’s neck while he stood on the other side.
JUSTICE
Two days after the murder, State Officer Arnold Skinner, Mayor Morris Shuler, and Butler County Prosecutor Peter P. Boli met in Boli’s office to discuss empaneling a special grand jury for the murder of Agent Gary. Also, on the 23rd, undertaker John Dawson was appointed temporary Butler County Coroner for purposes of holding the inquest due to the obvious conflict of interest for Coroner Gadd.
Three days after the incident, on Tuesday, November 24, 1925, Wells was released from Mercy Hamilton Hospital, where he had been treated for scalp lacerations, and taken to the Butler County Jail. During the entire time, he made no statements about the incident other than once accusing Gadd of shooting Agent Gary. Also on November 24, 1925, Butler County Prosecutor discussed with Judge Walter S. Harlan whether or not to empanel a special grand jury for the case.
Wells was charged with First Degree Murder and arraigned Friday, November 27, 1925. Under a recently passed statute, if found guilty, unless the jury recommended mercy, the penalty for murdering a Prohibition Agent was death by electrocution. Also on November 27th, a special grand jury was empaneled.
A preliminary hearing was held on November 28, 1925. Warren Gard defended Wells and Hamilton City Solicitor Millikin Schotts represented the city. Preliminary hearings are usually simple procedures lasting five to fifteen or so minutes. Gard, through every legal maneuver imaginable, dragged this one out for three hours before Olney was held over to the grand jury without bond.
On December 1st, the grand jury returned four indictments, one of which was for First Degree Murder against Wells. He was arraigned on the indictment on December 7, 1925 in front of Butler County Common Pleas Judge Walter S. Harlan. Defense Attorney Gard made a mockery of this hearing as well, addressing four separate objections to the indictment, each time requesting the quashing thereof. Judge Harlan refused to quash the indictment, but Ward was able to delay the arraignment until December 22nd. Then, on the 22nd he called in sick, and the case was postponed again. Judge Harlan overruled Ward’s plea again on January 26, 1926. He was finally arraigned on February 19, 1926 and pleaded innocence. On March 2. 1926, the trial date was set for March 29, 1926.
Empaneling a jury became the next problem. Only 48 of the 75 jurors called to serve responded on March 29th. Twenty-one had been excused by the jury foreman and four had not been found. Attormey J.B. Connaughton joined Judge Ward in the defense of Wells. Peter B. Boli was assisted by his assistant H. H. Haines. Regardless, a jury of eight women and four men was selected by the next day, March 30th.
Before the prosecution called its witnesses, jurors were taken to the cafe. Upon entering the crime scene, officials and jurors found it completely sanitized. The steel plate on the rear door, separating the back room from the front, had been removed. The bar fixtures, including the one that flattened the fatal bullet, were removed. The wood stove that was toppled when Gadd and Wells wrestled was also gone. Even some floorboards were removed. There was no evidence left at the scene.
In his opening statement, Gard depicted a scene whereby Officer Gary came behind the bar with his revolver pointed at Wells; that Wells, in fear of his life, retrieved a revolver from a drawer at the end of the bar; and that Gadd fired the first shot from his .45 automatic and struck Gary, killing him.
The prosecution rested its case at 10:13 a.m. on the 31st .
Wells took the stand in his own defense at 3:30 p.m. on April 1, 1926. He recounted the story of his life, sans arrests, including his movements from his home in Alabama to and from Butler County and the military. He claimed that he had not been in the café for three weeks until the night of the murder. He denied that he sold whiskey that night. He claimed that Agent Gary, whom he had never met and who had never drawn his pistol prior to that night, came at him with his gun oustretched threatening to kill him. He also testified that he never carried a revolver, but that there was one in the nearby drawer, and that Coroner Gadd fired at him and struck Agent Gary. At which time Wells pulled the pistol from the drawer and defended himself against Gadd.
Gard “found” three supposed witnesses, each of whom testified that they had not seen the exchange, but heard the shots, and when they looked, they only saw Gadd holding a gun. One, Joe Jacobs, another bootlegger, later killed by Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent. Another was John Evans, an exconvict and frequent customer of the café going back to before Wells “owned” it. The third owned the garage next door to the café.
The case went to the jury on April 1, 1926 at 2:55 p.m. After deliberating for seven hours, the jury came back at 10:00 p.m. with a verdict of Not Guilty. Whether or not that all of their names and addresses were published in the local newspapers had anything to do with the verdict is unknown. On the first ballot, only five voted Guilty. Upon leaving the jury box, almost every juror walked over and shook Wells’s hand.
EPILOGUE
- Mayor Shuler’s Seven Mile Court
Mayor Shuler’s court was short-lived. In 1927, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the law allowing mayors’ courts to try cases from outside their villages was unconstitutional, thus virtually ending Mayor Shuler’s Prohibition enforcement activities. Ironically, all the cases that were pending in Shuler’s court, and some of which were in process of appeal, were reassigned in April 1927 to State Prohibition Inspector Fred Gary for possible prosecution through courts of record.
- Olney Wells
Wells outlived Shuler’s court, but not by much. After the expensive and well-publicized trial, it is clear that he was on the outside of the mob and looking in. He was on his own. On April 17, 1926, he was identified as one of six bandits in an armed robbery of bus driver Steve Brayman on Middletown Pike near Flenner’s Corner. Taken was $18 in cash and jewelry, including a $1000 ring. It was sufficient funds to get him out of town. On May 12, 1927, initial reports after a robbery of a jewelry store in Toledo indicated that three men were surprised during a Toledo jewelry store robbery and wounded in a shootout and that Wells was killed. However, Wells escaped, but two months later, on July 16, 1927, he was found dead of pulmonary tuberculosis in Detroit. He is buried under the name of “T. O. Wells” in the Crumly Chapel Cemetery in Forestdale, Alabama.
- Raymond “Crane Neck” Nugent
Nugent, of Cincinnati, was an Al Capone hit man. After his escape from Butler County/Cincinnati Police authorities, he was implicated in the murder of North College Hill Marshall Dumele. Eight days after that, on April 16, 1928, Nugent was involved in Toledo Patrolman George Zientara’s murder during an armored car robbery. On February 14, 1929, he was one of the shooters in the Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. Though never brought to justice by the law, while running a business in Florida where he bought his alcohol from the “wrong” source during April 1931, it is alleged that he was escorted into the Everglades and fed to the alligators. Family lore has him being shot closer to home and set adrift on the Ohio River in a burning boat.
- Anna Laura Gary
Within two days, a fundraising effort was announced in for the widow. There is little media about the fund thereafter. On March 13, 1925, the widows of Prohibition Agents Wilber Jacobs and Robert Gary were informed that they were not going to receive benefits from the Ohio State Industrial Workmen’s compensation, as “the officers were working under fees,” and therefore “did not come within the constitutional definition of workmen.” They appealed in 1926, but eventually, on February 28, 1928, their appeal was denied. Anna was buried next to Agent Gary seven years later in 1932.
Prohibition
Prohibition itself did not last long either. The People of the United States rebelled against the United States Congress and states’ legislatures and had the offending amendment repealed in 1933.
- Fred Gary
Chief Deputy Gary continued with the Seven Mile Court, including recovering 200 gallons of moonshine on December 19, 1925 at the home of John Gebhart on Mount Pleasant Pike. But, within a week of Wells’s acquittal, on April 8, 1926, he resigned from Shuler’s court. On October 16, 1926, Gary was announced as the top contender for the State Prohibition Inspector to replace the recently resigned Arnold Skinner. By the 29th, he was back raiding cafes in Hamilton. But by 1930, he was as an inspector in a Hamilton, Ohio automotive plant. After that, he bounced from occupation to occupation and job to job and died in Pennsylvania in 1950.
- John Todd Messner
Messner lasted longer than any of them. He was once called “one of the most desperate criminals who ever went out of Hamilton to follow the paths of gangland.” He had been involved in bootlegging, rum running, hijacking, and possibly other vices in Butler County for several years. He was acquitted of the Schief assassination when key witnesses either disappeared or suddenly lost their memories on the witness stand. Messner was, however, convicted in the Marshal Dumele murder and sentenced to life in prison when a single juror refused to vote for the death penalty. He was a model prisoner and eventually assigned as a trustee to chauffer the governor. The governor commuted his sentence in 1957, and he died in Butler County during 1971.
If anyone has any information, artifacts, archives, or images regarding this officer or incident, please contact the Greater Cincinnati Police Museum at Memorial@Police-Museum.org.
© This narrative was further researched revised on November 15, 2025 in anticipation of the 100th anniversary by Cincinnati Police Lieutenant Stephen R. Kramer (Retired), Greater Cincinnati Police Museum Memorial Committee Chairman with research assistance from Joyce Meyer, Price Hill Historical Society Historian. All rights are reserved to them and the Greater Cincinnati Police Museum.