Bloody Williamson (37 page)

Newman then proceeded with the story of the actual killing, repeating the same gruesome details he had made public in his confession many months earlier.

Throughout this testimony Boswell stood a few feet from the witness stand, arms folded, chewing an unlighted cigar and staring unwaveringly at his accuser.

Leslie Simpson followed Newman. On the night the Prices were killed, he related, Ritter and Blue came out of the house with Mrs. Price shortly after Birger had driven away with her husband. They proceeded to the vicinity of the abandoned Carterville mine. There Ritter, Blue, and Simmons alighted and led Mrs. Price into the darkness. In a moment Ritter returned. When they brought her back, he told Simpson, he wanted a rifle in the back seat to go off “accidentally.” Simpson must make sure, however, that it killed her.

“You go to hell,” Simpson replied.

“Are you yellow?” Ritter asked.

“No, but I won’t kill a woman.”

“You do what I tell you,” Ritter threatened, “or I’ll blow hell out of you.”

“Go ahead,” Simpson dared him.

At this moment Riley Simmons returned to the car. Ritter ordered him and Simpson to walk down the road. Before the two men had gone fifty feet they heard shots and a scream, and as they turned they saw Ethel Price fall. They lingered long enough to smoke a cigarette, then went back to the car. By that time, Ritter and Blue were throwing refuse into the mine shaft.

Wooten corroborated Newman and Simpson in general, although he maintained that he had no firsthand knowledge of several facts about which they had testified. Riley Simmons, on the stand, professed to be even more ignorant of what had happened than Wooten. His assertion that he knew neither of the Prices, that he had never heard their names mentioned, and that he had no idea where the gang was going when they started out on the night of the murder, was too much for Judge Hartwell’s short patience.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he broke in, “that you fellows took two cars down to Price’s house with pistols strapped on
you without knowing anything was going to happen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What were those pistols for, some kind of ornaments? Was there some kind of a social gathering out there by that mine with only one woman and all you men with pistols and guns? Do you want me to believe you didn’t know what was going to happen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then,” the judge snapped, “you can go ahead and testify all you please.”

When Simmons finished, Browning announced that the state’s case was complete. After a brief recess he recommended that the court sentence the defendants to life imprisonment for the murder of Ethel Price, fifty-seven years for conspiracy to kill Ethel Price, and fifty-seven years for conspiracy to kill Lory Price.

He explained his recommendation. Until the eve of the trial he had intended to use Leslie Simpson as his witness against Newman, Wooten, and Simmons, and on the basis of his testimony to ask for the death penalty. At the last minute Simpson called him to the jail and admitted that he had not told the whole truth in their previous interviews. Browning realized that the man could not be trusted. He believed now that all four defendants were lying, at least in part. But if they should be hanged, a fate that he thought they all deserved, he would have no witnesses to use against Ritter and Blue, who were still at large. To make sure that the four defendants who had pleaded guilty would testify against the two fugitives, he was reserving the Lory Price murder case, and would ask for the death penalty in that if they failed him.

Judge Hartwell remarked that he too believed that the four confessed murderers deserved to hang, but that under the circumstances he agreed with the State’s Attorney’s recommendation. He then imposed the sentences, adding the provision that on the anniversary of the Price murders the prisoners
should be placed in solitary confinement for five days for reflection and for the good of their consciences. “If you have any,” he added.

Millich, Birger, Hyland, Newman, Wooten, Simpson, Simmons—now it was the turn of Boswell himself. Klansman, leader of the forces of law and order, State’s Attorney of Williamson County from 1924 to 1928, was he also, as Millich and Newman had charged, as Martin had insinuated, and as most of the people of the county by now believed, a confederate of Charlie Birger’s? A jury in the United States District Court, sitting at East St. Louis in the fourth week of January 1929, would answer the question.

Although Boswell was only one of several defendants—the others included the former coroner and one-time police chiefs of Johnston City and Marion—it was evident from the beginning that he would be the primary target of the prosecution. When Ralph F. Lesemann, Assistant District Attorney, outlined the government’s case in his opening statement he promised the evidence would show that Boswell allowed roadhouses to operate in return for protection money, that he used the Birger gang to extract payments from reluctant bootleggers, that he received a cut on all illicit liquor distributed from Shady Rest, that he delivered confiscated slot-machines and liquor to Birger, and that he prompted the murder of Lory Price.

To prove these charges Lesemann and his superior, District Attorney Harold G. Baker, put sixty-three witnesses on the stand—an incongruous procession of bootleggers, gangsters, convicts, and law officers. One of Birger’s former bartenders swore that on two occasions in 1926, in Birger’s absence, he paid Boswell seventy-five dollars; the bartender’s brother related that he heard Birger say he paid Boswell this sum each week for protection. A convict whom Boswell had sent up on a murder charge testified that from the spring of 1926 until fall of the same year he paid the former State’s Attorney thirty-five dollars a week in protection for his bootlegging establishment. Frightened
by frequent visits from Birger’s men, he closed up. Boswell called him in for an explanation.

“You go ahead and open up,” Boswell told him when he confessed that he was afraid of trouble, “and I’ll see that the Birger gang don’t bother you any more and I’ll cut your payments down to twenty-five dollars a week.”

A Johnston City bootlegger, raided by Sheriff Coleman, went to the State’s Attorney’s office to plead guilty. When Boswell’s assistant informed him that the fine would be one thousand dollars he refused to make the plea. Later he met the State’s Attorney on the street and told him what had happened. Boswell asked whether he had fifty dollars. He hadn’t, so he was instructed to obtain the money and turn it over to a man who would knock on his door that night. When the knock came the bootlegger pushed the money through a crack. He heard no more of the case against him.

Art Newman took the witness stand to testify once more against a former associate. On as many as a hundred occasions, he asserted, he and Birger paid Boswell amounts ranging from twelve to three hundred dollars in protection money either for themselves or for other bootleggers from whom they had collected. Birger paid Boswell two dollars a can on all the alcohol he handled. Mrs. Newman, also a witness, related that she had accompanied her husband and Connie Ritter “a dozen times” when they went to Boswell’s office to pay off the State’s Attorney.

Law officers buttressed the government’s case. A Department of Justice agent described an experience he had with Boswell in 1926. When he asked the State’s Attorney to accompany him to Shady Rest, where he expected to find an interstate automobile-thief, Boswell insisted on telephoning first. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve got to be friendly with Birger because I get lots of information from him.” When the agent, accompanied by Sheriff Coleman, went out to the resort no one was there.

John Ford, one of Coleman’s deputies, testified that in the
spring of 1926 he accused Boswell of taking protection money from bootleggers, and named several who were paying him.

“Yes,” the State’s Attorney replied, “and what are you going to do about it?”

Coleman himself related a conversation he had had with Boswell in 1928, just before the primary election in which the State’s Attorney was defeated. Boswell asked the sheriff why he was not supporting him in the campaign.

“I don’t understand your connections with the Birger gang,” Coleman replied. “You admit that you know of the crimes but the gangsters frequent your office all the time.”

On one occasion, Coleman stated, he told the State’s Attorney that his practice of fining bootleggers on only one count and dismissing the others was equivalent to licensing them. Boswell chewed his cigar before he answered.

“You do things I don’t like and I do things you don’t like,” he muttered, and changed the subject.

As damaging as all the stories of witnesses were the records of the Marion State and Savings Bank, showing that in the course of his four-year term Boswell had made deposits totaling eighty-seven thousand dollars.

Boswell answered the charges against him by a detailed, explicit denial. On the stand for several hours, he denied that Birger and Newman had visited his office frequently: he could remember only three occasions when they had called on him. He denied that Mrs. Newman had ever been a visitor, or that he had ever spoken to her. He had never taken stolen cars from Birger’s place; he had never accepted protection money from anyone. On the contrary, his record showed that he had been relentless in his pursuit of the Birger gang. He had prosecuted eleven of its members, sending one to the gallows and six to prison for terms ranging from ten years to life.

That, said District Attorney Baker when he made the closing argument for the prosecution, was absurd. Did Boswell ever raid Shady Rest? he asked. Of course not: it was his own rendezvous.
Did he prosecute Birger gangsters even though he had abundant evidence against them? Not until the Adams case, tried in Franklin County, showed him that the goose was cooked. Then, Baker charged, he “lost his guts” and tried to divorce himself from the gang. For that reason he finally sent Rado Millich to the gallows, and tried to obtain a last-minute reprieve for Birger.

Boswell’s counsel could only argue that the government, relying on “a mass of lies” from the lips of convicts, had not proved its case.

The jury took four hours to reach its verdict: Boswell and four of his five confederates were guilty as charged.

“Well, that’s that,” the former State’s Attorney said to his wife.

A week later he stood before Judge Lindley in the federal court at Danville and heard his sentence: two years in prison and a fine of five thousand dollars. The prison sentence was the maximum, the fine half the amount he might have been assessed. On the same day he started for Leavenworth in the marshal’s custody.

With Boswell convicted, only two important members of the Birger gang remained unpunished—Connie Ritter and Ernest Blue. Neither had been seen since the discovery of Lory Price’s body.

In mid-October 1929, New Orleans police officers notified Sheriff Pritchard of Franklin County that they had picked up Ritter in Gulfport, Mississippi, and were holding him there. He insisted that his name was Fred Randall, but they were certain of his identity. The sheriff left at once and in four days returned with his man. In jail at Benton, the prisoner finally admitted that he was Birger’s former lieutenant.

Ritter was willing enough to remain in Franklin County and face the Adams murder charge; what he must avoid was removal to Williamson County, where he would have to stand trial for the murder of Lory and Ethel Price. After several months of
legal maneuvering he succeeded. On May 26, 1930, he stood in the same courtroom in which Birger had been condemned to death, pleaded guilty to the murder of Joe Adams, and heard himself sentenced to life imprisonment.

“The final chapter of the bloody book which records the gang warfare which once ravaged Southern Illinois,” a local newspaper characterized the brief proceedings.

Since Ernest Blue was never apprehended, and was later reported dead, the newspaper verdict turned out to be true. But a more appropriate final commentary was implicit in a brief article that appeared in the
Marion Republican
a few weeks later.

1930–1951

A
LMOST
a quarter of a century has passed since Connie Ritter, the last of the Birger gangsters, entered an Illinois penitentiary. Throughout that period, Williamson County has lived at peace.

Prison walls gave assurance that there would be no resumption of the gang warfare by Birger followers. Ural Gowen, who had drawn the lightest sentence, was not released until 1941. (Illinois penal authorities have no knowledge of his whereabouts; presumably he has kept out of trouble.) Connie Ritter died in the hospital at Menard Penitentiary in 1948. Leslie Simpson remained in prison until 1950, when he was released on parole; Harry Thomasson and Ray Hyland were paroled a year later. Art Newman, Riley Simmons, and Freddie Wooten still serve their terms.