HOTEL CLERK IS ALSO KILLED IN BOLD ROBBERY ON GOLD COAST
Death Penalty Will Be Asked by Crowe for Pair Captured After Spectacular Holdup.
CHICAGO, July 30.—(By The Associated Press.)—In movie thriller style, a robber crew, masked and bristling with pistols and shotguns, invaded the exclusive Drake hotel In Chicago’s “Gold Coast” at tea time yesterday, enacting scenes of killing and sanguinary gun fighting that extended subsequently for an hour over northside boulevards.
When the spectacular affair was over, of five robbers, two were dead and one captured; a hotel clerk had been killed; two women Imd been injured: two robbers had escaped with $10,000 and as a finality early today, one of the escaped holdup men was found and the one previously arrested confessed fully.
The robbery was staged within a stone’s throw of tho residential mansions of Chicago’s 400, while hundreds of guests thronged the lobbies and heavy traffic crowded adjacent Michigan Avenue. A dozen policemen were within call.
For fifteen minutes the robbers, one of them a half breed Cherokee Indian cowboy from Texas, terrorized employes In the hotel offices and on the mezzanine floor and had crammed the loot into a black satchel when their retreat was cut off by James McMurdie, house detective.
Summoned by an excited guest the detective confronted the robbers and began firing with two pistols. While guests ran for cover amid whizzing bullets, the robbers returned shot for shot with the detective, retreating through an entrance.
Policemen, attracted by shots and called by employes, fired on the crew as they left the hotel and the Indian, ‘‘Tex’’ Corts, or Ten Court wounded by the detective was killed.
In the first outburst of shooting one of the robbers guarding Frank Rodkey assistant cashier who stood helplessly with hands upraised shot and killed him. Witnesses later told the police the robber was Jack Holmes, a former Texas cowboy.
Holmes fled to the kitchen during the battle with McMurdie. He terrorized employes there until he was captured after snapping his empty pistol in the faces of two policemen.
The third robber, Eric Nelson, a former employe of the hotel, commandeered a taxicab and dashed through the congested traffic thru the north shore boulevards, exchanging shots with pursuing policemen and threatening Mrs. Mazie Larson, occupant of the cab.
After the taxicab driver deliberately wrecked the cab, injuring Mrs. Larson, Nelson fled on foot and was killed by the policemen when he took refuge in a basement.
Of the two robbers who escaped in an automobile left running at the hotel door, Jim Woods was seized when he applied at a hospital early today for the treatment for a wounded hand. He admitted connection with the holdup and augmented the confession of Holmes.
Holmes said the fifth man was Jack Nugent. The police believe Nugent was the stranger who brought Woods to the hospital and who left unnoticed while the injury was being treated.
The dead Nelson was the leader of the crew, some of whom were intoxicated or under the Influence of drugs. Holmes told the police. He said he and his pal “Tex,” the Indian, had come here recently from Texas, had met Nelson and Nugent in a pool room and had agreed to assist in the holdup, without knowing fully the extent of the proposed undertaking. They had come here to participate in the rodeo, he said.
Robert E. Crowe, state’s attorney, to whom Holmes made offers to plead guilty to a robbery charge, said he would ask the grand jury which adjourns today, to sit long enough to indict Holmes and Woods for murder.
“It’s a hanging case and I’m going to see that they are tried as speedily as possible,” he said.
Holmes told the police he was in Brownsville, Texas, after enlisting in the army In 1917. He also said he had worked on the K and K ranch in Texas.
“Tex,” the supposed half blood Cherokee was the first of the robbers to burst Into the clerical room behind the cages of the cashier and paymaster of the hotel. He brandished a revolver In each hand and as he entered cried out:
”We’re from Texas and I want everybody’s hands up quick!”
Woods told a story that Robert Scott, brother of Rusell Scott, under sentence to hang but who has obtained a sanity trial was a friend and associate of the robber band. Robert Scott also is charged with murder in the same indictment with Russell and the latter has declared Robert fired the shot that killed a drug clerk, for whose death Russell was sentenced.
Casper Daily Tribune, Casper, WY, July 30, 1925