They followed behind Brooks in his car, forced him off-road, and held him up at gunpoint. Brooks was forced to drive to his factory and open the safe, where they took $33,000 in bonds and $12,000 in cash and jewelry. Brooks was then tied up and left there, plus Ginny for deception purposes, while the four men fled. But almost as soon as they were discovered and untied, Ginny told police everything. A manhunt for Medley, Gonyou, Daly, and Brown began. The four were so desperate to escape the law that they hocked their $40,000 in loot for only $3,000. They were hoping to get to California but Medley came down with a toothache.

At this point, the gang had made it as far as Chicago where Medley found another love interest named named Margie DeVere. Although the Windy City had no lack of dentists, Medley would only consider having his toothache treated by a favorite dentist of his back in Flint, Michigan. He went back, went to get his tooth worked on, and was immediately arrested by state police. Margie DeVere was also arrested as an accessory and the other three were caught not long afterwards. Medley was convicted of armed robbery and got 30 to 60 in prison, Brown got 40 to 70, Daly 5 to 30, and DeVere 7-1/2 to 15. In exchange for testifying against the others, Bassett got probation.

If Medley served the minimum 30 years, he would be released in 1964 and be nearly retirement age. He was a known troublemaker at the Jackson state prison, so as punishment he was sent to the less accommodating Marquette Prison, which stood on an island in Lake Superior. Medley had no intention of staying behind bars until the 1960s if he could help it, but escaping an island prison seemed like a remote possibility. The only hope was to get transferred back to Jackson. In 1937, a year and a half since his transfer to Marquette, Medley wrote the Jackson warden to tell him he had been a model prisoner since and he was being treated unfairly at Jackson. The ruse worked and he was sent back.

The years creaked slowly by and Medley's opportunity at escape didn't come. He had indeed been a model prisoner since returning to Jackson and was prominent in inmate activities. Medley celebrated his 40th birthday in the summer of 1941. Pearl Harbor was attacked five months later and the United States entered World War II. Medley was an enthusiastic patriot and threw himself into every inmate project designed to ensure victory. He was especially successful at raising war bonds and in fact got to the point where he was allowed to handle the funds put up by fellow inmates.

On November 27, 1944, he was granted permission to go into town and buy $750 in war bonds using cash raised by fellow inmates. One correctional officer was assigned to watch him, but Medley managed to elude him and make his getaway. After a decade behind bars, Medley was finally free. Once his absence was noticed, Michigan authorities put out alerts for him and the FBI also sent bulletins around the country. Since it was nearly December, he decided to overwinter some place warmer than Michigan and managed to find his way down to New Orleans where he took up residence in the De Soto Hotel.

On December 24, a clerk at the hotel noticed a tall man with graying hair standing before him. He recognized the man as Mr. D.J. Stafford, who'd taken a room for himself and his wife a few days before and listed their home town as Chicago. He told the clerk that he and his wife would be away over Christmas and the maid needn't bother cleaning up in the room, so he hung the Do Not Disturb sign on it. However, the maid, overcome by curiosity, entered the room anyway and was stunned to find a dead female sitting upright in the bathtub, which had four inches of water in it. In a panic, she ran downstairs.

The decedent, an attractive young woman with red hair, had registered as Mrs. Stafford and it was obvious that she had drowned, although it didn't seem at all accidental. She was autopsied and the cause of death quickly determined to be freshwater drowning, most likely from someone holding her head under the water. She was a perfectly fit young woman in her 20s, had not borne any children, and had no signs whatsoever of injury or organic disease. Police also began wondering if her real name was something other than Mrs. Stafford and attempted to identify her. Her husband or whatever he was never came back to the hotel and although the desk clerk provided a good description of him, he had vanished without a trace.

She was eventually identified through fingerprints as Laura Fischer, age 28, and formerly of New York City. Ms. Fischer was of Hungarian heritage and had been born in Vienna as Jszierna Zboro; she had come to America in 1934, when she was 18, and changed her name to the more pronounceable Laura Fischer. She lived in a room in the Bronx and worked in a textile factory. Although she did not have a criminal record, she had never actually obtained US citizenship and due to her place of birth being in Nazi Germany's sphere of influence had been required in 1941 to register as an enemy alien, which was why her prints were on file.

Laura's former employer confessed to knowing little about her personal life except that she had quit her job in September 1943 when she said she was planning to go to the South and get married to an Army sergeant who was stationed in South Carolina. She was was known for being reclusive and seldom offered any information about herself. She had no friends or social life that anyone knew of, and her landlady in New York said she'd never heard of her having any love interests until her announcement that she was engaged to a serviceman whom her acquaintances had never met, nor did they know his name. It was 15 months between her departure from the Big Apple and her death in New Orleans, and whatever she was doing all that time remains a mystery. No soldier named D.J. Stafford had been stationed in any Army camp in South Carolina in the fall of 1943 and there was no evidence that Fischer had been to any cities in the vicinity of Army camps, nor had anyone in New York City heard from her since she left.

New Orleans police telephoned the address given by Mr. Stafford as his place of residence, which turned out to be a rooming house that didn't know of any D.J. Stafford, nor did the hotel room have fingerprints or anything else useful in it. However, the case soon became national news and soon enough a man showed up at the Chicago PD headquarters and said he was the real D.J. Stafford, a respectable businessman who wanted to clear his name of any involvement. Mr. Stafford had operated the Studebaker sales agency that Medley worked for over 20 years ago. He remembered that Medley, then about 21-22, had worked for him as a salesman and did his job adequately enough for a little while, then lost interest in it and quit. Stafford said he heard afterward that Medley had ended up in prison. He was shown a collection of mugshots and eventually identified Joseph Medley. New Orleans authorities indicted Medley for murder, but he was nowhere to be found.

On February 17, 1945, a hotel maid at the Atlantic Hotel in Chicago again found a room with a Do Not Disturb sign on it. She entered anyway and found a red-haired female dead in the bathtub, sitting in an upright pose. Police were called and determined that she'd died several hours ago. The bath water was still warm and as with Laura Fischer, the body had no injuries anywhere to be seen. She had surprisingly few clothing items in the room, not even a winter coat which was odd considering the usual chilly Chicago weather this time of year. A purse sat on top of the dresser; inside some letters identified her as Mrs. Blanche Zimmerman, age 38, of Chicago.

The room had been registered to a J.H. Hanan of Dallas. Hotel employees said he was a tall, well-built man with graying hair, dark eyes, and bushy eyebrows. The similarity between this case and the New Orleans one were too great to be a mere coincidence. As if on cue, Mr. Hanan's handwriting also matched Medley's.

Mrs. Zimmerman's husband said she was employed as a long distance phone operator and that she was often away from home, although he'd always assumed it was due to the pressing demands of being a phone operator in the middle of a world war. The couple had no children of their own, although Blanche had a son from a previous marriage who was currently serving in the Navy. He noted that her two rings were missing and her fingers had impressions where they had been. But the only lead obtainable in her hotel room was the records of phone calls Medley had made. They were mainly to a Chicago woman who said that "Hanan" had claimed to be a wealthy cattle rancher from Texas, had introduced her to another man he supposedly met at a lounge, and proposed she call a girlfriend and they all have dinner. She asked Mrs. Zimmerman to go to the party. At the lounge, detectives learned that Blanche had been with a man matching Mr. Hanan's description and had gotten extremely drunk.

The bartender said that Hanan was carrying two pistols with him, a revolver in a shoulder holster and a stubby pistol in a coat pocket. He refused to serve him any drinks when he saw that he was armed, but Hanan pulled out a badge and said he was a cop. He ordered double gin bucks and then later double double gin bucks. This was pretty potent alcohol and the bartender warned him of that, but Hanan assured him he could handle it.

But had Medley actually killed Blanche Zimmerman? Unlike Laura Fischer, she hadn't drowned and her body had no visible injuries on it. It eventually took a toxicology examination to prove that she'd died of an overdose of alcohol and benzedrine, which was easily a lethal combination due to its effects of both depressing CNS function and causing the blood vessels to constrict--drug addicts often tried it out and died. Zimmerman's husband acknowledged that she did sometimes take benzedrine as a stimulant. He said she was not a heavy drinker in his experience. Although it was easy to write off Blanche's death as accidental, it would be harder to overlook the disappearance of her jewelry, why Medley had suddenly left the hotel, and how he was wanted in two states, or how Blanche was a redhead just like Laura Fischer.

File: boyer's apartment in wash(...).jpg (91 KB, 359x470)

91 KB JPG

Medley headed to Washington D.C. where on March 5, he attended an all-night poker party at the apartment of 50 year old Nancy Boyer, calling himself Joseph Fischer. After Mrs. Boyer had not been seen for two days, worried friends called police. Upon entering, they found her dead in a sitting position, wedged between the refrigerator and the kitchen wall, her face and hair covered in dried blood. Empty liquor bottles were strewn across the floor, ashtrays were full of cigarette butts, and empty drinking glasses were piled in the sink. Several packs of playing cards were neatly placed on a windowsill. Autopsy of Boyer found that she was shot three times. She had died about two days ago and appeared to have been hit in the face, possibly punched with a fist, and it looked like her killer had tried to strangle her. Two shots went into the head above the left ear and one in the hand. The wound to the hand was possible caused by Boyer raising her hand to deflect the killer's gunshots. She wasn't raped, nor did she have any alcohol in her system. Two spent slugs were found in the kitchen; both .38 rounds and both appeared to have been filed down, as if they wouldn't fit in the gun properly.

Boyer was a popular socialite who lived in this upscale apartment in the nation's capital and although 50 years old looked quite a bit younger. She was long estranged from her husband and had an adult daughter who was married to a Navy officer currently serving in the Pacific. Boyer often hosted poker games, although the stakes weren't exactly high, and she had been an addict of horse racing until it was banned in Washington D.C. several months earlier. All of the guests to her apartment on March 5 were known friends of hers, except for Joseph Fischer. They didn't know much about him except that he claimed to be a hotshot on Wall Street, but nobody asked him for any further details on that. He had been staying at the Annapolis Hotel.

File: imbt.jpg (97 KB, 620x378)

97 KB JPG

"Joseph Fischer" was nowhere to be found but everyone at the party remembered he'd been the last guest still in the apartment when they left. He had done rather poorly at the poker game and was down $200, not a big sum as it went, although Nancy had taken his personal check for $25 so he could stay in the game.

Boyer's friends were invited to assist police in determining if anything was stolen from the apartment. They immediately realized that there should be a large amount of cash there as Nancy acted as banker at the poker tourneys. The dresser drawer in her bedroom should have around $300 in it. There was no cash anywhere in the apartment, only the $25 check that Mr. Fischer had written to her, drawn on Bowery Savings Bank in New York City. Detectives called the bank and found that they didn't have any Joseph Fischer as a depositor, in fact they didn't even do checking accounts. This instantly felt suspicious. Joseph Fischer was at minimum a con artist and might be a host of much worse things as well. The woman who introduced him to the party admitted to hardly knowing him and in fact he introduced himself to her daughter in a D.C. restaurant and the daughter had brought him home.

And there was more. A number of valuables were missing from the apartment, including an $850 square cut emerald ring and a silver fox cape. It seemed like a pretty bad idea to murder someone and take the risk of hocking their belongings, but for what other reason would the killer have bothered taking them? A man carrying an expensive women's fur coat around in public would certainly draw attention. Police decided to put out alerts to every pawnshop in D.C., providing descriptions of Fischer, the ring, and coat. Boyer's coat and jewelry were not found, but one pawnbroker reported that he had two ruby rings that had been hocked at his shop.

File: 78.jpg (89 KB, 632x306)

89 KB JPG

The ruby rings were an uncommon jewelry item and one detective remembered seeing a flyer from Chicago describing the possible murder of Blanche Zimmerman a few weeks ago and that her ruby rings had been taken. Suspected in her death was one Joseph Dunbar Medley, whose description sounded an awful lot like that of Joseph Fischer. It took only a few hours to get ahold of a photo of Medley and the women who had been at Boyer's party immediately recognized him. Upon being told that Medley was wanted for murdering one woman in New Orleans and possibly another in Chicago, she was mum. She knew it could have just as easily been her.

On March 13, a Pittsburgh pawnbroker reported that he had Boyer's emerald ring and that the man who hocked it there matched the description of Joseph Medley. It seemed he was headed west and might well return to Chicago. His picture was circulated and printed nationwide; who knew when he would strike again? The money he took from his victims would only last him so long and he would need to obtain more cash.

On March 10, Dr. Joseph H. Elder, a psychologist for the War Department, boarded a train to St. Louis. To pass the time on the long, boring trip he read a D.C. newspaper from front to back. Two days later, Elder was relaxing in the lounge of the Jefferson Hotel in St. Louis and conversing with a pair of colleagues, Dr. Edwin Jerome of the Ward Department and Dr. Fred Keller of Columbia University. At the table across from them sat a striking blonde who looked to be somewhere around 40 years old. Being the trained psychologist he was, Dr. Elder believed she was almost certainly waiting for a man.

As if on cue, a tall man with graying hair entered the room and sat at her table. Dr. Elder continued to watch the two intently. The doctor remarked that the man looked oddly familiar. Dr. Jerome asked if he'd met him as part of his work. Elder said he had not, but there was something very distinctive about him. It became apparent from listening to the man and woman talk that they'd only met about a day or two ago. Elder then said he believed that could be Joseph Medley, as far as he could remember his description from the papers. The description said that Medley was a short man who wore flashy clothes. This fellow was tall and husky and wore a modest gray suit. Dr. Elder finally decided he was probably mistaken.

But Elder couldn't shake off the suspicious feeling he had. After her came back to Washington, he combed through old newspapers and re-checked the description of Medley. He had gotten some details wrong and now believed he'd sat across the table from a man wanted nationwide for three murders. Elder immediately informed police of his suspicions and D.C. cops called their St. Louis counterparts. A trap was set there.

Medley meanwhile was registered in the hotel where Dr. Elder had seen him under the name Hanan. Police surrounded the hotel and went to his room, but he wasn't there. However they did find Nancy Boyer's fur coat and a loaded .30 revolver. Local police and FBI agents lay in wait for when Medley came back. They also hoped his date was ok and he hadn't already killed her. And he did come back at 1:00 AM accompanied by the woman. They got on an elevator, rode to the third floor where his room was, and was arrested almost as soon as he stepped off the elevator. He had a different gun, a .38 snub nose revolver, with him. The officers told him he was under arrest for the murder of Nancy Boyer. The blonde woman collapsed in a nervous fit. Medley looked at her, then turned to an FBI agent and remarked "Is that right?" One of the cops asked who the woman was. "Don't arrest her," said Medley. "She's not implicated in anything I've done. She's a respectable woman, a grandmother."

They were taken downtown. Medley admitted to attending Boyer's poker party, but emphatically denied killing her. He said he left D.C. on March 6 and went to St. Louis by way of Pittsburgh and Chicago. Medley was hoping to make his way to California. The blonde woman, who turned out to be a sales clerk at a St. Louis department store, reportedly denied that the fur coat found in the hotel room was hers. She was not suspected in any of Medley's crimes or charged with anything, but was later subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in D.C. There was every reason to believe she would have shared the fate of Medley's other three victims if he hadn't been caught. The cops noted with some cheekiness that he'd gotten away with killing redheads and was only caught when he was with a blonde woman.

Medley's possessions included three suitcases of clothing and $176 in cash. Taken back to D.C., he was asked about two recent murders in the capital involving a pair of victims named Edward Baker and Pany Casbarian. On February 24, Baker, a car dealer, and Casbarian, who had been seeking to purchase a vehicle from him, were found dead in a trailer he used as an office. They were bound and gagged, each shot in the head, and robbed of money and jewelry, a very similar crime to the Boyer murder. Medley insisted he had nothing to do with those, but D.C. authorities felt there was enough evidence to convict him of murdering Nancy Boyer. Despite all attempts, police couldn't get him to talk about the Fischer and Zimmerman murders.

Medley was charged with first degree murder and robbery in the death of Nancy Boyer, found guilty on June 7, and sentenced to death November 30. Although there were usually no lengthy appeals in this era and the time from conviction to electric chair was short compared to the modern justice system, typically weeks or months, Medley's attorneys managed to stave off his execution for a while.

File: 79.jpg (36 KB, 288x212)

36 KB JPG

On April 3, 1946, Medley and Earl McFarland, a war veteran who had been sentenced to death for murdering an 18 year old woman, escaped from prison. They managed to smooth talk the correctional officers and join two of them, Hubert Davis and Oscar Sanderlin, for a card game. During the game, Sanderlin felt ill and decided to take a nap in Medley's jail cell. Medley slammed the door of the cell shut, then grabbed Davis and dragged him into McFarland's cell, shut him inside, and stole their uniforms and keys. They used a can opener to pull over a ventilator and climbed to the roof of the prison, then used a rope made of bedsheets to descend 60 feet to the ground. Medley's escape was short-lived; he was apprehended within eight hours. McFarland was luckier; he fled D.C. and eluded a nationwide manhunt until finally being captured in Knoxville, Tennessee on April 11.

Medley told authorities "You can't blame a guy for trying and I'm going to try again. I'm glad nobody was hurt." The two correctional officers were fired and security improved at the prison. The Supreme Court declined to hear his case, but his attorneys managed to delay the execution some more months. The end finally came on December 20, within hours of two other prisoners named William Copeland and Julius Fisher. McFarland had been executed July 19.

>>18019372
>>18019374
>>18019380
awlright, i loves me some film noir era crime kino

>>18019393
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWn4gNA13Jk

Sweet. BTW this was the hot song in early '45 when the events here happened.

>>18019366
>>18019364
who was this international woman of mystery? a Nazi spy, or...?

>>18019380
it's amazing just how easy it is to melt women like putty when you're six feet tall and have a Chad jawline

>>18019371
>It eventually took a toxicology examination to prove that she'd died of an overdose of alcohol and benzedrine
they had toxicology exams in 1945?

>>18019359
>Medley was convicted of armed robbery and got 30 to 60 in prison, Brown got 40 to 70
if this was the 50s-70s he would get 3 years and be paroled

>>18019369
>Mrs. Zimmerman's husband said she was employed as a long distance phone operator and that she was often away from home, although he'd always assumed it was due to the pressing demands of being a phone operator in the middle of a world war.

C-U-C-K

>>18019953
Come on, they had basic chemistry by that time it wasn't the Middle Ages.

>>18019371
>that she'd died of an overdose of alcohol and benzedrine, which was easily a lethal combination due to its effects of both depressing CNS function and causing the blood vessels to constrict--drug addicts often tried it out and died.
>alcohol
>dilates the blood vessels
>benzadrine
>constricts them
That sounds like it would end in all sorts of bad.

>>18019904
^This.

File: bcg.jpg (7 KB, 219x230)

7 KB JPG

>>18019393
>It was a gloomy night in the warehouse district when I met a dame with legs that could...

>>18019369
>This was pretty potent alcohol and the bartender warned him of that, but Hanan assured him he could handle it.

he's been to prison, this stuff was chump change for him in all likelihood

>>18019974
after the war the justice system got very soft because everyone associated executions and imprisonment with totalitarian governments

>>18019388
I would have fired those guys too tbqh.

>>18019372
Which part of DC was this?

>>18019974
He might be eligible for parole after 3 but would probably be serving a longer term, maybe indeterminate.
>>18020159
That was part of it. The early 1950s also saw some pretty bad prison riots, and there were efforts at reform building on earlier policies like early release.

>>18020469
>Which part of DC was this?
AFAIK her apartment was on 16th Street.

D.C. had a high murder rate during the war years due to the influx of transients and temporary workers there. There were several high profile murder cases from this period.

>>18020491
Northwest?

>>18020491
ah, ok

>>18020491
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Sixteenth_Historic_District_montage.jpg

File's too big to post.

>>18020528
I think so.

if he was black this thread would have at least 75 replies by now

Capital punishment in the District of Columbia was abolished in the 50s; the last execution there was 1957.

>>18020640
/thread

the part about >Dr Joseph H. Elder sounds quite bullshit tbqh with you senpai. also why did everyone forgot about his early prison escape?

>>18020605
Probably one of the nice areas nowadays