The day Dillinger’s Gang came to Knox County

GAMBIER — It had been a fairly quiet day, a little warm, growing cloudy.

Alex Ransom was walking down Middle Path through Gambier, on his usual afternoon walk to the post office. A briskly walking man suddenly strode past him, clearly in a hurry. The man stuck out in his suit and long coat, and Ransom didn’t recognize him as a local, especially with his tense manner.

As the brisk walker reached the intersection of Chase Avenue and Brooklyn Street, a big black Chevy car roared past Ransom and screeched to a halt outside the People’s Bank of Gambier, in those days located on the corner of that intersection. The brisk walker crossed the road and got to the sedan just as three well-dressed men hopped out. He joined them as they rushed up the steps into the bank. Another man got out of the car, holding a machine gun, and perched on the Chevy’s running board.

Put Your Hands Up

Inside the bank, banker Ray Brown was preparing to close the books by 2:30 p.m. and lock up the vault. His clerk, Alice Hill, was doing paperwork for a couple of customers. The robbers burst through the front door into the bank lobby, shouting, “Put your hands up!”

While the clerk and customers did so, banker Brown dropped behind the counter and grabbed the revolver he kept for just such a situation. Raising the gun above the counter, he made three blind shots before the big, gray-haired leader of the gang calmly aimed and shot right through Brown’s hand, sending Brown’s gun flying.

With a gun in his other hand, the big guy also kept customer Grant Dwyer, a Kenyon College student, covered.

“I was afraid he’d get his hands mixed up,” Dwyer later quipped to a reporter.

Seeing the car and hearing shots in the bank, the old men that hung out on the bench in front of Fred Hagaman’s hardware store across the street rushed inside to tell Frank. Hagaman grabbed a rifle and quickly set the bench men up with guns. He told them to go down to the basement windows and cover him.

While Hagaman made it outside and behind a tree without getting spotted, the wing man with the machine gun spotted the old fellows lining up at the basement windows of the hardware store and sprayed the building with a burst of machine gun fire. The retirees took cover on the far side of the basement.

In the bank, the heavyset man ordered everyone down on the floor while the other men grabbed $714 out of the drawers at the counter, missing the $5 bill that Alice Hall was clutching in her hand.

With machine gun fire sounding outside, they opted to ignore the vault. The criminals grabbed Brown and pushed him out the door in front of them, then dragged him into the black Chevy as they piled in.

As the car roared west on Brooklyn, Hagaman tried unsuccessfully to shoot out its tires. The gang took a hard left onto Ward, then right on Wiggin Street, nearly running over Reverend Lewis Bailey’s dog.

The Chase

At the bank, mail carrier Frank Armstrong and Kenyon security guard Paul Ralston jumped into Armstrong’s car and followed hot on the robbers’ trail, also nearly hitting Rev. Bailey’s dog. This angered Bailey so much, he jumped in his car and took off after the two reckless vehicles, presumably careful to avoid his dog as he did so.

In the black Chevy, banker Brown looked down at his profusely bleeding hand. The man who shot him looked at it, too.

“You made one mistake buddy, but you’re lucky it turned out OK,” the bank robber said.

At the bottom of College Hill, the robbers crossed onto Glen Road (today Laymon Road) and pushed Brown out of the car as soon as they crossed the bridge over the Kokosing River. They sped off toward the railroad tracks. Armstrong and Ralston, following slightly behind, saw the banker and stopped, but Brown would have none of it.

“Don’t mind me,” he shouted at them, “Go get those ——–!” The newspaper deleted whatever expletive was actually uttered.

As the pursuers started back up, they saw that the robbers had stopped just over the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks (today the Kokosing Gap Trail).

One man jumped out of the car with an automatic rifle. Ralston, who was driving Armstrong’s car, saw what was happening and slammed on the brakes. The two men bailed out of the vehicle into the ditches as bullets went flying, one of them demolishing the speedometer.

Ralston and Armstrong got back in the car and returned to help banker Brown. They took him to the hospital on East High Street in Mount Vernon. The Rev. Bailey, meanwhile, was appraised of the situation, and he opted to follow the gangsters at a safe distance, tracking them across back roads to Sycamore Road before he lost the trail. From there, the gang presumably hit Ohio Route 13 and made quick time exiting the county.

Identities Revealed

Just six days later, headlines were made nationwide when the gang associated with notorious outlaw John Dillinger broke into the Allen County Jail in Lima, Ohio, to break out their colleague. In the process, the gang murdered Allen County Sheriff Jesse Sarber, then went on a new series of bank robberies.

When pictures were circulated in the media, J.R. Brown recognized the mug shot of Dillinger’s right-hand man, Fat Charlie Makley, as the heavyset man with graying hair who had shot him.

While the exact roster for the robbery will never be known (and even eyewitnesses disagreed on whether there were four robbers or five), it seems probable that Makley was the trigger man.

Makley had a cousin in Delaware County who offered the fugitive and his friends a place to lay low, and thus Makley is thought by most crime researchers to have been responsible for the spate of bank robberies in central Ohio during this period. The lookout man on the running board with the machine gun was probably Ed Shouse, who often served in that role.

It may well be that the brisk walker who made sure the coast was clear was the true brains of the gang, Harry Pierpont. Pierpont had been a normal-enough kid growing up in Muncie and Indianapolis, Indiana. After a severe head injury in 1921, however, Pierpont’s personality changed and the 19-year old became a career criminal.

Most historians believe that Pierpont was actually in charge of the gang, deploying Makley and Dillinger to lead certain raids. The FBI attempted to generate tension in the group by telling the media that it was Dillinger’s gang, but Pierpont had no interest in fame and may even have welcomed the deflection of attention to the vain Dillinger.

Less than three months later, Makley and Pierpont were arrested and imprisoned. Dillinger was shot and killed by the FBI in July 1934, ending any hope Makley and Pierpont had of being sprung from the Ohio State Penitentiary, where they were on death row for killing Sheriff Sarber.

On Sept. 22, 1934, the two attempted to break out of prison with fake guns carved from soap and blackened with shoe polish, but the attempt failed. Makley was killed during the attempt, and the severely wounded Pierpont was kept alive just long enough to carry out his death sentence in Ohio’s electric chair.

Banker Brown kept working at the People’s Bank of Gambier until he retired in 1967, and according to local legend, he greatly enjoyed retelling the story of the day he tangled with the Dillinger gang and lived to tell the tale.