The Rondout Train Robbery

The case

The man who chose the train, the cars and the very mail sacks to take was a federal postal inspector, the officer whose job was to solve mail robberies. William Fahy had started as a railway mail clerk in Chicago, become an inspector in 1917, and built a reputation for cracking train jobs. By 1923 he was in debt and dealing on the side with James Murray, a West Side politician and bootlegger. Through Murray he met Willis Newton, a Texan who had spent five years robbing banks across the Southwest and into Canada with his brothers.

The Newtons were farm boys from west Texas, sons of a family of eleven children that had drifted from one rented farm to another before settling near Cottonwood in Callahan County. Willis was the planner. Doc, whose real name was Wylie, Jess and the youngest, Joe, followed his lead. With their friend Brent Glasscock they specialised in night-time bank burglaries with nitroglycerine and the occasional train, and they boasted that they had never killed anyone. Fahy offered them something larger: a Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul mail train carrying currency and securities from the Federal Reserve in Chicago to banks further north.

On the evening of 12 June 1924, two of the gang boarded the train in Chicago and hid. About thirty miles out, near the little station of Rondout in Lake County, they climbed over the tender, held guns on the engineer and fireman and made them stop at a road crossing where the others waited with Cadillacs. The robbers broke the mail car's windows and threw in homemade gas to drive out the clerks, then loaded dozens of registered-mail sacks into the cars. It was over in well under an hour and no one on the train was hurt.

One of the robbers was. Because the engineer stopped beyond the planned spot, the train had to be backed up, and in the confusion Glasscock saw a figure moving in the dark and fired. It was Doc Newton, hit several times. The gang laid him on the mail sacks and drove off. A clerk heard someone call out the name Willis. Wounded men need doctors, and Doc's need undid the whole plan.

The robbers abandoned and repainted the cars near Ottawa, Illinois, and Murray and two of the gang took Doc to Chicago for treatment. Within days police, tipped to an apartment on North Washtenaw Avenue, found Doc and Joe there and arrested Murray when he walked in after midnight; by the Postal Museum's account Willis walked into the same trap the next morning. Herbert Holliday, a Kansas City man who had helped, was picked up in Little Rock on 2 July, and Jess in Del Rio, Texas, two days later. Glasscock was caught at the end of July and confessed, naming the inside man. Inspectors had already noticed that their colleague had money he could not explain and friends he should not have, and on 26 August 1924 Fahy was arrested after telephoning Murray on a tapped line.

The take was put at about $2 million in cash, bonds and jewellery at the time, and later estimates run to $3 million. Much of it was recovered, but by some accounts as much as half never was. In federal court in Chicago that November, the Newton brothers, Glasscock and Holliday pleaded guilty and testified against Fahy and Murray, who were convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years each. The Newtons got far less, from under a year for Joe and Jess to several years for Willis and Doc, a reward for their cooperation and for the money they helped return.