A Federal Case

On Dec. 9, 1937, in a federal courtroom in Hammond, Ind., the prosecutor pulled several feet of machine-gun bullets out of a belt in front of the jury.¹

District Attorney James R. Fleming was asking a jury to send a man to the electric chair for the murder of an Indiana state policeman. “This is not a case for mercy,” he said.¹

“Think of that broken hearted wife in Lafayette (Mrs. Minneman) who is soon to become a mother,” he told them, “and I might ask you to go with me to that snowy mound in the Logansport cemetery.”¹

The jury took 2 hours and 17 minutes.¹

The trooper in the Logansport cemetery was Paul Vincent Minneman. The Indiana Historical Bureau marker near the place he was shot calls him the first Indiana state trooper killed by criminals’ bullets since the Indiana State Police was formed in 1933.²

His story is usually told in a sentence or two: a bank robbery, a gun battle, a fallen officer. The newspaper record of what followed is longer. Because of where the money in that bank came from, his killing was not tried in an Indiana county courthouse. It was tried by the United States.

What the record says about him

The surviving national record about Minneman himself is thin, and it does not agree with itself.

The Washington Times, the day after the shooting, gave his age as 27.³ The Associated Press, after his death, said he was 33.⁴ The state marker gives his years as 1904–1937, which fits the AP.²

The AP said he had been a state trooper for two years and was “a bridegroom of only five months.”⁴ In December, the prosecutor told the jury his widow lived in Lafayette and was expecting a child.¹ When the man convicted of killing him was executed in 1938, the AP called Minneman a “Logansport State policeman.”⁵

The Indiana State Police’s own memorial page adds a few facts the papers did not. It gives his hometown as Logansport, his post as the Lafayette district, and the date he was appointed: Sept. 1, 1935.⁶

That is most of what the wire services wrote about the man. Most of what they wrote was about the men who killed him.

Hoosier First searched the Library of Congress’s national newspaper archive for this story. It found the case covered in Washington, Texas, Alaska, North Carolina, Connecticut, California and Maine, in English and in French, but found almost no Indiana newspaper pages from 1937 in that free archive. The Indiana papers that covered him most closely are not cited here, because Hoosier First could not open them.

The gang

By the spring of 1937 the Brady gang had a reputation the papers kept measuring against John Dillinger.^7,3

The Washington Daily News ran a photo spread on May 27 under the label “New Dillinger Gang.” It said Al Brady had been arrested a year earlier in a jewel theft and the slaying of an Indianapolis policeman, and that he had boasted then that he was the “new Dillinger.”⁷

The police sergeant was Richard Rivers of Indianapolis.⁸ Brady, Clarence Lee Shaffer Jr. and James Dalhover had been held in jail at Greenfield for that killing, and escaped.⁹

Goodland

On Tuesday, May 25, 1937, the gang robbed the Goodland State Bank.^10,4,3 The Washington Times called Goodland “Brady’s home town.”³

The amount changed as the story traveled. The first AP bulletins said $2,500.^11,3 An October summary in Alaska said $2,600.¹² When federal prosecutors charged the case, the figure was $2,668.^13,14

Minneman and Deputy Sheriff Elmer Craig chased the robbers’ car.^3,4

The Washington Daily News described what happened next six days later. The officers lost sight of the bandit car and slowed at a crossing to see which way it had gone. “Suddenly from behind a church the bandits’ car issued, blazing a stream of fire from a submachine gun.”¹⁵ Minneman “lurched from the bullet sprayed car and tumbled to the highway.”¹⁵ Craig’s shotgun “clattered from his hands as three bullets found him.”¹⁵ A dispatch from Indianapolis the next day said Craig had been “shot in the foot and chest but is expected to recover.”¹⁶

An October account printed in Juneau, Alaska, told it with more detail: the gang “pulled off the road and hurried behind a little white church.” One gunman fired from one corner of the church, another from a second corner, and a third from the car.¹²

The state’s marker today stands at the northwest corner of State Road 16 and County Road 1450 East, “adjacent to the United Methodist Church,” half a mile west of the Cass-White county line.² Later AP stories placed the shooting near Royal Center.¹⁷

The Alaska paper added one more line: as Minneman lay in the road, “a gangster is said to have snarled, ‘I ought to finish you right now.’”¹² It was attributed to no one. Hoosier First found no other account of it and cannot confirm it.

How many bullets

The first AP bulletin from Logansport said Minneman had been shot in the abdomen and that doctors at a hospital there said he “had slight chance of recovery.”¹¹

He died on the night of May 27.^18,4

How many times he was hit depends on the paper. The Washington Times said on May 26 that he lay “near death from 12 .30-caliber automatic rifle bullets.”³ The AP said after his death that he died “from 23 bullet wounds.”⁴ The Washington Daily News said he “died a few days later with six bullets in his body.”¹⁵ At the federal trial, the prosecutor said he died of a wound caused by a slug from “a high-powered rifle.”¹⁷

The numbers cannot all be right. The prosecutor’s statement was made in court. Hoosier First does not have the autopsy and cannot settle it.

The hunt

Capt. Matt Leach, head of the state police, ordered his men to “shoot to kill,” the Washington Times reported, and said the gang must be captured “at any price.”³ Airplanes joined the search.³ So did “a special squad of Federal operatives, working under orders from Washington.”¹⁰

The Daily News described the methods: “road-blocking, aerial patrols, and radio blockade developed during the hunt for Dillinger.”¹⁵ The troopers, it said, wanted to make sure that even the endings of the two stories were the same.¹⁵

In July, after a bank in Centerpoint was robbed by men believed to be Brady’s, Leach mobilized what the United Press called his “Brady Squad,” which had been “cooperating with G-men since the gang killed State Policeman Paul Minneman.”¹⁹

The belt and holster

On Aug. 11, 1937, federal agents set a trap in a downtown office building in Baltimore, where they had heard the gang would take delivery of guns and ammunition.⁹

In the raid they found more than 1,000 rounds of machine-gun ammunition, four hand grenades, pistol clips, a mask, “and the belt and holster of the Indiana State trooper, Paul Minneman.”⁹

The gang escaped. Their bullets disabled the pursuing police car.⁹

Bangor

On Oct. 12, 1937, federal agents shot and killed Brady and Shaffer on a street in Bangor, Maine. Dalhover, wounded, surrendered.^20,8 The Evening Star reported that the Brady gang had held the top of the G-men’s “wanted” list since Dillinger.⁸

The next day, Capt. Frank Foley of the Bangor police said he had heard Dalhover, during an all-night questioning by federal agents, admit that the gang had killed three policemen: Rivers, Minneman, and George Conn, a highway patrolman at Freeport, Ohio.²⁰

Why a federal court

Then came the question of who would try him.

On Nov. 9, the Associated Press reported that the Department of Justice would try Dalhover in federal court at Hammond for Minneman’s murder.¹³ He had been held in Indianapolis while state and federal officials conferred “to determine by whom he should be tried.”¹³

The answer turned on the bank. “Under Federal law,” the AP explained, “the Government has jurisdiction since the slaying occurred in connection with a crime involving a bank insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.”¹³

Assistant Attorney General Brien McMahon said Donald F. Stivers, the superintendent of the Indiana State Police, had agreed with District Attorney James R. Fleming that the government had a strong case and that a federal trial would be faster.¹³ A federal grand jury at Hammond had already returned two indictments on Oct. 28, charging robbery and murder.¹³

The Indiana State Police was four years old.² Its first trooper killed by criminals had died chasing the robbers of a small-town bank, and because that bank’s deposits were federally insured, the case belonged to the federal government.¹³

“Guilty”

On Monday, Nov. 15, 1937, federal agents brought Dalhover from Indianapolis to Hammond, “heavily manacled and under guard.”²¹

“How do you wish to plead?” the court asked.²¹

“Guilty,” he said, in a low voice.²¹

Under the new federal bank-robbery law, the sentence could run from 10 years to life, or death.²¹ Federal Judge Thomas W. Slick accepted the plea and ordered a jury to decide the punishment.^14,21 The AP reported from South Bend that heavily armed federal agents, working eight-hour shifts, were guarding Dalhover in a secret cell. The U.S. marshal, A. W. Hosinski, said no pictures or interviews would be permitted.¹⁴

The hearing

The penalty hearing began Dec. 6.¹⁷ Dalhover’s lawyers said they would ask for life.¹⁷

On Dec. 8 he took the stand. He admitted he had been there and had a rifle, but said, “I didn’t fire any shots.”²² He said Brady had fired several times with a machine gun and that Shaffer also had a rifle.²²

He also told the court where the gang’s machine guns came from. They had stolen two of them from courthouse lawns, he testified, and turned them into working weapons “with little difficulty.”²³

The International News Service reported that federal agents were now “spiking every war memorial machine gun they could find.” An FBI agent named Myron Gurnea, credited with killing Brady at Bangor, told the reporter: “We were sort of chagrined that Dalhover brought that out, but Washington is moving fast to spike any others that might be stolen and used.”²³

Two months later, J. Edgar Hoover repeated the point to a House appropriations subcommittee. “They took them off the monuments, had them repaired and were using them,” he testified.²⁴

On Dec. 9, Fleming made his closing argument and the jury went out.¹ It returned a sentence of death.¹

The marshal

The sentence created a problem for a federal official in South Bend.

In February 1938 the Evening Star’s Washington columnist Frederic William Wile reported that Marshal Hosinski had come to the Department of Justice to ask to be excused from acting as Dalhover’s executioner.²⁵ As the Indiana chair was operated, Wile wrote, the marshal would have had to apply the current himself.²⁵ Between the arrest and the sentence, Wile said, Hosinski “came to know and rather like Dalhover,” while not condoning the crime or believing he should escape punishment.²⁵

Wile’s column is also a reminder to be careful with the record: it says the killing took place “on April 27, 1936.”²⁵ The court record, the AP and the state marker all give May 25, 1937.^13,17,2

Hoosier First did not find a record of how the department answered the marshal’s request.

Appeals

The execution was set for April 8, 1938 (one later Washington Times story said April 18²⁶), then postponed when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review the case.^27,25 In May the appeals court denied a rehearing.²⁸ A United Press dispatch in April said the execution had been reset for June 10 so that Dalhover could ask for a new trial.²⁹ On June 4, his lawyers announced they would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court; he was still “scheduled to die June 10.”³⁰ In October the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review it, and the circuit court set the date: Nov. 18, 1938.³¹

The day before the execution, the Washington Daily News reported, “President Roosevelt denied executive clemency,” rejecting his mother’s appeal that he be allowed to die as a “guinea pig” for science.³² That night, in a special night session of federal court at Hammond, Judge Slick turned down a last petition. It claimed Dalhover had pleaded guilty only because he feared mob violence.⁵ The Daily News put the ruling “an hour before the execution.”³²

Just after midnight on Nov. 18, at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Dalhover was taken from the death cell and electrocuted. The AP called it “a swift and efficient Federal execution.”⁵

Two families

The national papers that year followed another family closely, and it was not Minneman’s.

In April 1938, a guard told Dalhover in his cell that his wife had given birth to a five-pound daughter. “I’m glad it’s a girl—I’ve got two boys,” the Washington Daily News quoted him as saying, and he went back to pacing.³³

In November, days before the execution, his mother, Mrs. Bertha Craig of Madison, went to Washington. She was turned away twice in trying to see President Roosevelt and was refused admission to the office of Attorney General Homer S. Cummings, the Washington Times reported.³⁴ She said her main purpose was to learn whether her son could be put to death some other way than the electric chair.³⁴

The AP printed a note she said he had written her, asking to be used for medical experiments instead. “I don’t fear death and I am not sad,” it read, “yet I’d like to die in such a way that my Indiana neighbors would think well of me.”³⁵

The archive Hoosier First searched holds the gangster’s note, his song, his jokes and his mother’s trip to Washington.^34,35,25 It holds no interview with the trooper’s widow, and no word about the child she was expecting.

What was left

Minneman’s name was in almost every one of those stories, usually in a single line near the end: the state policeman, the trooper, the victim.

What the record keeps of him is in pieces. He was 33, by the better evidence.^4,2 He had been a trooper two years and married five months.⁴ He was shot behind a church on a state road while chasing robbers, with a deputy beside him.^15,2 His belt and holster turned up in a gang’s arsenal in Baltimore.⁹ His widow, in Lafayette, was expecting their child when the jury decided the case.¹

The Indiana Law Enforcement Memorial’s record says he was survived by his wife, an unborn daughter, sisters and parents.³⁶ Hoosier First is not naming the family. The 1937 national papers it searched did not report the birth.

He was buried first in Logansport.¹ In 1976 his body was moved to St. Mary’s Cemetery in Lafayette, the city where he had been posted. A trooper at the Lafayette post, Dave Morrison, was assigned to escort the procession and present the folded flag at the reburial, according to the Monticello Herald Journal. Morrison, who retired as a State Police sergeant, spent more than 30 years researching the killing and published a book on it, “Thunder at Caley Church,” in 2019.³⁷ In 1987, the Indiana State Police awarded Minneman its Gold Star for Valor, 50 years after his death.⁶

If you have records of the family, we would like to hear from you.

The marker that stands by the church today, put up in 1992 by the Indiana Historical Bureau, the State Police Alliance and David Morrison, gives the date, the gang and the town. It ends with the line the national papers mostly left out: he was the first.²

How he died

Trooper Paul Minneman was shot by members of the Brady gang on May 25, 1937, while he and Deputy Sheriff Elmer Craig chased the car the robbers had fled in from the Goodland State Bank. The gunmen fired on the officers from behind a church near a crossroads.^15,12,2 He was taken to a hospital in Logansport with a wound in the abdomen. Doctors there said he “had slight chance of recovery.”¹¹

He died on the night of May 27, two days after the shooting.^18,4 The record agrees that he died of gunshot wounds and disagrees about how many. Newspaper counts ran from six to 23, and at the federal trial the prosecutor said the fatal wound came from a slug fired by “a high-powered rifle.”^3,4,15,17 Hoosier First did not see an autopsy report or death certificate.