 |
| Pat Crowe at the time of Eddie Cudahy's kidnapping (The Duluth News Tribune. May 29, 1921) |
Pat Crowe spent five years running from the law. Then they caught him.
The
strange part came later. A jury let him go; Crowe admitted the crime anyway,
and the outlaw who had embarrassed police and Pinkerton detectives started
lecturing about prison reform.
He
was an unlikely man for the job. By the time Crowe became famous, he’d already
robbed, stolen, escaped custody and spent years moving between Iowa, Nebraska
and cities farther east. He knew jails, the police, and how much he liked
money.
In
1919, Crowe talked about his past with the San Antonio Light. “I had got
the habit of easy money,” he said, “and it was easy money I wanted.”
That
explained a lot.
Crowe
grew up in Iowa and left his parents’ farm near Vail as a teenager. He opened a
small butcher shop in Omaha in 1886, but the business failed after running into
competition from a Cudahy retail operation.
Edward
Cudahy was a powerful man in Omaha. His meatpacking business had money, reach,
and influence. Crowe eventually went to work for him.
That
didn’t last either. Crowe discovered how easy it was to take money from the
till and helped himself. A 1919 account said it started small. Fifty cents. A
dollar. Before long, it was enough to get caught and fired.
Pat Crowe in 1905 (The Reveille. October 6, 1905)
He tried his hand at selling. It didn’t stick. The wages were too small and came too slowly.
“I
had got the habit of easy money,” Crowe said. “It wasn’t long before I found a
way to get it.”
He
went to Chicago with $750 to buy equipment for another butcher shop, and lost
his money in a brothel. He responded by robbing the place.
More
crimes followed. In Chicago, he was caught after a pawnshop robbery and
sentenced to six years at Joliet. He served about seventeen months before
receiving a pardon.
He
tried to go straight, and spent nearly two years moving from one job to
another, but his criminal record followed him. By 1893, he was back at it.
He
was arrested for robbery in Denison, Iowa, and escaped.
From
there, the pattern hardened. He committed crimes, got caught, escaped or moved
on, then surfaced somewhere else. He began working with experienced
safecrackers and robbers. Diamonds became a favorite target.
The
Pinkertons knew his name. So did police departments across the country.
Crowe
also learned something about big robberies. Banks, express companies, and
jewelers had detectives, guards, and private agencies protecting them. A robber
could get the money and then spend months running from the men sent to recover
it.
It
was too much risk for too little money.
While
in Philadelphia, he learned about Charley Ross, the four-year-old boy kidnapped
in 1874. His abductors demanded ransom. Ross was never found.
The Cudahy Home (The Duluth News Tribune. May 29, 1921)
Crowe remembered the case. He also remembered Edward Cudahy.
On
December 18, 1900, Edward Cudahy Jr. left his family’s Omaha home to return
books to a neighbor. He didn’t come back.
His
father had called the police around midnight. Search parties moved through the
city. Hospitals and railroad stations were checked. Pinkerton detectives were
called in from Chicago.
Then
a ransom note appeared on the Cudahy lawn.
The
kidnappers wanted $25,000 in gold. If Cudahy refused, they threatened to blind
his son with acid. The note mentioned Charley Ross.
Cudahy
paid.
The
kidnappers released Eddie about thirty hours after taking him. He had been
stopped by men posing as police officers, forced into a buggy, blindfolded and
held in an empty house with irons around his ankles.
He
came home alive. The gold disappeared.
Police
picked up pieces of the trail, but prosecutors soon discovered a bigger
problem. Nebraska law didn’t fit the crime. The state’s kidnapping law applied
when a victim was taken across the state line. Eddie had never left Nebraska.
Another law covered child stealing, but he was too old. Lawmakers closed the
loophole a few months later, but the new law couldn’t be used against the men
who’d taken Eddie.
The
police focused on Crowe. He had worked for Cudahy, blamed the Cudahy business
for helping ruin his butcher shop, knew Omaha and had a long criminal record.
Eddie Cudahy as a soldier in World War I
(The Duluth News Tribune. May 29, 1921)
And now he was gone.
The
reward for his capture eventually reached $50,000, twice the ransom. Crowe’s
face went up in railroad stations, police stations, and other public places.
Detectives chased reports from one city to another.
People
saw him everywhere. Chicago. St. Joseph. Creston. Rhode Island. Honduras.
Someone put him on an ocean liner.
Most
of it was noise.
The
police arrested Crowe’s brother, John, in Council Bluffs, but Eddie Cudahy
couldn’t identify him, so they let him go.
Another
suspect, James Callahan, was harder to shake. He knew Crowe and had worked for
the Cudahys. Eddie identified Callahan as the man who guarded him.
Callahan
went to trial in 1901 and walked. The weakness in Nebraska law hurt
prosecutors, and the robbery charge failed.
Pat
Crowe was still on the run.
The
longer the hunt went on, the larger his name became. Newspapers turned every
sighting into another story. Detectives chased him for years without bringing
him in. Then Crowe gave them something they’d been unable to get for
themselves.
A
confession.
In
1904, he sent a letter to Father Murphy, his family priest in Vail, Iowa. He
wanted Murphy to approach Edward Cudahy and arrange terms for his surrender. He
admitted his part in the kidnapping and offered to plead guilty if he could get
a suspended sentence.
Pat Crowe in 1919 (San Antonio Light. February 19, 1919)
No deal came together. Crowe stayed free.
In
July 1905, two Council Bluffs streetcars were robbed, and police again
suspected Crowe. A few weeks later, he surfaced in Omaha.
On
September 6, four plainclothes officers approached Crowe and his brother-in-law
outside a saloon on South 16th Street. Gunfire broke out. Officer A. H. Jackson
was wounded.
Crowe
got away again.
Less
than a month later, the police found him outside a saloon in Butte, Montana.
This time he surrendered and agreed to return to Omaha without fighting
extradition.
The
arrest turned into a show. People crowded around the Butte jail to see him.
Women brought fruit and flowers. When officers took Crowe to the railroad
station, an estimated 15,000 people showed up to see him off.
More
crowds waited along the route east. At Rawlins, Wyoming, people pressed around
the prisoner and his guards. At North Platte, one observer said Crowe drew more
attention than Theodore Roosevelt.
The
police had spent years trying to put him in handcuffs. Now people lined up to
watch him wear them.
Back
in Omaha, prosecutors first tried Crowe for the shooting of Officer Jackson.
Witnesses disagreed about who fired first, and the jury acquitted him.
Then
came the Cudahy case.
Prosecutors
still couldn’t charge Crowe under the tougher kidnapping law passed after the
crime. Instead, they accused him of robbing Edward Cudahy of $25,000 by putting
him in fear.
The
trial opened in February 1906. Edward Cudahy testified about the ransom. Eddie
testified about being taken and held.
Then
prosecutors brought out Crowe’s letter to Father Murphy. Crowe’s lawyers tried
to keep it from the jury, arguing that communication with a priest was
privileged, but the judge disagreed. Crowe had not written asking for spiritual
advice. He wanted Murphy to negotiate a deal.
Crowe’s
lawyers called no witnesses. Instead, they went after Cudahy.
That
gave them plenty to work with. The meatpacking industry was under attack over
the so-called Beef Trust. Cudahy was rich, powerful, and part of an industry
many working people distrusted. Crowe’s attorney, A. S. Ritchie, hammered that
point. The jury included a packinghouse worker, a delivery clerk, a sign painter,
and a cigar dealer. Ritchie spent much of his closing argument attacking Cudahy
and the meatpacking interests around him.
Then
the jurors went out. The state had the victim, the ransom payment, and Crowe’s written
admission.
On
February 16, 1906, the jury came back.
Not
guilty.
The
courtroom broke into applause. Judge A. L. Sutton ordered it cleared. Police
Chief J.J. Donahue denounced the verdict.
Crowe
walked, but not far. Authorities took him across the Missouri River to Council
Bluffs, where he faced charges tied to the streetcar robberies. Over two
hundred people came to the jail to see him.
His
lawyers delayed the Iowa case. When it finally went to trial in May 1907, a key
witness failed to appear.
Crowe
was acquitted again.
By
then, pretending innocence wasn’t worth much. He’d already started telling the
story himself. In 1906, he published Pat Crowe—His Story, Confession and
Reformation and admitted his role in the Cudahy kidnapping. The timing was
important. He’d already been acquitted and couldn’t be tried again for the same
offense.
He’d
spent years running from the law. Now he started making a living talking about
it.
In
December 1908, he spoke in Evanston, Illinois, at a meeting connected with
prison reform groups and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. His subject
was “The Crime of Society in Dealing With the Criminal.”
Crowe
attacked prisons and reform schools, arguing that the system took young
offenders and hardened them.
In
1919, Crowe told the San Antonio Light that first offenders should not
simply be thrown into prisons. He wanted them sent to “a new system of
industrial schools,” where they could learn trades and work. He also wanted
help for men coming out of prison. Give them a trade. Help them find a job.
Give them a reason not to go back to stealing.
Crowe
knew the other route.
He
told the paper how it had worked for him. A man committed a crime, went to
prison and came out carrying a record that made honest work hard to find. Then
the old crowd and the old money started looking good again.
The
newspaper wasn’t completely sold on Crowe as the man to fix the system. It
described him as an extraordinary criminal who might be “a poor and miserable
reformer.”
Crowe
kept talking anyway.
By
then he was working with the Salvation Army in New York. He said he’d left
crime behind and wanted to stop young men from following the same road.
That
same year, Edward Cudahy Jr. got married.
Crowe
sent him a telegram. He joked about Eddie falling into the hands of another
kidnapper and wished him well. Nineteen years had passed since Crowe helped
snatch him off an Omaha street and hold him for ransom.
Now
Crowe could joke about it.
Through
the 1920s, he kept speaking about crime, prisons and young offenders. In 1922,
he promoted vocational training for young people on farms and chicken ranches. In
1927, he published Spreading Evil: Pat Crowe’s Autobiography and used
his life as a warning to boys who thought crime looked easy.
In
1925, New York police arrested Crowe for begging in the subway. A judge
suspended his sentence, and people in the courtroom passed a hat for him. Ten
years later, Crowe returned to Omaha and was arrested for drunkenness. A. S.
Ritchie, the lawyer who had defended him in the Cudahy case nearly thirty years
earlier, came out of retirement to represent him.
Crowe
was acquitted.
Again.
He
returned to New York. Near the end of his life, he worked as an attraction in a
penny arcade near Times Square.
Once,
police departments across the country had posted his picture and offered reward
money for him. Now people paid to look at him.
Crowe
died in New York on October 29, 1938. He was sixty-nine.
Police
found scrapbooks in his room filled with stories about his old life—the
robberies, the kidnapping, the manhunt, the trials, and the years when
everybody seemed to know the name Pat Crowe.
Twenty
years earlier, the San Antonio Light had asked Crowe what he hoped to
accomplish with his new life. His answer was a long way from the young Iowa
farm boy who discovered he preferred easy money.
“If
I can do this thing for the men who are going to go wrong after my time,” Crowe
said, “I’ll have paid up for all the harm I did.”
Then
he said what he hoped his second act would amount to.
“Pat
Crowe will leave something better behind him than his criminal record.”
Before you go...
If you’ve ever stayed up way too late watching a true crime documentary, gone down a rabbit hole reading about an unsolved murder, or found yourself saying, “How have I never heard this case before?”—you’re in the right place.
I dig into murders, disappearances, serial killers, cold cases, small-town mysteries, forgotten crimes, and the strange, unsettling stories that time almost erased. No sensationalized headlines. No made-up drama. Just well-researched stories built from newspaper archives, court records, police reports, and historical documents.
If you enjoy what you read and would like to help keep the lights on, consider buying me a Big Gulp.
Every little bit helps pay for old newspapers, research materials, public records, travel, and the countless hours spent piecing together stories that deserve to be remembered.
Buy Me a Big Gulp / NickVulich.com
If true crime is your thing, you might also enjoy these books...
No comments:
Post a Comment