State Exchange Bank Robbery May 29, 1933

On May 29, 1933, at 9:04 a.m., seven men staged a hold-up of the bank in a widely publicized robbery in which six robbers were captured after a chase west of Culver. The seventh was arrested in Chicago in late October. Of the $12,655.60 stolen, $9,375.61 was recovered. THE STORY:

That Monday morning a car came in from the North and stopped in front of the bank. Five men, masked, with one machine gun, and four sawed-off shotguns jumped from the car and went in the bank.

Mr. Osborn had seen them from the front window and set off the alarm, which alerted the citizens of Culver . Another account it is said that the switchboard operator was the one who sent the alarm out as she was in a concealed office where she could survey the whole premises. When the bandits entered the bank she sent a call to the academy which set in the pre aggranged defense plan for the bank. The alarm was ringing when they came in the door spraying bullets.

Oliver C. Shilling (son of Schuyler Shilling) with gun in hand ran to the roof of the two-story shoe repair shop south of the bank, and from that vantage spot, shot between the eyes the driver seated in the get-away car. The second man waiting outside ducked for cover behind the car. Inside the bank, two of the robbers made the fourteen people in the bank lie down on the floor, one stood guard at the entrance, one in the middle of the lobby and another took Carl Adams to open the vault.

The next day The Chicago Tribune reported: “Culver Trains Guns on Bank Bandits; Gets 6.”

Scenes from the 1933:


	Culver ’s first banker, John Osborn, points to the bullet holes in Dr. Mackey’s car
Irene Bogardus, Wilma Smith, Martha Werner, Helen Kruman, and Lenore Medburn faced the bandits’ guns
	Citizen publisher M.R. Robinson exhibits the special edition of the paper devoted to the robbery
Oliver C. Shilling demonstrates his shooting technique
	the car of H.H. Tallman, riddled with bullet holes,
and the same vehicle after evidence of the gunshots was removed by D. L. Jones.



More detail on the robbery can be found here, in True Detective Magazine's feature story on the robbery and capture effort.

The robbers took Carl Adams and a customer, Stephen Warren, with them as hostages placing them on the running board of the car.

The wounded driver was shoved aside and another man drove. The new driver did not know the roads. In frustration, the two hostages were let go at the west edge of town and the car proceeded North and crossed State Road 10 going West. Dr. C. B. Mackey was following close behind in his car. And when the get-away car skidded from the road on a sharp curve, the men stopped the doctor and took over his car. The doctor administered to the wounded driver who later died. In unknown territory, the driver tried to cut the car through a woods west of Ober which was swampy. The stolen car bogged down in quick sand.

They had to abandon the car and scatter on foot. A large posse of Culver citizens, joined by men from Plymouth and North Judson and led by Col. Robert Rossow, commandant of the Culver Military Academy [said to have numered 500 which included 10 officers from Culver Military Academy], encircled the robbers and all but one were caught. One of the men was in a tree, another submerged up to his neck in water, another man with the leader of the gang were well hidden with only their faces showing above the swamp water. Over half of the money was gathered throughout the woods with the largest sum found buried under a root on the bank of a creek.

"A Primitive Method of Enforcing the Law"
Vigilantism as a Response to Bank Crimes in Indiana, 1925-1933
Paul MUSGRAVE

On May 29, 1933, hundreds of vigilantes captured three men in the woods just outside Culver , Indiana. Their quarry was the last of a gang who had stolen more than $12,000 from the State Exchange Bank in Culver that morning.

Armed with shotguns, the robbers had entered the bank at 9:07; while some of them watched over the bank's customers and employees, their leader ordered the assistant cashier to open the va ult, which the gang members then emptied. Alerted by a telephone call from a bank employee in an adjacent office, a group of local vigilantes (soon numbering five hundred, including ten officers from the Culver Military Academy) quickly mobilized and surrounded the bank.

Using two captives as human shields, the bandits ran to their getaway car. As they sped away, the bank president's son, perched on a nearby building's roof, shot and killed the driver.

The car overturned, but the surviving bandits stole another one, leaving their hostages in a ditch. After crashing into a tree ten miles out of town, they fled on foot into the woods, where the vigilantes apprehended them piecemeal over the next few hours.

The trial for the robbers was held in Plymouth and ended with three robbers being sentenced 3 to 10 years and three sentenced to 2-8 years. The seventh was arrested in Chicago, IL. In the inner circles of prison, it was said that John Dillinger cased the Culver Bank and believed it too diffic ult to get away. Apparently, the seven men did not know of their fellow criminal's observation.

Some months after the robbery, Mr. Osborn received an extortion note from one of the robbers threatening death if W.O. didn't bring $20,000 in a bag to a particular location in Plymouth, Indiana.

Daughter Francis Osborn Butler remembers her mother, her husband's mother and father, who were visiting from Nebraska, and herself going to Plymouth and waited for news of the drop at a restaurant. While Will drove, Oliver Shilling was lying in the back of the car on the floor with a submachine gun. Four policemen were staked out in a house across from the alley. Osborn dropped the sack filled with fake bills beside a trash can. No one came to pick up the bag. But a lone car cruised by the site after midnight leading police to believe it was the robber who was tipped off to the stake-out.

1933 - Sep 29 - Shoved into Indiana He Is then Arrested

Chicago, Sept. 28 - A sudden shove from a Chicago policeman sent Thomas Leahy, 28, across the line Into Indiana today where police of that state arrested him for a bank robbery.

Leahy had refused to waive extradition.

Judge Thomas A. Green, before whom Leahy was brought to trial sanctioned the procedure by which the man was turned over to Indiana authorities. "Let him take that fellow to Indians whether he signa or not. That's what I call cutting out the red tape! I'm the judge in the case and I say you can do it." Green said. - - Democrat and Chronicle Fri, Sep 29, 1933 ·Page 2

1933 - Sep 30 - CULVER BANDIT IS HELD Seventh Suspect in Bank Robbery Is Placed Under $50,000 Bond. By United Press PLYMOUTH. Ind.. Sept. 30. Thomas Leahy, alleged Culver bank bandit and kidnaper, was placed under $50,000 bond here today. Trial was set for Oct. 16 by Judge Albert Chipman when he was brought into Marsahll circuit court Friday. Sheriff Charles Keller, who arrested Leahy, siad he was suspected of being the seventh member of the gang which several months ago held up the Culver State Bank and kidnaped the cashier and a customer. - - Indianapolis Times

Of this Arrest is found:

LEAHY v.KUNKEL, (N.D.Ind. 1933)
United States District Court, N.D. Indiana, South Bend Division
Oct 24, 1933

LEAHY v. KUNKEL, Warden.
SLICK, District Judge.

Petitioner brings this action for a writ of habeas corpus charging that he has been deprived of rights guaranteed to him by article 4, § 2, of the Constitution of the United States, and of his liberty vouchsafed him under section 662 of title 18 of the United States Code Annotated.

The facts are stipulated and are briefly as follows: Petitioner was indicted by the grand jury of the Marshall county circuit court for bank robbery. He lives in Chicago. The sheriff of Marshall county, accompanied by one Indiana police officer and two police officers of the city of Chicago, arrested petitioner in Chicago without a warrant, took him to a detective bureau, and locked him up. Thereafter he was handcuffed and placed in the sheriff's car and driven to Indiana. At South Bend he was placed in jail over night and the next morning he was taken to Marshall county, where a warrant of arrest was read to him. He was then taken to the Marshall county circuit court, where bond was fixed, and upon his failure to give the bond fixed by the court, was delivered for safekeeping on order of the court to respondent, who is warden of the Indiana State Penitentiary at Michigan City, Ind. He then filed his petition for writ of habeas corpus in the Marshall county circuit court, which petition was by the judge thereof dismissed and his case set for trial.

Petitioner contends, not without logic, that having been arrested without right and forcibly taken from the state of Illinois to the state of Indiana — "kidnapped," in other words, with all the ugly terrifying meaning that word implies — he is entitled to be discharged, or at least returned to the state of Illinois.

There is no excuse for the conduct of the arresting officers and their procedure should not be commended. The Constitution of the United States, article 4, § 2, and the acts of Congress, section 662, title 18, United States Code Annotated, passed pursuant thereto, provide an orderly manner for extradition of persons charged with crime in one state, who have fled to another state. These constitutional and legislative provisions were designed to procure physical possession of an offender who has fled the jurisdiction of the court without irritation between states and without the necessity of one state invading the territory of an adjoining state with all the resultant violence and terrorism naturally attendant upon such invasion.

The Constitution, the bulwark of the nation's liberty, was written to "insure domestic tranquillity" as well as to "establish justice," and "domestic tranquillity" can best be insured by an orderly procedure in all judicial controversies.

There can be no doubt that the acts of the officers were wrong; were without the pale of judicial approval and should not be condoned or encouraged. But these officers are not before this court, and the only question up for decision is the alleged right of petitioner to be discharged because of the wrongful manner of his having been brought into court to answer the charge with which he stands indicted.

Fortunately, this very question has been before the United States Supreme Court in a number of cases. The two outstanding cases are Mahon v. Justice, 127 U.S. 700, 8 S. Ct. 1204, 32 L. Ed. 283, and Pettibone v. Nichols, 203 U.S. 192, 27 S. Ct. 111, 118, 51 L. Ed. 148, 7 Ann. Cas. 1047. In Mahon v. Justice, supra, the opinion is by Mr. Justice Field, and Mr. Justice Bradley and Mr. Justice Harlan dissented. This case was decided in 1888. Pettibone v. Nichols, supra, was decided in 1906. Mr. Justice Harlan wrote the opinion in that case and Mr. Justice McKenna dissented. In this case, Mr. Justice Harlan said: "It is settled that a party is not excused from answering to the state whose laws he has violated because violence has been done him in bringing him within the state. * * * The United States do not recognize any right of asylum in the state where a party charged with a crime committed in another state is found, nor have they made any provision for the return of parties who, by violence and without lawful authority, have been abducted from a state, and, whatever effect may be given by a state court to the illegal mode in which a defendant is brought from another state, no right secured under the Constitution and laws of the United States is violated by his arrest and imprisonment for crimes committed in the state into which he is brought. "Citing Mahon v. Justice, supra, where he dissented from the majority opinion of the Supreme Court.

Petitioner is here seeking by the exercise of the extraordinary remedy of habeas corpus to prevent his trial in a state court on the ground that his apprehension and subsequent arrest were illegal, and for that reason no jurisdiction exists in the state court to put him to trial.

The law is well settled that a person charged with crime in one state, and who is found in and abducted from another state and brought into the state where he is indicted, is not entitled to be discharged upon habeas corpus in a District Court of the United States. Neither the Constitution nor the laws of the United States entitle such person to a discharge. Pettibone v. Nichols, 203 U.S. 192, 27 S. Ct. 111, 51 L. Ed. 148, 7 Ann. Cas. 1047.

The Constitution of the United States does not guarantee the right of asylum to one who has committed a crime in one state and fled to another state. The right of the state of Illinois to demand of the state of Indiana the return of one of its citizens illegally taken from within its borders is a different question and need not be decided in determining the rights of petitioner who stands charged by indictment with a crime against the laws of Indiana.

As was said in one of the cases decided against petitioner's theory, if one has committed a crime against a state and has fled therefrom, the law is not particular as to the means or the method by which his return to the state against whose laws he has offended is obtained. No doubt this court has jurisdiction to discharge petitioner if the acts of the arresting officers render the exercise of jurisdiction by the circuit court of Marshall county over his person a violation of his constitutional rights. The decisions cited above in this opinion, and many others, hold, however, that his constitutional rights have not been violated. There is no emergency here. Petitioner has not been tried on the indictment pending in the circuit court of Marshall county. He may be found not guilty, and in such event no question would ever arise as to his rights secured under the federal Constitution. It is the duty of this court to presume that the circuit court of Marshall county will enforce, as it has power equally with this court to do, every right secured to petitioner by the federal Constitution.

The application for discharge is denied, and the petitioner is remanded to the custody of the respondent. Petitioner is granted an exception.

Bank Robbery of 1933 - It was 75 years ago today.. The great Culver bank robbery of ' 33