PART ONE
She was fifteen and blonde, Stella Mae Irwin. She had pretty legs and loved to roller-skate. A gay, laughing little girl like your daughter or mine.
Within the year she had robbed her first bank. At sixteen she was well on her way to become America's Female Public Enemy No. 1.
Bennie Dickson taught her the crime business.
Bennie came naturally by his pedagogical proclivities. His father was an instructor in the Topeka High School. Dickson Sr.'s students called him "Professor" or, more affectionately, "Prof."
A nice man, Professor Dickson. He gave his son every advantage a nice boy should have. Bennie took the advantages. Bennie was the taking kind. Before he was through he took almost everything in the Middle West — including Stella Mae.
They met, the boy and the girl, at a Topeka roller-skating rink in the summer of 1937.
Bennie Dickson was smallish, blue-eyed and fair-complexioned, and looked much younger than his age, which was twenty-seven. Erect, well proportioned, muscular, athletic, an excellent skater, he quickly attracted the blue-eyed and fair-complexioned Stella Mae. She was smallish too, a slim five-feet-three-ful. Soon they were having dates, on wheels and off.
Suddenly Bennie had to go away from there.
Stella Mae was desolate. Skating cross-armed with the girl friend, which she had been doing when she met Bennie Dickson, no longer thrilled her. Boys of her own age bored her. Compared with Bennie, they were nothing. Bennie was a man of the world.
So glamorous was he to her distorted thinking that she approached with complete indifference the task of readying herself for the fall term of school, her second at Topeka High. She took no interest in shopping for the modest school wardrobe. That was bad, Mother Irwin well knew. Stella Mae was in love.
Letters came almost daily to her, first from Chicago, then from Los Angeles. Finally came the letter the child had been waiting for: the letter with the money order in it that was to take her to her lover. An hour later she was steaming westward on the Santa Fe — westward to California, the State of Missing Girls.
Fifteen, fair, wide-eyed, alone, Stella Mae Irwin stepped off the train at the little mosquelike red-brick station which had for decades marked the gateway to Los Angeles.
Little did she know — or did she? — the kind of life into which she was going.
She knew, of course, that Dickson had been in trouble with the law. There was that time, when he was fifteen, that he was arrested for joyriding in a car that did not belong to him; and that other time, when he was seventeen, that he hailed a taxicab, beat up the driver, dumped him out on the sidewalk, and drove away in the cab. To Stella Mae these were just boyish pranks. She knew — she had once had a little trouble with a probation officer herself.
Perhaps Bennie Dickson had made light of the six-months jail sentence he received for stealing that first car, and the ten-to-twenty-one-year sentence he received for first-degree robbery in the taxicab case. Perhaps he hadn't told her that, after his parole from the latter sentence, he actually served seven years of another ten-year sentence for holding up the State Bank in Stotesbury, Missouri, and getting away with $1,147.
Sentimentalists will like to think that Stella Mae knew nothing of the seriousness of her lover's crimes: that she arrived in Los Angeles as innocent as she looked. Their thought is as good as the next man's. All any of us' know is that, she didn't stay innocent very long.
As for Bennie, it is hard to believe that he ever was. To be sure there was nothing in his early life on which a student of juvenile delinquency could put his finger and say: "That's what started this boy on his criminal way." Professor Dickson's income was not large but it was adequate. The family lived comfortably in an excellent neighborhood. It was an affectionate family, too, and a loyal one, which stood by its renegade son long after his crimes were known.
She and Bennie tumbled out of bed and dressed themselves carefully in denim overalls.
The making of a gungirl: Stella Mae bangs away under Bennie's guidance.
Neither was Bennie Dickson's personality at all like that of the average criminal. He was just the gentle-mannered, quiet-spoken, studious type you would expect to come from a home of culture and refinement.
Although he showed no overmastering desire to indulge in gainful occupation, the fact that his educational career was interrupted by the joy-riding incident at the end of his first year in his father's school was a source of continuing regret to him. Between bank robberies and kidnapings, he studied assiduously, attended night schools, took correspondence courses, registered — under assumed names, of course — at academies and colleges, and generally led the intellectual life.
Yet, according to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of all the many dangerous criminals that the bureau has been called upon to locate and apprehend, none was more vicious than Benjamin James Dickson.
For example, the crime which had driven him so suddenly from Topeka and Stella Mae was due solely to the fact that the brutish instincts he had shown in his attack on the taxicab driver again came into play.
In July, a few weeks after his first skating-rink meeting with the little Irwin girl, Bennie had gone to the City Hall to secure an automobile license, and had become so infuriated at the questions asked by the bureau clerk that he had attacked him with both fists, knocked him unconscious, and then finished the job by kicking him and breaking several of his ribs.
This was in itself a serious crime — "assault with intent to kill" was the way the warrant read — but it was especially serious in Dickson's case, because it was a violation of the conditional commutation granted him in Missouri. So Bennie "took it on the lam" and left his blonde charmer to weep and skate alone.
Such was the baffling complex individual into whose waiting arms fell Stella Mae Irwin that April morning on the sunlit platform of the Santa Fe station in Los Angeles.
How would she make out, this fifteen-year-old child who had never been away from her family's home in Topeka, who knew the man to whom she was entrusting her life only as a skillful skater and a fascinating sinner? How would the frilly little girl with the big worn suitcase fare in a world of sunshine and sin?
At first, according to her lights, she fared well.
The nine months which intervened between the boy's hurried departure and Stella Mae's arrival in Los Angeles he had spent in a thoroughly characteristic manner: He went to night school in Chicago, and later registered at a university in Los Angeles. Characteristically, too, he financed his educational career by robberies.
In Chicago, he also renewed an interest in boxing which he had formed while in Missouri State Penitentiary, and gained some local fame as an amateur under the name of Johnny O'Malley. Fight fans say he displayed not only considerable skill but a stout fighting heart.
In Los Angeles he continued to appear on amateur fistic programs, and was so successful that he seems to have thought seriously of following a ring career; he even arranged for a manager. But, in the end, crime got boxing down for the count. Robbery became his regular business. And for the moment he was in the money.
For weeks Stella Mae nestled by the side of her lover as they sped over those long straight highways — the Pacific on the east — through green valleys merging into the Great Valley, most fertile garden ever tilled by man. The Kansas child's blue eyes became bigger and wider as she saw for the first time snow-covered mountains rising out of orange-covered fields, ancient Franciscan missions lining modern motor highways. The color in her young cheeks rose as she whirled along through breezes cooled by the snow, warmed by the sun, softened by the sea.
Stella Mae was in California and in love.
When the warm days came, the honeymooners started east on the long trek to the Dickson family's summer home at Lake Benton, Minnesota.
Stella Mae visited her mother in Topeka while Bennie visited relatives in Detroit. The official climate of Topeka was not so healthful for Bennie right then, with a freshly sworn warrant hanging over his head! Subsequently they joined up and continued by automobile to the Dickson cottage on the shore of the lake, where they spent a happy summer as guests of the Dickson family.
Bennie, as usual, pursued his studies; and Professor Dickson assisted him. Young and old, the family fished and bathed in the cool waters, and led a thoroughly conventional domestic life.
In California there had been some talk of marriage between Bennie and Stella Mae. Bennie had gone so far as to take out a marriage license. But when the couple, already living as man and wife, had found that Stella Mae's age made marriage impossible under California laws, they had contented themselves with saying they were married and had let it go at that.
Now, on August 3, 1938, they slipped over to Pipestone, Minnesota, and got themselves married by a police court judge. Bennie used his old nom de sport. Johnny O'Malley. The witnesses were strangers, as well as the judge; and apparently this belated legitimatizing of a relationship which already existed in fact remained a secret with bride and groom.
The only feature of these months on the shores of Lake Benton that ties up with Stella Mae's subsequent introduction into crime was the instruction she received from her husband in the use of firearms. The Dicksons did a bit of hunting now and then, and, with this as his explanation to his family, Bennie put her through a daily routine which made her expert with both rifle and revolver. There is always the intriguing question how much the girl knew about what she was doing in the early months of her relations with Dickson. Whether or not she realized that she was in training for shooting at human targets, she applied herself to her work with such enthusiasm that she soon became an even surer shot than her more experienced partner.
"Sure Shot Stella"-that's what they called her, and what she was.
Along about the middle of August the elder Dickson had to go back to Topeka to prepare for the fall term of school, and Bennie and Stella Mae offered to drive him in their car. Although the young Dicksons' stay in Topeka was necessarily short, Bennie managed to acquire a shotgun, an automatic pistol, and a 38. revolver. Thus heeled, the pair returned to Lake Benton, where they stayed alone in the family cottage, continued their target practice, and amused themselves of an evening in one of the neighboring night clubs.
Among Stella Mae's many attractions was a very lovely singing voice. Once, the leader of the orchestra at their favorite night club asked her to sing a solo, and she made such a hit with the crowd that for a while she seriously considered the career of a public entertainer. Her husband, however, had other plans for her.
Their own family fortune, acquired in the crime fields of California, had held out fairly well during the first weeks while they were guesting at the professor's expense. Now that they were on their own, they must do something about the exchequer. In Elkton, South Dakota, Bennie had spotted a bank that was ripe for the picking. Elkton is not a very large town. Business at the bank, even in rush hours, is no subway crush. An ideal place, he had thought, for a daylight robbery.
When he broached the idea, Stella Mae was at first concerned, not for herself — a little bank robbing, she thought, would be fun — but for Bennie, who was already doubly entangled with the law. But what, Bennie argued, did one more black mark matter, when he already had so many against him? Besides, they must eat.
The two children talked far into the night — or, rather, the child and the man who looked like a child.
Painstakingly Bennie explained the technique of successful bank robbery as he had learned it in the cell blocks at Missouri Pen. His mistake at Stotesbury, he said, had been that he was in too much of a hurry. He had contented himself with the loose cash in the tills.
This time they would go slowly. They would grab all the money there was in the vault.
As a matter of fact, his earlier try at big-time crime had been merely the kind of bank robbery that any inexperienced eighteen-year-old boy might have committed as a substitute for work. He had simply walked into the bank, stuck his revolver through the cashier's wicket, grabbed the cash which happened to be in the cage, and walked right out again.
His getaway was quick — too quick, as it happened. There had been no rainfall in Missouri and Kansas for some weeks in the summer of 1931, and the young bandit's car, driven at high speed over sandy country roads, raised a cloud of dust that attracted the attention of farmers for miles around. A few citizens gave chase across the Missouri-Kansas line to an isolated farm where, it was learned, he had been living under an alias for several weeks. From there officers traced him to Topeka, and caught up with him just as he was climbing out of a swimming pool.
This must have seemed an ideal situation for a speedy and uneventful arrest. A man dressed only in a bathing suit usually carries few concealed weapons. But Benjamin Dickson was no usual criminal. Believe it or not, the official report states that he "reached under his bathing suit and secured a revolver which he leveled at the officers." Prompt action by one of them in knocking the gun out of his hand was all that "prevented serious harm to the other officers."
But to get back to the midnight talk at Lake Benton and the projected robbery of the bank at Elkton: So persuasively did Bennie talk to Stella Mae that she was soon entering into the plan with all of the enthusiasm of which her eager, passionate nature was capable. She could hardly wait for the adventure to begin.
Very early on the morning of August 25, 1938, the day before her sixteenth birthday, she and Bennie tumbled out of their snug bed in Professor Dickson's summer home, and dressed themselves carefully in the blue denim overalls which were the costumes of Minnesota and Dakota farmer youth in town for the day.
Stella Mae did up her fluffy blonde hair into a knot on the top of her head, and pulled down over it one of her husband's hats. At first sight, especially head on, she would pass for a boy or a very small man. Somewhere in the denims she concealed the .38. Bennie pocketed the automatic. Then, just before daybreak, they tooled their car noiselessly through the little lakeside colony and out on the road to Elkton.
The forenoon they spent thoroughly "casing" the little Corn Exchange Bank — no relation to the big one in New York City. At two thirty, when they figured that business at the bank would be at a low ebb, they drove down the main street of the town, these two youthful, slender, undersized figures in overalls, and Bennie walked nonchalantly into the bank as if he were about to cash a check. Stella Mae remained in the car, which they had parked near by.
Once inside, Bennie gave the command "Throw up your hands!"
There were, as it happened, several customers in the bank as well as the working force, and Bennie covered them all with his revolver.
"Open the vault," commanded Dickson.
"We can't." gasped the nearest clerk. "It's on a time lock."
"When will it open?"
"Not for another half hour."
"O. K. I'll wait."
Stella Mae meanwhile, anxious at Bennie's delay, tucked her gun under her overalls and joined Bennie in the bank.
Guns in hand, the two Dicksons disposed themselves in the lobby so as to command both the counter and the door, and waited silently. Each time the door opened and a customer entered — and this happened several times — the newcomer was told to hold up his hands.
Two pairs of baby-blue eyes: Sixteen-year-old Stella Mae with her husband.
At exactly three o'clock the steel doors of the vault swung slowly open. The Dicksons, maneuvering now so as to cover operations inside the vault as well as outside, made sure that they had every dollar on the premises, locked both clerks and customers inside the vault, and left the bank as slowly and as nonchalantly as they had entered it. (Fortunately, the prisoners in the vault were rescued in time to prevent suffocation, but no thanks for their deliverance was due to Bennie or Stella Mae Dickson.)
Gaining their car, the young hoodlums drove out of town at a reasonable pace, turned off the main highway into a series of roundabout country roads — which they had previously carefully charted — and arrived at a farm in Tyler. Minnesota, owned by relatives of the Dickson family. Here they counted their swag, which, after all their care and trouble, amounted to only $2.174.64.
"We'll have to tackle a bigger bank." allowed Bennie.
From Tyler they made their way back to Lake Benton, where no one had noticed their absence.
Although their venture had been less successful financially than they had hoped, it had been, they prided themselves, very much, so professionally. They had employed the leisurely technique which Bennie had learned from the old-timers at Missouri Pen. They had allowed neither the unexpected presence of so many customers in the bank nor the delay in gaining access to the vault to deter them. In their getaway, too, they had not been lured into any such unseemly speed as had led to Bennie's capture after his first essay at bank robbery.
Most important of all. Stella Mae Dickson had proved her nerve on this occasion by not flinching in the face of unexpected setbacks, and had shown herself in every way a fitting mate and partner for her bandit husband. All they needed, apparently, was — as Bennie had inferred — bigger and better banks. When they were found, Bennie and Stella Mae would rob them.
Well, perhaps. But the bank at Elkton, unlike the bank at Stotesbury eight years before, was insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a government organization growing out of the bank holidays of 1933, and that fact automatically made the robbery a violation of the National Bank Robbery Act.
At first glance this may seem to be of little consequence, but it was to be of vital importance to Bennie Dickson and his bride. On his own, he had committed crimes which brought him only into the black books of local and state authorities. Henceforth, as violators of a federal statute, he and Stella must deal with J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men, who in some 23,000 cases have eventually gotten their man — or woman.
At the moment, though, the young couple's only concern was to buy a new car more befitting their new station in life. So they went over to automobile headquarters in Detroit and shopped around. Presently they were on their way to Kansas to show the folks their new Buick sedan. But automobiles, so necessary to Bennie Dickson in his work, were never lucky for him. Near Osage City, Kansas, the new sedan was wrecked and had to be towed into a garage in Topeka.
While Stella Mae was visiting her family, Bennie slipped over to Kansas City again to look over the automobile market. Finding a Buick of the same model as the one he had just wrecked, he expressed so much interest in it that the accommodating salesman suggested that Bennie run the car around town a bit just as a demonstration. Bennie took the suggestion — and the car.
Of course, one of the first rules Stella Mae's husband had learned from his mentors in the pen was to stay out of hot cars as much as possible. There would be times when it would be advisable, in the course of business, to steal a car; but, once the theft was accomplished, the car should be abandoned or so altered as to avoid identification. But Bennie couldn't afford to abandon this prize, because he had already invested a good part of his working capital in a wrecked car, and what good was a wrecked car to a bank robber about to go out in search of bigger and better banks?
So Bennie went back to the garage in Topeka and exchanged the engine in the wrecked chassis for the one in the new one. Thenceforth he would be, so far as the police were concerned, no longer riding in a car that was stolen in Kansas City but in a car that had been purchased with presumably hard-earned cash in faraway Detroit — and he could prove it by the serial number on the engine.
Publication Date: December 30, 1939