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Two cases in which the Department of Justice has as yet failed to score with the capture of the culprits: Edward G. Bremer, St. Paul banker, snatched last January; June Robles, 6, stolen from her Tucson, Ariz, home last April. Last week Federal sleuths cleared up their 32nd and 33rd cases of extortion and abduction since the Lindbergh Law in record time.
Ford. In Detroit Edsel Ford received a letter threatening death unless $5,000 was left on the back porch of a home in the city's northeast section. The money was duly left in a candy box. A tenant nearly ruined the case by picking it up by mistake. Soon, however, Edward Lickwala, 20, son of a onetime Ford worker, appeared to offer Federal agents information. He gave more information than he intended. Arrested, he quickly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth.
Stoll. The kidnapping of wealthy young Mrs. Alice Speed Stoll of Louisville, Ky. fortnight ago, put the Division of Investigation ("D. O. I.") agents on their mettle. Mrs. Stoll, ill with a cold, was seized shortly after 3 p. m. from her suburban house by a man with a revolver and a lead pipe. The Stolls did not ring famed NAtional 7117 in Washington, as every kidnappee's family is supposed to do. The first thing that D. O. I. Director John Edgar Hoover knew about the case was when he received a telephone message at 7 p. m. from a relative of Mrs. Stoll, onetime Ambassador Frederick M. Sackett Jr. Within 24 hr. the D. O. I. laboratories had the $50,000 ransom note, had found fingerprints and identified them, among nearly five million on file, as belonging to a young Nashville maniac named Robinson. Foolish Kidnapper Robinson named his father in Nashville as intermediary and money-passer.
Less than 1,200 people work for the D. O. I. Less than half of them are field operatives who report to 30 bureaus throughout the country. Their names are never known. But their bureau chiefs and inspectors must be known. Director Hoover has a teletype system to all bureau headquarters and D. O. I. men are encouraged to use the long distance telephone like grain speculators. Through this high-speed network Director Hoover began converging some 30 operatives on the scene of the crime. From Washington, Assistant Director Harold Nathan flew to Louisville to co-ordinate the search. Inspector H. H. Clegg sped from Washington to take care of the Nashville end of the investigation. From Chicago hurried one of the littlest and ablest crook snatchers in the service—Melvin Purvis. Just past 30, Bureau Chief Purvis, University of South Carolina Law School graduate, helped with the Federal investigation of the Insull collapse, rounded up Verne Sankey and the Touhy gang, set the Chicago trap that resulted in the killing of Desperado John Dillinger last July.* In the Stoll case he was given the Indianapolis area.