Newspaper Articles for Lane County, Kansas

By Erle Stanley Gardner
Creator of Perry Mason and author of "The Case of the Nervous Accomplice"

The thumbpring of an alcoholic---a smudgy, almost indiscernible clue left by chance on the window glass of a death car in Kansas---was destined to be the stamp that sealed a ticket to doom.

At the same time it was also to become the hallmark of a little-known legend in the annals of murder investigation.

The car had plunged over a cliff in a remote section of the badlands in western Kansas. Sprawled beside the wreckage was the body of a man. He had been shot---almost decapitated from what obviously was a shotgun blast.

The car and the dead man had been found, that May morning of 1928, by possemen who for two days had been scouring the plains of three Western states---combing the region for traces of four men who had staged an incredibly bold noonday holdup two days before at a bank in Lamar, Colorado, near the Kansas line.

In the course of the robbery, which had netted the thieves nearly a quarter of a million dollars, two bank officials--the president, A. N. Parrish, and his son, J. P. Parrish, a cashier--had been shot down in cold blood. A teller had been kidnapped as a hostage by the robbers as they fled. One bandit had been wounded but had escaped.

Identity of the slain man found beside the wreck was swiftly established. He was Doctor W. W. Wineinger of Dighton, Kansas, a town a few miles distant from the spot where the tragedy was discovered. The car was his. Inquiries at Wineinger's home produced a puzzling story.

On the night following the Lamar bank robbery, Doctor Wineinger had been roused from sleep by a caller at his front door. Mrs. Wineinger said she heard a gruff voice--thick and slurred as though from liquor--on the porch, telling her husband that a man had been injured in a tractor accident near by and needed medical attention. The Wineinger family--the physician, his wife and their small daughter--had retired. But the doctor dressed and, driving his own car, left with the stranger.

When he failed to return by morning Mrs. Wineinger notified the police. The matter apparently was put aside in the press of the manhunt. It was the second morning after he disappeared that the body of the slain physician was discovered.

In Garden City, Kansas, a young police officer named R. S. Terwilliger had, mostly on his own time, trained himself in the science of fingerprint identification---a technique now routine even in rural areas but one which, a quarter century ago, was a field in which few outside metropolitan police departments were schooled.

Officer Terwilliger's examination of the wrecked car yielded a large number of latent fingerprints. He obatined samples of the fingerprints of the Wineinger household and their immediate associates. All but one of those found in the automobile were thus identified. However, on the window opposite the driver's side of the car, Terwilliger found a print from the man's thumb.

Terwilliger sent a copy of this to the FBI---which had not yet developed the vast file it has today---and copies to police and sheriff's offices across the country.

Meanwhile, on the day after the murder of Dr. Wineinger was discovered, other possemen found the body of E. A. Kessinger, the bank teller who had been kidnapped as a hostage. The body of the teller, bound with rope, was found in a deserted shack some miles from Dighton. He, too, had been killed by a shotgun blast in the head.

Months went by. Then at the Department of Justice in Washington the laborious search for the counterpart of the single print found on the Wineinger car brought the first glimmer of results. The owner of the thumbprint was identified as Harrison Holden, who had served a term in the Oklahoma Penitentiary. But Holden long since had been released and had dropped from sight. Further, it developed the name Holden was undoubtedly an alias.

Then, working in close concert across the nation, police and the district attorney at Lamar finally located a woman who was known to have consorted with the elusiv ex-convict prior to his conviction in Oklahoma.

The true name of Harrison Holden, this woman told the officers, was William Harison (Little Jake) Fleagle. He and his brother, Ralph, the woman said, owned a ranch in a remote sector of Western Kansas. Jake was known as a heavy drinker and spent much more money than any conceivable profits from the ranch could provide.

Police descended on the ranch. Again, Little Jake escaped the police net by a hair. But the trail led next to Kankakee, Illinois, where another raid bagged Ralph Fleagle and led to the capture of two others of the four-man gang--Howard L. (Heavy) Royston and George J. Abshier.

It was Royston who had been severely wounded during the holdup. But it was Jake, the collared thieves told authorities, who had selected Dr. Wineinger at random and lured him from his home on the injured-farmer pretext to treat the wounded Royston. And it was Jake, the trio said, who in a drunken frenzy had killed the doctor who had insisted he would report the gunshot wound. Jake also had killed Kessinger so no witness would be left, the captured robbers said.

The three were returned to Lamar to face trial for murder as headlines from coast to coast flared bigger with each new development in the case.

It was at this point that the first of a series of crudely penciled illiterate letters began to show up in Denver. They were addressed to Williams Adams, then governor of Colorado. The letters purported to come from the long-sought fugitive, Jake Fleagle.

In them the writer inferred that he would assume all blame for the quadruple killings, if this would save Ralph Fleagle's neck. But he made no offer to surrender or reveal his whereabouts.

The letters were turned over to the then United States Attorney for Colorado, the late Ralph L. Carr. It was determined by postal investigators that all of the letters sent to Governor Adams were actually in the handwriting of Jake Fleagle. All were mailed on trains plying remote branch lines of the Missouri Pacific through the Ozark country of Arkansas. Federal agents, local police and sheriff's officers rode these trains day after day.

Then, one October morning in 1930, a year and a half after the Lamar robbery, the months of effort in the huge interstate manhunt paid off.

Little Jake Fleagle, the most wanted criminal at the time in the United States, stepped from the shadows of a platform in Branson, Missouri, as a train chuffed into the station. He swung aboard and the officers on the train closed in. The officers returned the fire. In the fray the snarling, booze-crazed killer was fatally wounded.

He died, but not before he confessed to murdering Dr. Wineinger and pushing his car over an embankment. Jake had brushed the window with his thumb, leaving the print that was to seal the doom of the entire mob.

A jury held all three surviving members of the gang guilty of murder in the first degree.

And so the last chapter was written to a case where the thumbprint of a drunk was the sole clue in one of the most spectacular crimes of the modern West---all because an unsung police officer in a rural community had put his spare time to work for the citizenry he served.
(Plain Dealer ~ November 27, 1955 - Submitted by Lori DeWinkler)