Douglas Walker|dwalker@muncie.gannett.com
MUNCIE – In the 150 years since its incorporation, Muncie has seen its share of memorable crimes — some shocking, many heart-breaking and more than a few ridiculous.
But the most high-profile criminal saga to unfold in Muncie — one that produced front-page headlines nationwide twice in eight months — has been all but forgotten.
On Jan. 18, 1925, local authorities captured a man who at that point was the country's most infamous gangster, the first criminal to be labeled — by the media, not the FBI — "Public Enemy Number One."
No, his name was not John Dillinger.
The apprehension of Gerald Chapman — also known as "The Gentleman Bandit" and "The Count of Gramercy Park" — as he walked along East Charles Street, near the current site of the YWCA, placed Muncie in a national spotlight with an intensity that perhaps has not been matched in the ensuing 90 years.
The whereabouts of Chapman — best known for his 1921 robbery of a mail truck in New York City that brought his gang more than $2 million in cash, jewelry and bonds — had been a subject of intense national interest since he escaped from a federal prison in Atlanta in May 1923.
Chapman's reputation as a dapper, ever glamorous hoodlum — famous as a master of disguise, and for the nitroglycerin he used to blow open safes — took a hit when he was accused of killing a police officer during a Connecticut heist in October 1924.
It would later be determined Chapman — and his spectacle-wearing partner in crime, George "Dutch" Anderson, who had also busted out of the Atlanta prison — spent a significant portion of their time on the lam in Delaware County, as tenants living in the farmhouse, just south of Eaton, of Ben and Mary Hance.
Media accounts of the day were unclear or contradictory as to how Chapman came to know the Hances. Perhaps another of his henchmen, former Hartford City police officer Charlie "One-Arm" Wolfe, made the introductions.
Chapman spent a considerable amount of his time in Muncie, seeking treatment from a local physician for a bullet wound suffered in an earlier bid to flee prison, dining at local eateries, playing cards at a cigar store and entertaining a female friend at a downtown hotel. Those who encountered him would recall the Brooklyn native at times spoke with what seemed to be a British accent.
When staying closer to home, he reportedly enjoyed taking target practice at a large tree outside the Hance farmhouse, and fishing in the nearby Mississinewa River. (Some later came to believe that during his Delaware County residency, Chapman had used nitro to blow open safes at Eaton's two banks and Stillman's Department Store in downtown Muncie.)
Contemporary reports were also hazy as to what role, if any, Ben Hance had played in the events leading to Chapman's capture that Sunday morning in downtown Muncie. Comments attributed to the gangster, however, made it clear he held his Delaware County landlord responsible for his fate.
Chapman shot at, but missed, one of the four Muncie officers who captured him, but he would face no local charges.
He was instead extradited to Connecticut to stand trial for the previous year's slaying of the police officer. Ben Hance traveled east from Eaton to provide testimony for the prosecution.
Less than three months after his Muncie capture, Chapman was convicted in the Connecticut case and sentenced to death. As things turned out, however, he would outlive both of the Hances and his chief partner in crime, Anderson.
On Aug. 15, 1925, Ben and Mary Hance were traveling through southwestern Delaware County, on what was then known as the Middletown Pike, when they were ambushed.
Mary Hance died instantly from a gunshot to the head. Her husband lived just long enough to tell witnesses who had shot him — Dutch Anderson and Charlie Wolfe.
Word of the revenge killings again produced front-page stories in newspapers across the country.
Anderson fled Delaware County but died that October in a shootout with police in northern Michigan.
"One-Arm" Wolfe, meanwhile, was captured by local police, convicted of two counts of murder by a Delaware Circuit Court jury, and sentenced to life in prison. (He was granted parole, reportedly for health reasons, in the 1940s, and was killed in an explosion at his Florida home in 1959.)
Gerald Chapman, by then 38, was executed — through use of a neck-breaking device known as the "upright jerker" — on April 6, 1926. One prison official maintained Chapman had never been told about the Hance slayings.
In the wake of Chapman's execution, a song about his misspent life, "Gerald Chapman, What A Pity," enjoyed brief popularity. (A recording of that song, on a 78 rpm record, is preserved on YouTube. Repeated listening is strongly discouraged.)
In death, Chapman would not retain the odd sort of postmortem celebrity that endures for several of the Prohibition and Depression-era gangsters who followed him.
Perhaps "The Gentleman Bandit" would take some satisfaction in knowing that 90 years after his Muncie capture, residents of the Eaton area still tell stories about the Public Enemy Number One who hid out in the farmhouse south of town and fished the Mississinewa.
He would probably be chagrined, however, that many of those story-tellers maintain, incorrectly, their community's infamous visitor was John Dillinger.
Dillinger Days
While Gerald Chapman was the nation's best known criminal when he was arrested in Muncie in 1925, John Dillinger was anything but a celebrity when he showed up in town in the summer of 1933.
Recently paroled from the Indiana State Prison after serving nearly nine years for a mugging in his hometown of Mooresville, the 30-year-old Dillinger and his co-horts — including an ex-con from Muncie named Harry Copeland — held up the Bide-A-Wee Inn, a "roadhouse" at the present day site of the Oasis Tavern, at Burlington and Memorial drives, about 12:15 a.m. on July 15.
The early morning heist netted the bandits $70.
Hours later, three members of this early Dillinger gang were arrested outside a South Council Street boarding house where they had been staying. Dillinger, with Copeland riding shotgun, narrowly escaped capture by backing his Chevrolet coupe down an alley onto Powers Street.
(A teenage accomplice would provide police with Dillinger's name, leading to him being charged in the Bide-A-Wee holdup.)
Two days after that, Dillinger committed, with Copeland, the local crime he is best remembered for.
"Honey, this is a stick-up," he told teller Margaret Good before vaulting over the counter at Daleville's Commercial Bank.
When Dillinger fled from Daleville that day, only a handful of Delaware County residents had heard of him.
By the time he was gunned down outside a Chicago movie theater 370 days after the Daleville robbery, he was one of the most famous men in the country.
The Hoosier bandit's year on the run saw a series of dramatic events — daring holdups, prison breaks, raids to steal firearms from police stations, and improbable escapes — that, for good or bad, won him a level of fame that proved far more enduring than that of Gerald Chapman.
Dillinger's last year also produced numerous reports that he had returned to Muncie, none ever confirmed.
Unsolved mysteries
•One of Muncie's early mysteries unfolded in the summer of 1891, and perhaps pointed to an unsolved double homicide 14 years before the city's incorporation.
Two youngsters exploring an area just east of White River were startled to find a pair of human skulls near where the Indiana Steel and Wire plant would later be built.
The shocking discovery jogged the memories of some local pioneers, who recalled a day in 1851 when two traders passed through town on a wagon. The following day, the strangers' wagon was found — apparently in the same area as where the skulls would surface four decades later — but the traders were nowhere to be seen.
•In September 1910, Norman Black, a local businessman, was delivered to a downtown livery stable on his horse-drawn buggy.
At the time of his arrival at the stable, Black was dead, the victim of a gunshot wound in the chest.
Investigators theorized the victim had been shot by a sniper, perhaps from a second-story window, near Second and Mulberry streets, where he had reportedly dropped off a female friend.
There were widespread rumors the shooting stemmed from a romantic entanglement, but more than 104 years later, no arrests have been made.
•While never officially declared a homicide, the September 1937 disappearance of Freda Swanson LaDuron, 36, a Swedish-born nurse and mother of two children, has been one of the city's more enduring mysteries.
In the decades that followed, friends and relatives of the missing woman's husband, Muncie physician Jules LaDuron, suggested that recurring speculation he was somehow responsible for the disappearance was unfair.
LaDuron maintained his spouse had left their home in the Old West End neighborhood after a quarrel. Over the years, the fate of Freda LaDuron was the subject of at least two grand jury investigations.
The case returned to the headlines 13 years after the disappearance.
In November 1950, Jules LaDuron shot and killed two Terre Haute men he said had been blackmailing him — by some accounts over his wife's disappearance.
The physician said he had killed brothers Seibert and Ralph Carter, in his medical office, in self-defense, maintaining he had opened fire only after a "hell of a fight" with the men.
A Delaware Circuit Court jury in 1952 found LaDuron not guilty of manslaughter charges.
•On the night of Sept. 28, 1985, Northside High School students Ethan Dixon and Kimberly Dowell were shot to death as they sat in a car parked in Westside Park.
Over the past three decades, city police have reviewed — again and again and again — evidence in the unsolved homicide investigation.
As recently as last September, a city detective said he believed he had identified a possible suspect in the teens' killings.
But he acknowledged with the passage of time, and the deaths of potentially key witnesses, there were no guarantees that person — or any other — would ever be charged.
That detective's theory suggests Dixon and Dowell — 16 and 15, respectively, when they died — were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Murder and mayhem
Over the decades, some of Muncie's high-profile crimes have seemed representative of the times in which they took place.
•The years immediately following World War II were apparently one of those periods when things were rather "wide open" in Muncie when it came to pursuits like gambling.
In October 1949, police said two southern Indiana men opened fire on the participants in a poker game at the New Deal Cigar Store, 604 S. Walnut St.
Three of the poker players were fatally shot; seven others were wounded.
One of the alleged gunmen was acquitted by a Delaware County jury; his co-defendant was found guilty of murder and received a life sentence.
An appeals court later threw out the conviction, however. The man pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was out of prison by 1955.
•The slaying of Kino Lewis, a 21-year-old African-American who was shot, apparently at random, as he stood near an eastside intersection raised racial tensions in Muncie in 1982.
Lewis' assailant, Kevin Noles of Selma, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison.
In 1999, Noles shot and killed three people in Steuben County before taking his own life.
•The early and mid-1990s saw a disturbing series of killings by young men — acting in groups of two or three, with some of the participants still in their teens.
Two of those high-profile cases saw Ball State University students — Tony Sak and Christopher Coyle — as victims.
Death sentences
In March 1961, 24-year-old Jay Dull received the first death sentence in Delaware County history.
Dull had been convicted of robbing and killing James Tricker, a 35-year-old Muncie cab driver, two days before Christmas 1960.
Authorities said Dull and co-defendant Walter Line forced their victim to drive his cab to an isolated area east of the city, where Dull first shot Tricker in the wrist with a sawed-off shotgun, then used the weapon to fracture his victim's skull.
Dull spent more than a decade on Death Row at the Indiana State Prison. His life was spared by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the early 1970s that revoked all pending death sentences.
(In the meantime, in 1972, Dull — back in Muncie for a court hearing — escaped from the Delaware County jail, briefly abducting a newspaper reporter. A resulting life sentence was overturned on appeal.)
His prison term was formally commuted to life in prison in 1975. Eight years later, he was granted parole.
By 1991, however, Dull was back behind bars for parole violations. He remained incarcerated until June 2008, when he died at the New Castle Correctional Facility.
The only other death sentence issued in Delaware County resulted in a defendant's execution.
On Dec. 28, 1990, 20-year-old Michael Lambert — under arrest for public intoxication and handcuffed in the back seat of a Muncie police car — fired gunshots from a stolen handgun at the officer driving him to jail.
That gunfire would lead to the deaths of both the officer and his prisoner.
Patrolman Gregg Winters, 32, died 11 days after being wounded.
Lambert was convicted of murder in 1991 and later sentenced to death. He was executed, by lethal injection, in June 2007.
Two other Muncie police officers have been fatally shot in the line of duty.
In September 1923, Toney Charles Hellis, a 25-year-old patrolman, was gunned down when he responded to a report of a domestic disturbance on South Madison Street.
His killer remained at large for two days, then took his own life.
Nearly nine years later, in April 1932, patrolman James Ovid McCracken, 35, was shot to death by bandits as he accompanied employees from two downtown Muncie theaters to make bank deposits.
His alleged killers, never returned to Muncie for trial, were alleged to have later killed an officer in Springfield, Ohio.
Contact news reporter Douglas Walker at (765) 213-5851. You can also follow him on Twitter @DouglasWalkerSP.
