Desperate robbers and a sure shot
Southwest Bank Robbery
By Tim O'Neil
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
11/30/2008
Editor's note
This is an excerpt from the new Post-Dispatch book, “Mobs, Mayhem & Murder: Tales from the St. Louis Police Beat” by veteran
reporter Tim O’Neil.
On the morning of April 24, 1953, a man who claimed to be an insurance adjuster walked into an auto body shop north of Granite City and looked over a banged-up car.
Shop employees would notice later that the car's license plates had been swiped.
The petty theft was the beginning of a busy morning of big-time crime.
Shortly before 10 a.m., four men gathered in Tower Grove Park in south St. Louis. They went over their plans, phony names, weaponry and getaway cars — one of which bore the stolen plates.
Just north on Kingshighway, tellers at Southwest Bank were prepared for a different kind of busy day. It was Friday — payday — and they had more than $200,000 ready for cashing checks. Bank tellers Alice Ruzicka and Betty Valenti were at their stations. Eva Hamilton, a secretary at a cosmetics company, stood in line to get a cashier's check for her boss. Outside the front door at Southwest Avenue and Kingshighway, Myrtle Howard of the Salvation Army sought donations.
In a room just off the lobby, telephone repairman Joseph Bauer was at work. Four short blocks away, at Shaw Boulevard and Kingshighway, police Officer Melburn Stein and Cpl. Robert Heitz were in a patrol car.
Back at Tower Grove Park, Fred W. Bowerman, 60, ran the meeting. He was a veteran robber, recently promoted to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List for a bank holdup in South Bend, Ind. With him was Frank B. Vito, 25, a former convict free on bond from charges in a liquor-store robbery. Also there was Glenn Chernick, 22, a former Marquette University football quarterback who had been expelled and was awaiting trial for theft of wholesale cigarettes. The fourth man was William Scholl, 28, the only one of the bunch with a clean record. He had been attracted from his bartender job by Bowerman's promise to "make $5,000 in five minutes."
Three were from Chicago. Bowerman, of Niles, Mich., often plied his trade in Chicago. They had been in St. Louis less than two weeks, casing the bank. Bowerman, the boss, told them it would be easy and quick.
He led the way in with a sawed-off shotgun. He jumped onto a counter and shouted, "This is a holdup! Everybody stand still!" The robbers wore handkerchief masks.
The next 14 bloody, harrowing minutes would go down as the city's most infamous bank robbery. Foiling it would become a matter of great pride for the St. Louis Police Department. Two of the robbers would pay with their lives. Later, it would inspire a movie, shot on location and starring a rising young actor named Steve McQueen.
Bowerman ordered the employees onto the floor as Vito and Scholl stuffed cash into a zipper bag. Valenti and Ruzicka, the tellers, deftly tripped silent alarms under their counters at 10:19 a.m. that lit up the board at an alarm company downtown. Bauer, the telephone repairman, called directly to police headquarters: "I'm in a rear room at Southwest Bank. I can see a holdup going on."
Howard, the Salvation Army worker, had seen one of the robbers holding a gun as they entered the bank. She warned arriving customers to stay away.
Stein and Heitz heard the radio broadcast of a robbery in progress and raced to the bank. Stein ran to the front door, Heitz to a side entrance. Looking through a window, Stein saw the robber with the sawed-off shotgun fire toward Heitz. Stein blasted through the window at the robber.
Hearing gunfire, bank directors, who had been meeting in a back room, dove onto the floor. Downstairs, 15 terrified employees ran to a back room. Chernick, waiting in the stolen green Oldsmobile, took off southbound on Kingshighway.
Inside the bank, Heitz exchanged shots with the robbers. Bowerman, moving from behind a counter, fired at Heitz, striking him with shotgun pellets in his neck and one ear.
Additional officers arrived, some firing tear-gas canisters through more windows. Others stormed into the bank and fired at the robbers. Scholl, hit once in the back, had gone down behind the counter. "Grab a woman," Bowerman shouted to his accomplices. He yanked Hamilton, the customer, up from the floor and shoved her toward the front door, jamming the shotgun barrel into her back. Just outside, Stein was crouched behind a sheet-metal newspaper box.
"Don't shoot, or I'll kill her," Bowerman said as he pushed Hamilton out the door. Stein, a former Marine, saw his chance. He fired into Bowerman's side at a range of 3 feet. Hamilton fell free onto the glass-littered sidewalk, breaking both wrists. As Bowerman struggled to pull a .38-caliber revolver from his belt, Stein jumped on him.
Inside, Vito told Scholl the game was up. "We'll get 99 years. I can't take a pinch," Vito said as he put a pistol to his head and killed himself. Nearby on the floor was $140,769 in the zipper bag.
Scholl grabbed a customer but let her go. Crouching in a teller's cage, he told police Cpl. Elmer Hildebrandt, "I give up. I'm shot." It was 10:33 a.m., 14 minutes after the tellers hit the alarms.
Cpl. James Broderick, one of the 100 officers who arrived at the bank, saw a woman hiding in her car outside. She gave Broderick a piece of paper on which she had written the license plate of the getaway car. She said it almost hit her speeding away.
Bank employees and customers, many of them coughing from the tear gas, stumbled out of the building. More than 40 shots had been fired, but only two bystanders inside the bank went to the hospital, and only for treatment of jittery nerves.
Police found the green Oldsmobile, bearing the stolen license plates, six blocks away, on a parking lot. They found another stolen Oldsmobile later, near Lemp and Shenandoah avenues. Witnesses said a man walked away from it carrying a sack of clothing.
Ambulances took Bowerman, Scholl and Cpl. Heitz to City Hospital.
Bowerman, paralyzed by a shot through his spine, refused to talk. Mayor Raymond Tucker visited Heitz and lavished praise for his "outstanding piece of police work."
If the veteran hood Bowerman wouldn't talk, the tenderfoot Scholl sang from his guarded hospital bed. He told investigators how Bowerman recruited them, when they drove to St. Louis and where they took separate small apartments, which police quickly raided. And he told them that the mystery getaway driver, known only as George, was Chernick. Police found Chernick asleep at his father's house just southwest of downtown Chicago.
Bowerman died in the hospital on May 2. Heitz recovered and was promoted to sergeant. Stein became a corporal.
Scholl, who took the witness stand in St. Louis Circuit Court the following December, testified that he had let his hostage go because "she began to cry and asked me to think about her children. I told her I had children of my own and would not harm her." Unimpressed by Scholl's kindhearted side, the jury recommended 25 years. Scholl wept in the courtroom. In two trials in 1954, Chernick also drew 25 years.
Filmmaker Charles E. Guggenheim, then of St. Louis and better known for his later documentary on the building of the Gateway Arch, revisited the crime with the movie, "The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery," that hit the screens in 1959. McQueen, an aspiring young actor from New York, played the getaway-car driver. Stein played himself in a speaking role.
Heitz died in 1993. Stein retired from the force in 1973 and, for a while, worked for Brinks Inc. In April 2008, officers held an informal reception to honor Stein, then 94, for his heroism 55 years before.
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