Situation:
You’re coming up against a thug who’s known for skill at arms, hates armed citizens and cops, and has murdered the latter. This time, though, you’re ready for him.
Lesson:
It’s like the old saying — If you know you’re heading into a gunfight, bring a long gun, and friends with long guns.
The man stepping out of the new Chevrolet is carrying enough cash in his money belt and the brownish briefcase under his arm to buy a fleet of such vehicles. He’s there to do business, and is dressed like a businessman. His blue serge suit is impeccable, like his blue tie with subtle white dots and his polished oxfords. The suit-coat hides a cocked and locked Colt auto pistol in his waistband, and no one can tell just to look at him he is praised by his peers for his skill with it, having won his most recent shooting match.
He is technically a citizen of the United States, and he is armed, but he is a far cry from our concept of “armed citizen.” In fact, he hates them, because one honest armed citizen shot him and almost killed him during one of his many bank robberies. He hates them as much as he hates the police, and he’s a cop-killer who once did a happy dance in the street after using his custom-made “assault rifle” to murder a policeman.
And now, as the Chevy that dropped him off pulls away, he hears a shouted command: “Stick ’em up!” His reflexes are fast: he explodes into a sprint as he draws his Colt, blindly firing two shots over his shoulder as he cuts into a nearby alley.
His chosen path is an allegory to his life: a blind alley, with nowhere left to go. And now the thunder of police shotguns and submachine guns erupts behind him, the lead sleet-storm seeming to literally lift him into the air before he falls, his still-loaded pistol landing some ten feet away. He has sworn in the past he wouldn’t die in some filthy alley.
He was wrong.
A crowd soon gathers to gape at the blood-soaked corpse. Homer Van Meter, dead at 28, had been John Dillinger’s closest henchman, his right-hand man. It was August 23, 1934, near the corner of Marion Street and University Avenue in the city of St. Paul, only a couple of blocks from the Minnesota State Capitol building.
Background
Born in Indiana, Homer Van Meter ran away from home to Chicago at the age of 11. He worked as a waiter and as a bellhop, and soon gravitated to crime. His arrests as a teenager escalated from drunk and disorderly to petty theft and then grand theft auto. By the time he turned 20 he had been convicted of robbing passengers on a train in northern Indiana and sentenced to a long term in Pendleton Reformatory, where he first met John Dillinger and another man who was destined to be a key member of the Dillinger gang, Harry Pierpont.
Then as now, parole boards were known to sometimes make unfortunate judgments. Van Meter and Dillinger were paroled about a month apart from each other. They hooked up. The infamous Dillinger Gang was born.
An Ugly Path
It soon became clear Homer Van Meter was a sociopath ready to unleash lethal violence at a moment’s notice. With a long, horse-like face and sagging lips, Van Meter was seen as stupid by some at first glance, but he possessed a native animal cunning Dillinger, a natural leader, appreciated. He lacked Dillinger’s ability to charm others though, from accomplices to victims.
When they first met in Pendleton, Van Meter and Pierpont were at each other’s throats, and as time went on and the Dillinger Gang and the Baby Face Nelson Gang became a blended crime family, Van Meter and Nelson quickly developed a vehement dislike for one another also. Where Nelson was a psychopathic killer who seemed to delight in committing murder, Van Meter was more of a sociopath who would kill for money, revenge, or anything else that served him, and not so much for the act itself.
Dillinger biographer G. Russell Girardin would later write, “… it was his quarreling with ‘Baby Face’ Nelson that resulted in Van Meter’s undoing. A feud existed between the two men. Their dispute had been discussed at a meeting of Dillinger, Van Meter, and (Dillinger cohort Arthur) O’Leary in Chicago, and Dillinger had mentioned it again after leaving the conference. ‘I hope Van and Nelson don’t meet,’ Dillinger remarked to O’Leary. ‘If they ever come face to face again, they’ll kill each other.’” (1)
We’ll see shortly how prophetic those words may have been.
Van Meter joined Dillinger and his assorted minions in multiple armed robberies, including raids on police stations where they stole weapons and body armor. In one of those, Van Meter savagely pistol-whipped a cop who was helplessly at gunpoint.
Three Lawmen Murdered
The first police officer Homer Van Meter is known to have murdered was a member of the South Bend, Indiana Police Department. In 1934, Van Meter and Nelson and other members of the gang, led by Dillinger himself, hit the Merchants National Bank in South Bend. Van Meter was outside the bank on the outer perimeter of the meticulously planned heist when he observed Officer Harold Wagner approaching. Van Meter shouldered a customized Winchester .351 and fired, and Officer Wagner fell, mortally wounded.
Dillinger biographer Dary Matera would write in 2004, “… a small group of clerks and customers gathered near the display windows of Ries Furniture store to catch the action. Aside from the disturbing image of Officer Wagner going down, they watched in horror as Van Meter did a crazed jig as he sprayed the area with slugs to keep the police at bay.” (2)
Moments later, Van Meter’s hatred for an armed citizen would be born. In the course of this high volume firefight, while Baby Face Nelson was also outside the bank guarding the rest of the gang’s perimeter, a South Bend jeweler named Harry Berg had taken aim with a .22 target handgun and shot Nelson in the center of the back. Nelson, however, had been wearing a steel vest under his clothing, and absorbed the bullet without injury. The killer spun and hosed a burst from his Thompson submachine gun at Berg, who ducked quickly back into the cover of his shop and escaped the bullets, though a pedestrian was wounded by one of Nelson’s stray .45 slugs.
As the gang was escaping the scene at last, and Van Meter was getting into the driver’s seat of the getaway car, Harry Berg leaned out from his shop, carefully aimed, and squeezed off one more shot. Blood splashed from Homer Van Meter’s head, and he crumpled. Dillinger shoved him into the car, and the gang took off, successfully escaping.
Later, a subsequently captured gang member would tell of how the thugs licked their wounds when they gathered at their hideout. He described Nelson as being in a spazzed-out state from his near-death experience; the man who delighted in killing others had no stomach for stopping a bullet himself, even if his steel vest kept it from hurting him.
And Van Meter? Once the gang was safely away, examination showed the .22 slug fired by the jeweler had indeed struck Van Meter in the head, but had skidded off his skull digging a groove in the outer table of bone and creating a nasty flesh wound. Van Meter was reported to have been in a babbling, homicidal rage. (Some historians would suggest later it was a police bullet that “grazed Van Meter’s skull” and temporarily incapacitated him. However, the thugs were there, and in the best position to know who shot who. Most historians agree it was Berg who shot Van Meter).
Historian Bryan Burrough, later poring through the recollections of captured Dillinger gang members who finally spilled their guts, pieced together the following account from the post-South Bend dialogue at the criminals’ hideout, where Dillinger associate Jimmy Probasco gave Van Meter first aid before rogue anesthetist Harold Cassidy could get there to administer professional medical treatment:
“Van Meter was sitting on a couch, recovering nicely. ‘I saved your life, didn’t I?’ Probasco asked him. ‘Why, I was up all night picking hairs out of that wound.’ A little later Cassidy arrived. As Probasco and Van Meter cursed him, he cleaned the wound and re-bandaged it. Dillinger regaled the group with the story of the wild shoot-out, dwelling on the story of the Jewish jeweler who had brazenly fired on Nelson. ‘You know, Johnnie,’ Van Meter said at one point. ‘We’ll have to go back to South Bend in the next few days and take care of that little Jew.’
“‘Sure we will, Van,’ Dillinger said, laughing. ‘Sure we will.’”
With a huge number of witnesses to the South Bend bank robbery and shootout, we can safely say beyond a reasonable doubt Homer Van Meter murdered Officer Harold Wagner. There was apparently only one witness to the other two policemen Homer Van Meter is believed to have shot to death, and this witness would have been John Dillinger himself.
Two More
On May 24, 1934, two detectives from the East Chicago, Indiana Police Department were found dead in their vehicle, which had been riddled from the front by fully automatic fire. Lloyd Mulvihill and Martin O’Brien died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head and neck. It’s generally believed the detectives had pulled over a red panel truck being driven by Dillinger when Van Meter threw the rear doors open and hosed them on full auto through their windshield.
Per Gerardin and Helmer: “Statements by Dillinger and Van Meter throw light on the events of this dark night. Dillinger was driving the red truck when Mulvihill and O’Brien drove alongside and ordered him to pull over. In the rear of the truck was Homer Van Meter with his ever-ready machine gun. He realized it was a case either of their being captured and confronting the electric chair, or shooting their way out. Before the detectives had a chance to step out of their car, Van Meter expressed his decision in a spray of machine-gun bullets. Dillinger placed the blame for these killings on Sergeant Martin Zarkovich. Zarkovich was a hoodlum in police officer’s clothing. Dillinger had been in contact with the East Chicago people while sojourning in the red truck, and they, including Zarkovich, knew he was in the area.”
The account continues, “‘Those two police should never have been bumped off,’ Dillinger later told O’Leary. ‘They were just trying to do their job and there’s nothing wrong about that. The trouble was they were getting to know too much and Zark was getting antsy. They were sent off to shake down a couple of suspicious characters who were driving around in a red truck. I think Van felt bad about it, too, but there was nothing else that he could do, and Zark knew what was going to happen. If we would have given ourselves up we both would have got the hot seat.’”(3)
If Van Meter didn’t kill any more cops than he did, it wasn’t for want of trying. He shot it out with a Federal agent at the notorious Little Bohemia shootout in Wisconsin. In the dark, neither man scored a hit. Some historians believe Van Meter was the Dillinger Gang triggerman who shot Fostoria, Ohio Police Chief Frank Culp during a bank robbery in that community in May of 1934.
And, in a prior St. Paul shootout a few months before his death, Van Meter was hanging out with Dillinger in an apartment house when investigators came. On a pretext, Van Meter led the officers down a stairway, then turned and opened fire with a 1911 .45, fortunately missing his target. At about that time, Dillinger opened fire through his door with a Thompson at other lawmen, and in the ensuing confusion, both fugitives escaped.
Guns Of Van Meter
Colt semiautomatic pistols in calibers .45 ACP, .380 ACP and the recently introduced .38 Super were the preferred handguns of Dillinger, Nelson and Van Meter. Dillinger was pulling a 1908 Pocket Model .380 from his side trouser pocket when he was shot and killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago a month to the day before Van Meter’s death. It is generally agreed Nelson was carrying a .38 Super when he was killed in Barrington, Illinois. It’s not surprising Van Meter died with a Colt auto in his hand.
The gang’s pet “outlaw gunsmith” was Hyman Lebman. He built them Colt Government Model .45’s and Super .38’s with extended magazines, full auto capability, Cutts compensators and Thompson foregrips. He’s also believed to have sold them tricked-out 1907 Winchester .351 autoloaders, at least some of them in full auto. Van Meter supposedly used a Lebman-modified .351 to murder Officer Wagner in South Bend.
In Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy, Steven Nickel and William J. Helmer write of a gang sojourn to Texas, “In the midst of all the rest and recreation, the gang managed to squeeze in some business at Lebman’s shop. Nelson purchased a .38 machine-gun pistol for Dillinger and selected a pair of .380 automatics for himself … Van Meter decided he, too, wanted one of the gunsmith’s specially crafted baby machine guns. When Lebman said he had sold his last available model to Nelson … Lebman agreed but said it would take time. Van Meter said there was no hurry; he would return for it in the spring.” (4)
Homer Van Meter knew how to shoot. In the days when the Dillinger/Nelson gang members were resting at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin before their ill-fated shootout there with Melvin Purvis and his Federal agents in the spring of 1934, lodge owner Emil Wanatka told of an informal shooting match between the gang members on his property in which Van Meter was the winner.
Just what Colt automatic was in Van Meter’s hands when police gunfire ended his life is a matter of dispute among historians. Some say .45, some say .38 Super, some say .380, and some just say “.38.” With this last, bear in mind it was common in yesteryear for .380 pistols to be referred to as “.38 automatics.”
The Set-Up
It was no secret St. Paul was one of Van Meter’s favorite stomping grounds, but how did St. Paul Police know to be there waiting when Homer Van Meter stepped out of the Chevrolet? One theory is Van Meter’s girlfriend, Marie (aka Mickey) Conforti had caught him cheating on her with one Opal Milligan, and punished him by turning him in to the cops. A second theory is Baby Face Nelson knew Van Meter was in St. Paul and tipped off the cops to get his hated fellow gang member killed by proxy.
A third theory is the “business” Van Meter was in town for was to pick up loot he’d stashed with a St. Paul gangster, who tipped the cops so he could keep the cash. A fourth is corrupt cops of the period set him up for a kill so they could take the cash for themselves. A fifth theory is the local underworld thought Van Meter’s presence in the city was bringing too much scrutiny upon them, so they dropped the dime on him to take the heat off themselves.
Death Of Van Meter
The four officers who engaged and killed Homer Van Meter were led by the St. Paul Chief of Police himself, Frank Cullen, and Detective Tom Brown, both armed with 12-gauge shotguns. With them were Detectives Thomas McMahon and Jeff Dittrich, both carrying Thompson submachine guns. When the challenge was given and Homer Van Meter simultaneously ran and drew his Colt and shot at them, all apparently opened fire. Van Meter’s body was so chewed up reporting on the wounds varied wildly, from him being hit “by 50 or more bullets” to the fatal wounds involving two buckshot charges and a single .45 ACP round.
Multiple witnesses described Van Meter as being blasted two feet off the ground or otherwise being lifted into mid-air by the fusillade that hit him. While some would consider this impossible on the theory such a “knock-down” would, by the laws of physics, require the recoil to knock the shooter backwards, don’t forget many people have been knocked off their feet by the recoil of a 12-gauge if they were leaning away from the gun when it was fired. If Van Meter was running away from the gunfire with his upper body forward, or trying to shoot at the cops when he was hit and leaning over backwards, this would be exactly consistent with those laws of physics and would explain the witness statements he appeared to be blasted off his feet by the impact. Other possible explanations for the phenomenon include violent body alarm reaction, or spasmodic neuromuscular reaction.
Lessons
Don’t presume your opponent will be merciful. Don’t presume he’ll have a cheap junk gun he doesn’t know how to shoot well. There’s truth in the old saying “If you think there’s going to be a gunfight, bring a long gun, and bring lots of friends with long guns.”
Those lessons worked for the cops that long-ago afternoon in St. Paul, and neutralized a vicious criminal before he could claim any more victims.
Notes: (1) Girardin, C. Russell and Helmer, William J.: Dillinger: The Untold Story, Indiana University Press, 1994, P. 239 (2) Matera, Dary: John Dillinger: The Life and Death of America’s First Celebrity Criminal, Carroll & Graf, 2004, P. 312; (3) Gerardin, op. cit., Pp. 162-163; (4) Nickel, Steven and Helmer, William J.: Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy, Cumberland House, 2002, P. 136.
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