Finally, in 1906, when Crowe had been hunted in vain for more than five years, he suddenly opened negotiations with Omaha’s chief of police through an attorney, offering to come in and surrender, in case all the rewards were immediately and honestly withdrawn, so that there would be no money inducement which might cause officers or others to manufacture a case against him. After some preliminaries, these terms were met, but not until an attempt to capture the desperado had been made and failed, with the net result of three badly wounded officers.
In February, 1906, Crowe was at last brought to trial and, to the utter astoundment and chagrin of the entire country, promptly acquitted, though he offered no defense and tacitly admitted that he had taken the boy. One bit of conclusive evidence that had been offered by the prosecution and admitted by the court, was a letter written by Crowe to his parish priest in the little Iowa town of his boyhood. In the course of this letter, which had been written to the priest in the hope that he might make peace with Cudahy, the desperado admitted that “I am solely responsible for the Cudahy kidnapping. No one else is to blame.”
No matter. The jury would not consider the evidence and brought in the verdict already indicated. Crowe, after six years of being hunted with a price of fifty-five thousand dollars on his head, was a free man.
The acquittals of Crowe and Callahan have furnished material for a good deal of amused and some angry speculation. The local situation in Omaha at the time furnishes the key to the puzzle. First of all, there was the bitter anti-beef trust agitation, founded on the fact that many small independent butchers had been put out of business by the great packing-house combination, of which Cudahy was a member; and that meat prices had everywhere been rapidly advanced to almost double their earlier prices. Next, there was the circumstance of Cudahy’s abundant and flaunting wealth. The common man considered that these millions had been gouged out of his pocket and cut from off his dinner plate. Cudahy had also begun the introduction of cheap negro labor into Omaha to break a strike of his packing-house employees, and the city was bitterly angry at him. Also, Crowe was himself popular and well known. Many considered him a hero. But there was still another strange cause of the state of the public mind.
In the very beginning a not inconsiderable part of Omaha’s people had somehow come to the curious conclusion that there had been no Cudahy kidnapping. One story said that Eddie Cudahy was a wild youth, and that he himself had conspired with Crowe and Callahan to abduct him and get the ransom, since he needed a share of it for his own purpose, and he saw in this plan an easy method to mulct his unsuspecting father. A later version denied the boy’s guilt, but still insisted that the whole story, as told by the father and confirmed by the police, was a piece of fiction. What motive the rich packer could have had for such a fraud, no one could say. The best explanation given was that he saw in it a plan to get worldwide advertising for the Cudahy name. How this could have sold any additional hams or beeves, is a bit hard to imagine, but the story was so generally believed that two jurors at one of the trials voiced it in the jury room and scoffed at all the evidence. All this rumor is, of course, absurd.
Crowe, after his acquittal, went straight, as the word goes. He has committed no more crimes, unless one wants to rate under this heading a book of highly romantic confessions, which he had published the following year. In this book he set forth the circumstances of the crime in great, but unreliable, detail. He made it very plain, however, that he and Callahan alone planned the crime and carried it out.
Crowe personally conceived the whole plan and took Callahan into the conspiracy only because he needed help. The two held up the boy, as already related. As soon as they had him safe in the old house, Crowe drove back to the Cudahy home in his buggy and threw the note, wrapped about the stick and decorated with the red cloth, upon the lawn, where it was found the next morning by the coachman. Of the twenty-five thousand dollars in gold, Crowe gave his assistant only three thousand dollars, used one thousand for expenses, and buried the rest, recovering it later when the coast was clear. He selected Cudahy for a victim because he knew that the packer was a fond father, had a nervous wife, and would be strong enough to resist any mad police advice.
A few years later I first encountered Crowe in New York, when he came to see me with a petty favor to ask and an article of his reminiscences to sell. He had meantime become a kind of peregrine reformer, lecturer, pamphlet seller and semi-mendicant, now blessed with a little evanescent prosperity, again sleeping in Bowery flops and eking out a miserable living by any device short of lawbreaking. And he has called upon me or crossed my wanderings repeatedly in the intervening years, always voluble, plausible and a trifle pathetic. Now he is off to call upon the President, to memorialize a governor or to address a provincial legislature. He is bent on abolishing prisons, has a florid set-speech, which he delivers in a big sententious voice, and perhaps he impresses his rural hearers, though the tongue in the cheek and the twinkle in the eye never escape those who know him of old.
This grand rascal is no longer young—rising sixty, I should say—and life has treated him shabbily in the last twenty years. Yet neither poverty nor age has quite taken from him a certain leonine robustness, a kind of ruined strength and power that shines a little sadly through his charlatanry.
Only once or twice, when he has lost himself in the excited recounting of his adventures, of his hardy old crimes, of the Cudahy kidnapping, have I ever caught in him the quality that must once have been his—the force, the fire that made his name shudder around the world. Convention has beaten him as it beats them all, these brave and baneful men. It has made a sidling apologist of a great rogue in Crowe’s case—and what a sad declension!