Fifty Years a Detective: 35 Real Detective Stories

by Thomas Furlong

Glencoe is a small station on the Missouri Pacific Railway, twenty-nine miles west of the city of St. Louis. An east bound train which carried both mail and passengers was boarded on the night of February 21, 1910, by two men, who climbed on the front end of what is known by railroad men as the blind baggage, next to the tender of the engine. These men were unobserved until the train had passed Glencoe station, when they climbed over the top of the tank to the engine and covered the engineer and fireman with drawn revolvers. They were both masked with handkerchiefs tied over the lower portion of their faces, which entirely concealed their features below the eyes. They wore slouch hats and were described by the engineer and fireman and other members of the train crew who saw them—one as a short, stout built man with very black hair; the other as a tall, square-shouldered fellow with light-brown hair, and apparently younger than his stout partner. The stout man was described as having handled and carried his revolver in his left hand, while his right hand was bandaged and appeared to have been injured. He also was reported as having acted as chief and to have given all orders, and to have handled the locomotive as though he was as perfectly familiar with the work as an experienced locomotive engineer. These men compelled the engineer to bring the train to a full stop. They then made the engineer and fireman accompany them back to the rear end of the last mail car, when the engineer was forced to disconnect the two mail cars from the rest of the train. Then the engineer and fireman were marched back to the engine, and after all four men had again entered the cab, the short man took charge of the engine, and pulled the express and two mail cars to a point about three miles east of where the rest of the train had been left with the crew. They stopped at this point on the main track and began rifling the sealed mail pouches in one of the mail cars, continuing this for several minutes, cutting open the sealed pouches and taking therefrom all the registered mail. They finally concluded that they were consuming too much time, as trains were liable to approach from the east. They, therefore, seized a number of large mail pouches filled with registered mail, and, after instructing the engineer and fireman to back the engine to Glencoe and take up the rest of the train again, the men left the railroad on foot, each of them being loaded down with the registered mail pouches, which they had taken from the car. They hid these mail bags in a stack of corn-shucks in a cornfield near the bank of the Meramec River. They had previously stolen a skiff, or rowboat, which they had hidden in a clump of bushes on the bank of the river near the cornfield. They took this rowboat and made their way down the Meramec River a few miles, where they left the boat and made their way overland back to St. Louis.

On the morning of February 22, I happened to be in New York City and upon picking up a morning paper I read the account of the train robbery and the description that had been given by the train crew of the robbers. I immediately telegraphed to the manager of my office in St. Louis to go and tell Mr. Dixon, of St. Louis, Postoffice Inspector in charge of the district of Missouri, that I knew who the train robbers were, and where they could be found, and that I would be in St. Louis the following Saturday and that I would get the guilty men and turn them over to him or to his assistants in case he, Mr. Dixon, and his force had not succeeded in locating and arresting the guilty men before I returned to St. Louis.

On my return the following Saturday I found Mr. Dixon awaiting me. I told him that I was satisfied, from the description of the robbers, that Billy Lowe was the leader in the Glencoe Train Robbery. I told about having arrested Lowe eleven years before for having taken part, with others, in the Leads Junction Train Robbery, which had occurred on the Missouri Pacific Railroad just east and south of Kansas City. He with the others had held up the train and had blown the express car to pieces with dynamite. I also told him that I had finally succeeded in obtaining from Lowe a complete confession as to the part he had taken in the Leads Robbery, and also the names of his associates in the crime.

Some of his other companions were also arrested at the time. Lowe took the witness stand and by his testimony fully substantiated the confession that he had made to me in the presence of John Hayes, who was then Chief of Police of Kansas City, Missouri, and D. F. Harbaugh, one of my men at that time. Lowe afterwards reiterated this confession to the prosecuting attorney of Kansas City. The prosecutor's name I do not now remember.

Lowe having taken the witness stand and having promised the Chief of Police and Prosecuting Attorney and myself that he would thereafter lead an honest life, the prosecuting attorney annulled the proceedings against him and after the trial of his associates Lowe was dismissed. He was a thorough railroad man. He came to St. Louis and obtained employment as a switchman in the yards of the Iron Mountain Railroad, where he met and formed the acquaintance of one George Ebberling, also a switchman. He and Ebberling became fast friends and continued to work for the Iron Mountain for several years, when they left the company's service and went to St. Paul, Minnesota, where they obtained employment in the train service of the Great Northern Railway Company, and finally worked their way to Spokane, Washington.

In the meantime I kept track of them, believing that it would be only a question of time until Lowe would become a train robber again. During the years of 1908 and 1909 a number of trains were held up and robbed in the vicinity of Spokane, and I, knowing that Lowe was there, wrote the officers of the Great Northern Company that I believed that I knew who the guilty parties were and where they could be found. But these officers apparently did not deem the information I had sent them worth answering, as I did not hear from them.

I knew that both Billy Lowe and Ebberling were in St. Louis prior to the Glencoe Train Robbery. They had returned early in January and I immediately had placed a shadow on their movements, and when I read the description of the men who had robbed the train at Glencoe I at once became satisfied that Lowe was the man who had handled the engine. He had visited my office the day preceding the Glencoe affair, and his right hand was bandaged by reason of boils that he had on his wrist just above the hand; and then the description in the New York papers was almost a perfect description of Lowe, and also the description of the tall man given in the paper was that of Ebberling.

As soon as they arrived in St. Louis, Lowe had rented an office room on the upper floor of the Granite Building, on the southwest corner of 4th and Market streets. Lowe furnished his office and had a number of maps and charts of mining lands in Alaska, and offered mining stocks for sale in that country. Ebberling left St. Louis immediately after the Glencoe robbery.

A day or so after the robbery, a country merchant, who resides in a small town near Kansas City, furnished the postoffice inspector with a clue which afterwards proved that I was right in suspecting Lowe and Ebberling of the crime. This merchant owed a St. Louis wholesale house a bill in the neighborhood of $100.00. He had, on the day before the robbery, remitted the amount by registered letter, keeping a memorandum of the size, series and numbers of the bills. When he first heard of the robbery, and knowing that his package was probably a part of the loot, the merchant sent a copy of the memorandum to the postoffice inspector. The inspector had several hundred copies of the memorandum printed and forwarded to the officials of the banks within a radius of five hundred miles of St. Louis. Within twenty-four hours after the distribution of these circulars, one of the bills, a ten-dollar gold certificate, was presented at the receiving teller's window of a Hot Springs National Bank, by one of its lady depositors—the keeper of a rooming house in that city. On being questioned as to where she had obtained the bill, the lady told the teller one of her roomers, Mr. George Ebberling, had given it to her in exchange for a week's room rent.