I brought Rice back to St. Louis, and while en route he made a full confession to me as to his and Lands' connection with the counterfeit tickets. He told me about the printing office and gave me the names of various scalpers throughout the country who were engaged with them in handling the bogus tickets.
On arriving in St. Louis I secured a lodging house for Rice in the suburbs of the city, placed him there, by his consent, in charge of one of my operatives. I did this so that the scalpers who were in collusion with the fraudulent scheme would not become aware of his capture until I would have time to arrange for indictments and arrest all the parties connected with the fraud. I also wanted to arrest and bring Lands to St. Louis before he had learned his partner was in custody, and proceeded to Indiana and took him in charge. His relatives, who were well-known and influential, immediately applied for a writ of habeas corpus, which prevented me from removing Lands from the state until permitted to do so by due process of law.
The judge before whom this writ of habeas corpus was returnable was a lifelong personal friend of the family of Lands' wife, and the judge, therefore, released Lands from custody on the grounds that forged railroad tickets had no intrinsic value.
This was the first and only prisoner that I have ever had released by such a procedure. However, Lands was sick at the time of his arrest, and lingered along for a few months after his release, and died, which was the ending of his part of the crime.
In due time Rice's trial was called in St. Louis, and the judge before whom the case was tried decided the same in this case as had the judge in Indiana on the Lands case; and, therefore, the ticket forgers went unpunished.
The state laws in nearly every state in the Union have since been revised so as to make the forgery of railroad tickets a felony, with the same penalty attached as that of forging any other document or valuable paper.
The farcical termination of the case also caused the passage of laws which have put the ticket scalpers out of business in almost the entire country. Prior to that time, every city of any size was infested with numerous ticket scalping offices. The men engaged in the business were usually of the unscrupulous kind, and their crookedness caused the railroads no little amount of trouble.
In working up this case and apprehending Lands and Rice, I personally traveled, in all, about eighteen thousand four hundred miles, and consumed nearly six months' time, did a lot of hard work and incurred considerable expense.
I will say here that the attorneys of the legal department for the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company were fully advised as to all the facts connected with this case and they advised that the parties be located and apprehended: and the work involved in the location and arrest of Rice and Lands was as good as any work ever done by any one in a similar case. Under the laws then existing the cases of Rice and Lands could not be reached.
After Rice's final release he went to the state of Iowa, where he engaged in the insurance business. He was successful and finally married the young lady he was engaged to, and when last heard of by the writer, was a prosperous general insurance agent, raising a nice family and respected in the community in which he lived.