The 400 block of East Adams Street, site of the shootout, in 1936, with the S.S. Kresge store taking up almost half of the north side of the block (Sangamon Valley Collection)
A wild shootout erupted when police detectives interrupted a stickup at the Kresge store in downtown Springfield the day after Christmas 1933.
As bullets flew, the robbers jumped into a waiting car and drove away. One officer followed in a squad car, another commandeered a passerby’s auto, and two Kresge employees joined the pursuit in a pie-shop delivery truck. Bandits, police and the pie truck skidded through icy streets for blocks, but the pursuers lost track of the bullet-riddled getaway car at Fourth Street and South Grand Avenue.
The episode sounds like something out of a Hollywood caper comedy … except for the burned human remains St. Louis authorities discovered two weeks later.
Three of the thieves, members of a prolific interstate stickup gang, were arrested a few days after the heist. They pleaded guilty to armed robbery and served years in prison.
Police, victims and witnesses, however, all said four men participated in the holdup. Was it the fourth robber’s body that was found, charred and unidentifiable, near St. Louis in mid-January? That mystery was never solved.
Springfield’s S.S. Kresge “5¢-10¢-25¢” store was on the northwest corner of Fifth and Adams streets for most of its existence. It had main entrances on both Fifth Street and Adams Street. The robbers entered the Adams Street door about 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 26,1933, planning to hijack the store’s Christmas receipts, which – because of the three-day holiday weekend – had not yet been taken to the bank.
Kresge managers, aware of the potential for robbery, had taken the store’s Christmas proceeds – all in cash, in those days – to the police station for safekeeping after the store closed on Saturday, Dec. 23. When Kresge’s reopened on Tuesday, Dec. 26, they retrieved the money and brought it back to the store.
Kresge assistant manager Raleigh Shoup called police a little before 9:30 that morning and asked that police escort him to the bank to make the deposit. (The first newspaper stories reported the amount taken as $1,000 to $3,000; later articles raised the tally to $5,700.) It was a routine request, and detectives William Shafer and Thomas Howerton were dispatched. They parked their car across the street, and Shafer, not knowing a robbery was under way, walked into Kresge’s.
The story unfolded in the pages of the Illinois State Journal:
In the meantime the bandits had entered the Adams street side of the store, three going inside, while one remained at the wheel of the car. As Shoup and Willard Hunter, an employee, came down the stairs from the office on the second floor with the bag of money, they met the bandits. The bag was so heavy it required the two to carry it. B.F. Filburn, … a carpenter, was directly behind the two employees with a saw in his hand.
Sticking guns in the employees’ sides, two of the bandits forced them back up the stairs, while the third robber stood at the foot of the stairs with the bag of money between his feet.
Ruth Petticord, Marie Bryant and Esther Hiltabittle, three clerks, were in the office behind the cage. As the bandits entered with Shoup, Hunter and Filburn, one of the girls pressed an alarm button. The girls were forced to open the safe and the bandits took the rest of the cash in the office.
As Shafer went into the store, he was met by the gun-wielding bandit at the foot of the stairs. “Keep moving,” the robber ordered Shafer. Instead, the detective “maneuvered around for a shot, while counter girls ducked beneath the counters,” the Journal said. Shafer fired a shot – it hit a door – and ran out an alleyway entrance, hoping to stop the robbers as they left the store.
Howerton, in the meantime, had seen the bandit in the car point a revolver at one of the girls in the office when she looked out a window and called for help. Howerton ran into the middle of the street and began shooting at the robbers’ car.
The robber who had stood at the foot of the steps was seen to slump to his knees on the sidewalk as he left the store. …
When Shafer reached the street from the store, the bandits were entering their automobile, and the detective fired into it. All of the glass was broken in the bandits’ car by the shots fired by the two detectives.
Robbers and police exchanged about 20 shots before the robbers managed to maneuver their car around a Peter Pan Pie Shop delivery truck and head south on Fourth Street. Shafer hopped in a car driven by civilian Albert Molash, who had stopped at a red light. They followed the gunmen on Fourth Street, as did two unnamed Kresge employees in the pie truck. Howerton’s squad car had been parked facing east, so he joined the chase driving parallel on Fifth Street.
The slippery condition of the pavements prevented fast driving to the scene of the holdup … and also prevented fast driving on the part of the bandits, whose car was going slowly when it started from its parking place.
Just after the bandits had turned south on Fourth street, they were seen to change drivers. It is believed that the man who stayed at the wheel during the robbery was hit by a shot from Howerton’s revolver. This might have accounted partly, it is believed, for the slowness with which the robbers left the scene.
Mug shots of the three arrested robbers (Courtesy State Journal-Register)
Whatever its speed, the getaway car – “a Ford V-8 with red wire wheels” that had been stolen in St. Louis – evaded its pursuers.
Springfield authorities, however, circulated descriptions of the gunmen throughout the Midwest, noting that they believed at least one member of the gang had been wounded.
As a result, St. Louis police moved in when Lawrence Arens, 34, a known stickup artist, showed up at a hospital there with a severe leg wound. Shortly afterwards, they also nabbed Virgil Arens, 25, Lawrence’s brother, and a third accomplice, Horace Crabtree, 25. In the process, authorities retrieved about $2,500 in cash, some of it in wrapping bearing a “Kresge” stamp, and found the bloody, bullet-riddled Ford in a St. Louis garage rented by Crabtree and Lawrence Arens.
The fourth robber, if there was one, was never identified. Authorities in mid-January said they had found a charred skull and other human remains in a wooded area near St. Louis. They speculated that the getaway driver might have died of his wounds and that the others burned his body to avoid identification.
Later newspaper stories give no evidence, however, that the burned-body angle was ever followed up. When they pleaded guilty, the arrested men said all the witnesses had been mistaken – there were only three robbers all along, they said.
The Arens brothers were only five months out of Missouri state prison when they robbed the Springfield Kresge, the Journal reported. Their criminal records were substantial.
(The brothers) first came to attention of police on April 25, 1927, in St. Louis, when they admitted forty holdups, the theft of numerous motor cars and three running gun fights with police. They received 10-year prison sentences from June 1928. They were paroled from the penitentiary last November 16 by Governor Park of Missouri.
Facing overwhelming evidence, the three accused men pleaded guilty in February 1934. They were sentenced to indeterminate terms in Illinois state prison. It’s unclear how long they spent in prison, but census records show all three were being held in Joliet State Prison in 1940. Crabtree, at least, was free by 1947.
Kresge/Kmart building
The S.S. Kresge Co. built its new three-story, 18,000-square-foot building on the northwest corner of Fifth and Adams streets in 1929-30. Kresge’s converted the building to a Kmart, the chain’s discount brand, in the mid-1970s. Kmart closed downtown in December 1982.
The building has been the object of a number of redevelopment efforts since, but the structure’s Fifth Street side still bears the legend “Kresge Building.”
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