The time? Eighty-five years ago.

The place? The snow-covered village of Leonore.

The body count? Seven men, maybe eight.

Four ex-cons rolled up to the State Bank of Leonore the early morning of Wednesday, Jan. 16, 1935 with guns in their hands and dollars in their dreams. They were Fred Gerner, 27, John Hauff, 32, and Arthur Thielen, 41; they were led by Melvin Liest, 40. Hauff was from Chicago, the others from Rockford. Gerner and Thielen were brothers-in-law.

By late 1935, they had several robberies and burglaries under their belts when Liest came across a newspaper clipping of a recently botched holdup of the Leonore bank. Apparently not seeing this as an ill omen, they decided to try their luck in downstate
La Salle County, according to the later confession of one of the bandits. Bank jobs back then were often team efforts, unlike today, when most are done solo.

Regardless of the clipping about Leonore, they first tried to break into the bank in Grand Ridge the morning of Jan. 16, but abandoned the idea and moved onto Leonore, several miles away. The temperature was in the 20s.

Bank President Charles Bundy, who had fended off the would-be robber about whom Liest had read, came to the bank after hearing a report of something suspicious, cracked a door and saw the bank’s rifle had been moved from its usual spot. Bundy took off and sounded the alarm. Thielen, the getaway driver, drove off, but the response of men in the village was quick — they fired at the getaway car, disabling it, and Thielen ran into a field, where villagers caught him. The robbers probably did not know Leonore residents had experience dealing with criminals — nine years before, townsmen and police had a gunfight with escaped convicts from Joliet.

The three stranded robbers fled the bank and stole a car from an auto garage owned by George Yusko, abducting Yusko and a 16-year-old boy, Norbert H. Naas, according to accounts of the time. They had Yusko drive a short distance, before returning to look for Thielen. Spotting him near a road in the custody of armed citizens, they opened fire, killing Bundy, 47, and wounding Bank Director Clarence Seipp, 59, who died three days later at St. Mary’s Hospital in Streator.

The posse returned fire and wounded Thielen and Naas, but Thielen made it back to his cohorts. With Thielen back in the fold, the group sped off in a southwest direction toward Lostant. Soon, they came upon a traveling salesman, Leon C. Vacheront, of Marseilles. They left their car and their captives, stealing Vacheront’s car with Vacheront driving. However, they did another turnaround and retrieved Naas as a hostage.

In the meantime, news had spread — mostly by telephone — that the bandits were on the run. Among the lawmen and citizens who got the news was Glenn T. “Mike” Axline, the 33-year-old sheriff of adjacent Marshall County. Axline and deputy Renis Brown encountered the gang’s speeding car near Routes 89 and 17, by Varna. Axline fired his new Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun at the car, hitting the already-wounded Thielen. Vacheront stopped the car and got out with his hands up.

Axline apparently believed the robbers were surrendering and stepped from his car — and it cost him his life.

The robbers fired, killing Axline and wounding deputy Brown, and taking Axline’s submachine gun. As they left, Liest yelled, “Tell the law we still have the kid!”

They headed north on Route 89, reaching McNabb and turning east on North 500th Road, also known as the McNabb Blacktop. After about two miles, they pulled into the driveway of the Ioerger home. The man of the house was not there, but his wife Florence and daughter were. Florence welcomed the men, believing they were upright citizens on the lookout for the robbers.

The robbers came into the house with their captive Naas. Some talked of surrender, but Liest vowed to not be taken alive. He was a man of his word. Liest and Hauff took off on foot, but police caught them in a field a short distance away. With police and citizen gunshots whizzing by, Liest put a .32-caliber bullet into his brain. The submachine gun jammed on Hauff and he surrendered. Somehow, Streator Police Chief Harry Reynolds ended up at the scene among the mixed collection of officers and regular Joes.

Back at the Ioerger house, for 1 1/2 hours Gerner and the bespectacled Thielen smoked cigarettes and drank coffee made by Mrs. Ioerger. Police eventually entered the home and demanded the surrender of Gerner and Thielen, who complied. Amid the gunfire during the morning, state highway officer Joe Gromann also was slightly wounded. The day after the robbery, a 46-year-old farmer, who had participated in the chase, died of a heart attack brought on by the excitement.

The tragedy made national news, knocking Ma Barker and her sons — the FBI was in a shootout with the desperado gang the same day in Florida — off the nation’s front pages. It was such a big story, interviews with the captured robbers made the newsreels shown in theaters around the country.

Hauff pleaded guilty in March in a bid for mercy; what he got was a death sentence. Gerner and Thielen went to trial the same month — Thielen, recovering from wounds, was carried into court on a stretcher — with a jury finding them guilty and giving them death after three hours, six minutes. In the following days, Gerner and Thielen spent much of their time weeping, while Hauff found the Lord.

All three were soon to meet the Lord.

On Friday, May 10, a coin was tossed to determine the order of execution. Thielen won, if that’s the word for it — he was electrocuted last. No more weeping, they went stoically. No one has been executed for a crime in La Salle County since.

The La Salle preacher who ministered to Hauff, the Rev. P.B. Chenault, later put out a booklet about Hauff’s conversion

After 85 years, there are a few reminders of the heist gone bad.

The farmhouse near McNabb still stands, but the Ioerger family no longer owns the white-sided home with black shutters. A stone marker in memory of Axline sits at the northeast corner of Walnut and First North streets in Wenona, his hometown. Clarence Seipp is buried at St. Peter and Paul’s Catholic Cemetery just south of Leonore. Bundy was buried in Indiana and Axline in Lacon. The bank was torn down in 1991.

The court record for the case, including the death warrants, is at the downtown La Salle County Courthouse where the trial was held. For a triple death penalty case, the file is very small compared to a modern capital case file. The county jail where the robbers were kept, at the southwest corner of Jackson and Columbus streets in Ottawa, is gone, but the sheriff’s house remains.

The teenage hostage, Norbert Naas, lived to be 83, dying in 2002, but always harboring a fear the robbers’ relatives would come after him — even though it was a posse bullet that wounded him, not one from a robber.

The bandits made off with $13, which is equal to about $244 today.

• THIS ARTICLE was written by Dan Churney and originally published in The Times on Jan. 18, 2010. It has been updated to reflect the amount of time that has passed between the Leonore bank robbery and today. Churney is a former reporter who remains a regular contributor to The Times. He is the author of the local true-crime books “Capone’s Cornfields” and “Take Two Bullets and Call Me in the Morning.”