After the assassination of George Murphy and other escalations in the Little Chicago gangster wars, police were on the lookout for Bob Zwick, one of the top machine gunners in the underworld and indicted in the murder of College Hill Marshal Peter Dumele.
Zwick hailed from Cincinnati and was early on associated with the bootleggers in Newport, Kentucky, but he also had a friend in “Turkey Joe” Jacobs, one of Hamilton’s most well-known gangsters. Jacobs, a horse trainer and race by trade or cover, was a defense witness at the trial of Alabama Wells, testifying that Coroner Hugh Gadd fired the shot that killed Bob Gary. It was reported that he hated his nickname, earned early in his bootlegging and hijacking career when he stole a turkey truck that he believed was hiding a load of liquor, but it turned out to only be turkeys. Another story says he got the name because he grew up on a turkey farm in a neighborhood right outside of Hamilton known as Gobbler’s Nob. He was closely connected to an interstate auto theft ring and implicated in a variety of gangland activities, from running moonshine to blowing safes.
“To all but those who knew Jacobs well,” the Evening Journal reported, “he might have been considered a yokel. His manner of dress, his easy-going way and his disarming appearance characterized him as such, but he was anything but a yokel in the racket.”
The Daily News said that Jacobs was not fond of guns but was well-armed with his fists. He and Zwick were the best of friends, and many believed a not-so-innocent bystander when the assassins came after Zwick, that Turkey Joe just got caught in the crossfire. He was planning to take one of his horses to a race in Columbus the day after his death.
At 6:15 p.m., May 27, exactly one week after the Murphy killing, Turkey Joe Jacobs and Bob Zwick were in the Milders Inn at Symmes Corner south of Hamilton, a favorite regional eatery. They were keeping a close eye on the traffic on the Mt. Pleasant Pike, on the lookout for a liquor truck that was supposed to be heading down that way around 8 p.m. They were planning to hijack it.
Jacobs’s head turned toward the Pike when a brown sedan passing by. The two men quickly paid their tab, left their meal unfinished, and got in Jacobs’s brand new Nash sedan that parked on the Symmes Road (now Nilles Road).
Anna Smith, 22, was walking west along the crossroad to meet a friend when the Nash passed her by. She saw a second sedan behind it traveling at high speed, and caught up with the first car containing Jacobs and Zwick about 50 feet from the brick schoolhouse. The first car came to a stop and as the brown sedan pulled alongside and someone leaned out of the window and launched a machine gun assault, pumping round after round into the green Nash.
The brown car took off heading west, passing the Miss Huffman, who was driving her uncle’s car, heading east. She slowed down, horrified at the sight of the bullet riddled car just as Bob Zwick managed to roll out of the Nash’s door and in front of her car. She slowed further to keep from striking him and he jumped on her running board.
“Get off!” Huffman screamed hysterically.
“They’re after me,” the man said, a revolver dangling from his right hand and blood pouring from his left where three fingers has been ripped to shreds and dangling. She stopped the car and screamed hysterically until Zwick pointed the gun in her face. “Take me up the road,” he demanded, and she complied, driving right past her friend, who stood paralyzed by the side of the road having witnessed the assault. As Huffman approached the Milders Inn and the intersection, he jumped from the car and stumbled inside.
The brown sedan had driven about 100 feet down the road and turned around just as Zwick jumped onto Huffman’s car. It slowed down again and pumped another blast of machine gun fire into the Nash.
“Hide me!” he pleaded to Mom Milders. She took him through the kitchen and out the back door to the privy. He locked himself in and Mom Milders went back inside and saw the brown sedan speed past the restaurant. Jake and Mom Milders and their daughter Helen saw four heads bob up in the air like jumping jacks as the car bumped over the CH&D Railroad tracks. It then disappeared around a curve.
After the car passed, Zwick left the outhouse and walked north toward Hamilton and stopped at Phillip Beiser’s grocery store, pushing his blood spattered face against the glass of the front door, scaring the wits out of Mrs. Beiser, who was luckily locking up for the day. He continued out to the Mt. Pleasant Pike and flagged down a Studebaker that was headed north toward Hamilton, a high school boy from Mt. Healthy on his way to a church festival in Hamilton. Zwick got in the back seat.
“He said he’d been in an accident, that he was with another woman and his car had hit a pole and they were both hurt,” the young man said. “He said he didn’t want his wife to know about it. I asked him where the other woman was and he said he left her at Milders’s… There was a wound over his right eye and his face was covered with blood. One finger on his left hand was almost cut off and was hanging by the skin.”
“We drove to Central Avenue, then to Fifth Street, to East Avenue, to Maple Avenue and then crossed the canal to Hancock Avenue, turned into an alley and went about a block and came to a small, one-story frame house. As we crossed Walnut Street, he ducked his head as though he didn’t want to be seen.
“When we stopped at the house, he got out and a woman, a big woman with bobbed hair came out and said, ‘My God, man, what have you been doing?’ She seemed to be mad.’
The boy would later identify the woman as Anna Jacobs, Turkey Joe’s wife, but she denied ever seeing him or Zwick that night. When showed a picture of the fugitive Bob Zwick, the boy said, “That’s the man.”
When he arrived at the scene, Coroner Edward Cook estimated that 35 to 40 bullets in the automobile. Jacobs, slumped over the driver’s seat, was shot in the left eye, in the left ear and in the left jaw, several more in his head, his left arm and wrist, a total of 18 wounds.
Two hats, one felt and one straw, were lying on the front seat. Jacobs had worn the felt hat. Jacobs had a .38 caliber revolver in his belt, unfired. Fifteen .45 caliber automatic bullets, loosely wrapped in a sheet of paper, lay on the back seat. Rear seat pockets contained 25 more .45 shells, a loaded .45 revolver hidden, tucked beneath an adjustable armrest, its numbers filed away. Police found bullets that had passed through Jacobs’ skull embedded in a shed 75 feet back from the road.
Hamilton police were already certain that the assassination was in reprisal for the murder of George Murphy, so Chief Calhoun took charge of the investigation even though the incident was four miles outside city limits. He personally led squads of detectives and officers on five raiding expeditions trying to find the wounded Bob Zwick, with little effort directed toward finding the assassins.
The Milderses, the Studebaker driver, Blanche Huffman, and others identified Jacobs’s companion as the man wanted in the murder of Marshal Peter Dumele in North College Hill, the murder of Hamilton gang chief Jack Parker, the murder of George Murphy and numerous hijackings of liquor trucks in Southwest Ohio.
From witness accounts, police surmised that Zwick had been shot four times, a graze on his forehead, one in the hip, one in the arm, and a devastating shot to the left hand that took his little finger and damaged several others. The wounds may have been fatal, so they alerted all area hospitals and physicians.
Police would later discover that a Hamilton taxi picked Zwick up at the Evans house and at around 9:30 p.m. delivered him to Dr. J.M. Digby a Newport, Kentucky, physician, who sewed his finger back on, gave him three stitches in his scalp wound and removed a bullet from his hip. The wounded man told the doctor he had been wounded at a beer camp. Dr. Digby would tell the newspapers that such occurrences are not unusual in Newport.
The search for Zwick turned to the north, toward Dayton, Detroit and Canada based on a tip saying that the fugitive had moved to Middletown, where someone else took him through Dayton to Columbus, but the trail soon grew cold.
Officials allowed Turkey Joe’s brother, George Jacobs, a furlough from prison, where he was serving time for burglary, to attend the funeral Friday afternoon. Although Turkey Joe was deeply embedded in the local gang culture, the event was strictly a family affair. Most of the 50 people in attendance who were not police or press were women, there to console his mother, his wife, and his five children. The pallbearers were mostly cousins, though one man was the son of Jack Parker, the local gang leader who met a similar fate a year earlier in Lebanon.
By the weekend, the waters of the Great Miami River had receded some and Hamilton County officials resumed dragging the river in search of Pauline Wilson, George Murphy’s missing girlfriend, whom they believed had been shot and thrown off the Venice bridge. The search was for naught as the body turned up on the farm of Theodore Baughman of East River Road near New Baltimore, five miles below the bridge. The body was fully clothed, wearing a fur coat, a sorority pin, a ring with a black oblong stone, and a wrist watch–stopped at 12:45.
When word of the discovery reached Hamilton, officials rushed the Hamilton County morgue with Murphy’s gold watch with the photo of the girl, but found it difficult to make a positive identification as the body had been badly decomposed from its two weeks in the swell. The eyes had been eaten from the body, the flesh discolored. Nothing indicated that the body had been weighted. The corpse bore one bullet wound that entered just below the left eye and exited the back of the skull on the right side. The only other wounds were scratches and scrapes caused by its five-mile odyssey in the Great Miami River.
Her watch proved to be the positive identification, and police traced her to Atlantic Avenue apartments in Cincinnati where neighbors identified the woman they knew as “Mrs. Murphy.” Dr. A.L. Huston said that the Murphys lived in the building for several months but left in February, saying they were headed to Florida and would return in the spring.
“We did not know what Murphy did for a living,” Dr. Huston said, “but they appeared very quiet and lovable. Never, as long as I was there, did I hear a loud voice or see them that they were not smiling and happy.”
On Wednesday morning, June 5, police discovered an apartment at 831 Carthage Pike where “Mr. and Mrs. George Wilson” lived after they vacated the Atlantic Avenue apartment. The kitchen was spotlessly clean, the living room neatly, tastefully and expensively furnished.
Then they opened a chifferobe. It was a “yegg kit,” with two ounces of nitroglycerin carefully wrapped in cotton, a dozen dynamite detonating caps, and other tools used to blow open safes. They also found a high-powered automatic rifle with a silencer in the apartment and a set of silverware in the process of having a monogram removed.