On a frozen December morning in 1932, a gang of armed robbers walked into a bank in Minneapolis and sparked a firefight that would unravel everything. Among them was Verne Miller, a former small-town sheriff turned Prohibition-era criminal, a man whose skill with a Thompson submachine gun was so notorious that he was said to be able to sign his name in bullet holes. The heist went wrong almost from the start, and by the time it was over, Miller’s face was in newspapers across the country. He went to ground, but the robbery was only the beginning of a chain of violence that would end with his body dumped in a ditch.
Miller’s early life was a mystery even to those who knew him. Born somewhere in Iowa, his birth year was recorded anywhere from 1892 to 1896, and almost nothing survives of his childhood. His parents divorced when he was young, and by his teens he was already making his own way. In 1914 he moved to Huron, South Dakota, and found work as an auto mechanic.
Two years later he enlisted in the U. S. Army, serving in expeditions along the Mexican border against bandit raids. When the First World War broke out, he was sent to France, where he made a name for himself as a marksman and sniper.
He rose to the rank of sergeant and received the Croix de Guerre for bravery. After the war he returned to South Dakota and took a brief job as a patrolman in Huron. In 1920 he ran for sheriff of Beadle County, won, and became a popular local figure. His term was quiet, but in 1922 his wife fell seriously ill and was hospitalized.
Unable to pay for her medication, Miller took six thousand dollars from county funds. He resigned the sheriff’s post hoping no one would notice. He was found out within three months, tried, and sentenced to two to ten years in the state penitentiary for embezzling twenty-six hundred dollars. Prison did not ruin him.
He grew close to the warden and became his chauffeur, which gave him unusual freedom and comfortable privileges. After serving two years, he was released on parole and worked as a laborer, but he despised the work. Once his parole ended, he left the straight life behind for good. He began bootlegging, smuggling illegal alcohol during Prohibition, and left his wife.
He built a highly successful bootlegging operation with a farm girl named Vivian Gibson. By the end of the decade, Miller had gained a reputation as a gun for hire. In May 1930, a friend of Miller’s, Eugene Red McLaughlin, was found dead in the Chicago canal, killed by members of Al Capone’s gang. Miller tracked three suspected killers to a hotel in Fox Lake, Illinois, and on June 1 gunned them down.
It was never fully settled that Miller carried out the Fox Lake Massacre alone, as some credited it to George Moran’s North Side Gang. But the money from bootlegging was never enough. Miller began teaming with experienced robbers to hit banks across the Midwest and Southwest. His first major bank job came in July 1930, when he teamed up with Harley Bailey and George Machine Gun Kelly to steal seventy thousand dollars from a bank in Willmar, Minnesota.
In September of the same year, he participated in a forty-thousand-dollar robbery in Ottumwa, Iowa. In April 1931, he and several accomplices took another forty thousand from a bank in Sherman, Texas. The robberies had gone smoothly, almost routine. That changed in Minneapolis in December 1932.
The gang approached the bank from several directions and entered with guns drawn, ordering everyone to the floor. Customers and employees dropped down as the robbers demanded money be stuffed into bags. The trouble began when several female employees refused to cooperate. One robber slapped a woman, and she started to scream.
Panic spread through the bank, and in the noise the bank guard managed to set off the alarm. Everyone inside knew, and people on the street could see the armed men through the huge glass windows. One of the robbers started yelling at the customers and clerks, threatening them with a machine gun to keep them still. But police were already close by, and the sirens were soon audible.
The robber known as Blind Devil ran outside to confront them. A police car drove up the street toward him, and he opened fire, with the getaway driver joining in. Blind Devil ran along the icy sidewalk to get a better shot, slipped, and sprayed bullets across the pavement, nearly hitting the officers. He recovered, kept firing, and the rest of the gang raced back to the black Lincoln waiting outside.
Miller took the driver’s seat, considered the best driver among them, and the gang escaped to the nearby town of St. Paul, where a second getaway vehicle waited. The take from the Minneapolis robbery was only twenty thousand dollars. Newspapers printed photographs of the wounded policemen and the bullet-riddled vehicle.
The gang was identified, and under cover of night they scattered. Miller traveled to Kansas City, where he kept a low profile until June. That month, Miller received a call telling him a close friend, Frank Nash, had been captured and was about to be locked away in Leavenworth Penitentiary. He was asked to take part in a plan to free him and accepted.
On June 17, 1933, Nash was brought to Kansas City by train, escorted by agents of the Bureau of Investigation. The train arrived on time at 7:15 in the morning. Nash and the agents got into a car, but the moment Nash was seated, two armed men appeared from nowhere and shouted for everyone to put their hands up. The agents barely had time to react.
The order was given to let Nash have it, and machine-gun fire rained down. What followed was a massacre. Agents Hermanson and Grooms were directly in the line of fire and killed almost instantly. Another agent took a bullet to the brain and died on the way to the hospital.
Agent Fedeli, slightly wounded, dropped to the floor, crawled to the back of the car, and ran for his life into the station. Agent Smith escaped unharmed by dropping to the ground and playing dead. One agent who survived the initial fire was paralyzed for life after taking several bullets to the back. Nash himself was slumped forward, shot multiple times in the head.
In fact, he was the first to die, raising questions about whether his rescue had ever been the real motive. The gunfire stopped as quickly as it had begun. With all the agents dead or wounded, the shooters fled. The massacre forced major changes on federal law enforcement.
The Bureau was reorganized into the FBI, and its agents were given the authority to carry firearms and make arrests at all times. Attorney General Homer S. Cummings called the massacre a challenge to the government, declaring that the army of crime had declared war on the United States. Within two weeks, Miller was confirmed as one of the three shooters.
Police, federal agents, and criminal gangs all began hunting him, and he became one of the most wanted men in America. Miller fled to New York, where he met with the underworld figure Abner Zwillman. A heated argument broke out between the two men, and Miller gunned him down before heading for Chicago. On October 23, 1933, he turned up at Vivian’s apartment hoping to stay there.
The next day, federal agents raided the place and Miller had to shoot his way out, barely escaping. Around a month later, on November 29, a motorist in the Michigan area discovered a mutilated body in a ditch by the side of the road. The man had been killed in a cruel manner, the victim of gangland violence. Fingerprints confirmed it was Verne Miller.
Why the criminal world had hunted him down was never fully clear. Some believed it was retaliation for the murder of Zwillman, or payback for the Fox Lake massacre. Others thought it was because Miller was the only shooter in the Kansas City Massacre whose identity was fully confirmed, making him a dangerous liability. With the pressure of law enforcement closing in on gangs across the country, a captured Miller could have started talking.
Dead, he could expose nothing. In Miller’s father’s hometown of White Lake, a memorial service was held with full military honors. His coffin was escorted from White Lake to Huron by uniformed ex-servicemen, friends, and family. The service was overflowing, and his burial drew a crowd of mourners.
His death was met with mixed feelings, some still remembering the friendly sheriff and decorated war hero, others seeing only the cold-hearted killer who had fallen to the violence he had spent his last years living by.