DOVER TOWNSHIP, Minn. — A dog could have saved Dover Township citizens thousands of dollars, but no one would listen.
On the night of May 24, 1900, the Dover bank was robbed of $4,500, which calculates to more than $160,000 in 2024.
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“The looting of the bank was one of the most complete he ever saw and was undoubtedly done by professionals,” reported as the sheriff investigated.
Silver dollars were scattered around the bank, blackened and bent. Shreds of paper money littered the ground. There were holes drilled around the combination, which seemed to have broken the lock.
The vault itself was a strong, heavy box, “an iron affair,” the Herald reported. Except now, there was a large dent in the iron door, which investigators believed to be from a flying piece of iron inside the vault.
The burglars blew it open.
One man told the paper that the explosion startled his dog, who barked for over an hour.
“Had the good people of Dover been as thoroughly aroused as a dog in the town was, the robbery of the bank would have been detected, in all probability soon enough to catch the thieves,” the Herald reported.
Less than a month later, the Olmsted County sheriff returned from Chicago with a suspect: Thomas O’Neill, also known as Omaha Kid. O’Neill was “a cracker of safes and one of the cleverest criminals in the whole country,” according to reporting from .
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“All in all he is one of the most promising specimens who was ever presented for jail honors,” the article read.
O’Neill was charged with first- and second-degree burglary, although the jury found him not guilty in his first indictment. O’Neil was found guilty and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison following his second indictment.
During the trial, a La Crosse woman named Belle Bruce testified that she went with O’Neill to a bar on May 26, two days after the robbery. He showed her that he had “all kinds of money to buy beer with,” The Post and Record reported.
Many witnesses named three other men they believed to be involved: Lefty Fitzgerald, Daddy Flynn and Toronto Jimmy.
Jacob Miller, a witness from Wisconsin, testified that he drove Daddy Flynn to Osseo, Wisconsin, on May 28. Daddy Flynn had a bag, cane, bottle of whiskey, one sack of gold and one sack of silver on him.
“He was quite drunk in fact,” Miller said, noting Daddy Flynn would pour his sack of money out in Miller’s car.
Lefty Fitzgerald and Daddy Flynn were arrested before O’Neill, according to . The pair was turned over to the United States authorities, awaiting extradition.
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It wasn’t until January 1903 when Toronto Jimmy was found. He gave the court his real name, James Johnson, and pleaded not guilty.
His bail was set at $6,000, but he opted to find his own way out.
“On Sunday morning before the spring of the June term it was discovered that Jimmie had fled the jail in the night, and that a lesser criminal, Charles Reynolds, held for burglarizing a hardware store in Stewartville, had also fled,” Joseph Leonard wrote in “ .”
Leonard wrote that the pair escaped through the windows after cutting the steel bolts and bars.
Johnson dodged his fate for five years. He was “captured by a bank insurance detective” in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Unlike his accomplice, O’Neil, previously sent to the penitentiary who looked like a vulgar thief, Jimmy was a good looking, well dressed and gentlemanly looking young fellow of about thirty years,” Leonard wrote. “He looked the professional man that he was, thoroughly qualified in his profession of safe breaking.”
Johnson was taken to Williamstown, Kentucky, where he was tried for two bank robberies in that county.
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“Rochester will have to do without seeing this interesting gentleman again,” The Post and Record wrote.
The Trust Project
