Wanted: Indiana Billy

 Who doesn’t enjoy a hair-raising story of true crime? From bank robberies to safe crackings and horse thievery to street brawls, Mokena has seen them all. These dot our collective village timeline, providing for some proverbial spice to otherwise uneventful periods in history. It might not be so easy to believe, but our idyllic community has been the stage for quite a few violations of the law over the years, and when we turn back the pages to the year 1903, one will find that none other than the elusive Indiana Billy, a feared criminal of yesteryear, was in our midst. 

 

   The Mokena of the earliest years of the 20^th century was pretty sleepy place, even by the standards of rural farm towns. The reasons for this were many, primarily that trade and commerce that would have normally came to our community had been diverted to the newer trading points of Alpine, Marley and Orland due to the construction of the Wabash Railroad about twenty years earlier. A dearth of good roads in the area also wasn’t exactly auspicious for Mokena. These factors plus a severe countrywide economic depression in the 1890s led the town to experience such a drain of citizens, that by 1900, a federal census taker logged a mere 281 souls living within the corporate limits. 

 

   Thus, the scene was set for treachery. Under the cover of inky darkness one night in July 1903, a daring criminal act was committed when Mrs. Harry Miller’s village home was burglarized. The historical record isn’t clear as to whether or not Mrs. Miller was there when the thief struck, but he managed to make off with some valuables, including silverware, and about $12 in cash, or roughly $345 in today’s money.  

 

   As the small town reeled from the burglary, another drama was unfolding. Officer Oscar J. Klose had been Mokena’s sole peace officer for two years, and was used to run of the mill escapades in town, usually of the kind fueled by alcohol. What would happen on July 14^th would prove to be a little different. As he patrolled the village that morning, it was the general consensus of the town folk that the perpetrator of the burglary at Mrs. Miller’s was likely to still be lurking the community, and the constable kept a sharp lookout. With this in mind, Officer Klose spotted a suspicious character making his way up the Rock Island railroad tracks across from the Hacker lumberyard on McGovney Street. As Klose made his way over to the figure to see who he was, the stranger took off on foot. 

The Hacker Lumberyard, across from which Indiana Billy was captured, seen in its later iteration as the Mall Lumber Company. These buildings stood on the site of today's 11125 and 11131 McGovney Street.

 

   He wasn’t fast enough for Oscar Klose, who caught up with him in no time. In a dramatic escalation, the man then drew a revolver and attempted to shoot Klose. After an exhaustive tussle, the Mokena lawman subdued the would-be shooter, and with the help of general store keeper John A. Hatch, was finally able to handcuff the man and take him prisoner. Before a hearing with the town magistrate, the miscreant was drawn into a village building to be searched, and was quickly determined to not be the Miller burglar, as he had no cash on his person. However, what was found raised more than a few eyebrows, namely some fake keys and a bottle of nitroglycerine, all tools of a professional safe cracker. 

   The frisk very nearly had a completely different ending. When questioned more closely about the bottle, the stranger fibbed and said it was full of liniment for his leg. It was then thrown with a dismissive toss onto a bed, nearly resulting in a calamitous explosion of the agitated nitroglycerine. In a statement to the Joliet Weekly News a few days later, the man readily admitted that he “was trembling in his boots for a moment.” He went on to say that “I couldn’t open my mouth quick enough to stop him and I thought we would both be blown into eternity.”

 

   Officer Klose didn’t know it just yet, but he had just snagged an elusive criminal, the loathsome William Warren, otherwise known as Indiana Billy. It would turn out that he was wanted for a daring robbery in Missouri, and one local newspaper proclaimed that he was “one of the most expert safe blowers in the country.” Indiana Billy was sent to Joliet, where he stood before the grand jury, who slapped him with a charge of having burglary tools in his possession, and also sent him to stay in the Will County jail for seventy days on one count of vagrancy. 

 

   The saga was not yet over for the hardened criminal, who in early October of the same year got a new charge of assault with a deadly weapon, harkening back to his confrontation with Officer Klose in Mokena. Klose testified as a witness in the proceedings, as did the venerable John A. Hatch, the town storekeeper who helped the officer wrangle Indiana Billy the day of the incident; Mary and Ida Kiniry, mother-daughter residents of McGovney Street attested too.  For this charge, Indiana Billy was given a fine of $50 and court costs, but he couldn’t settle the fine, so he was carted back off to the county jail. His increasing familiarity with the jail in Joliet led the Lockport Phoenix-Advertiser to snort that he was now “Weary Willie.”

 

   The historical record is imprecise as to what criminal hijinks Indiana Billy found in his future after his run-in with the law in Mokena. What is clear, is that his short stay within our gates was one that undoubtedly stayed in his memory for a long time.