The Port of Missing Men: Walter Davis on the Run
Everyone back in Colorado Springs imagined Walter Davis living it up on some tropical island with a woman on his arm and a drink in his hand. The newspapers speculated he was in the South Seas. Or Greece, like the fugitive energy mogul Samuel Insull. Surely the “master criminal” was enjoying his stolen fortune somewhere exotic.
The reality was a lot sadder.
Life on the lam
Walter Davis never even left the East Coast. The only border he crossed was a quick trip to Niagara Falls. His passport had expired in July, and he knew European countries required foreigners to register with police. So he was stuck.
Here’s what he actually did. He rented a car in Manhattan, hired a driver named John Henry Bogans, a 35-year-old Black veteran from Harlem, and spent the summer driving around the Northeast. Poughkeepsie. Albany. Boston. Portland. Asbury Park. He stayed in modest hotels, paid cash, and kept to himself.
The relationship between Davis and Bogans is one of the most unexpected parts of this whole book. Davis offered Bogans $40 a week, which was easily double what many professionals were earning during the Depression. He fronted him $250 for a used Ford. In Albany, the two men cooked breakfast together every morning for a week.
Davis told Bogans he was a retired lawyer from Cincinnati named William Arnold. He gave him financial advice, warning him against investing in first mortgages (pretty ironic coming from a B&L man) and pushing government bonds instead. He claimed to have enough money to last a lifetime.
But Bogans also noticed his boss seemed haunted. Hotel staff described Davis as the “perfect guest” who paid in cash and never caused trouble. They also called him “a man with a haunted look.”
Sending books instead of letters
Davis was desperately lonely for his wife Lula and daughter Dorothy. But communicating with them was dangerous. So he came up with an unusual system.
He’d visit Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, buy a book, ask the clerk to paste a small card (that he provided) inside the front cover, and have it shipped first class to his wife in Colorado Springs. His book choices were all over the place: a proletarian novel about striking autoworkers, a book of sophisticated cartoons called Virgins in Cellophane, a photo book about New York buildings, and Poems That Have Helped Me.
He also called Lula from drugstore phone booths once or twice a week. And she mailed letters to “William Arnold, General Delivery, Yonkers, New York.”
In his last long letter to her (hidden inside a copy of a Galsworthy novel), he was all over the place. Financial instructions mixed with declarations of love. Warnings not to trust his brother Roy. Self-pity about his lonely existence. “Am just marking time,” he wrote. “Have never been to a stage show. Have never listened to a radio. Can’t stand music.”
He told her he was living simply and saving their money for when they could be together again. He encouraged her to remember “the millions who were out of work and destitute” when she felt down. As if that would help.
The arrest
In October, two detectives spotted Davis walking in Gramercy Park, the private park near his hotel. They noticed he kept looking over his shoulder. “That bird thinks someone is looking for him, all right,” one muttered. But they let him go because in that fancy neighborhood, you didn’t just grab well-dressed men.
Then one of those same detectives spotted Davis’s face in a detective magazine. The wanted poster was incredibly detailed: his love of apples, his clothing preferences, his health problems, even his “peculiar posture.” Someone who knew him well had cooperated with police.
On Sunday, December 11, 1932, Davis was in the lobby of the Parkside Hotel waiting for the elevator when two men approached from behind. “Are you Davis?” He turned around slowly. “I’m your man.”
He claimed the $200 on him was all he had left. He also claimed he owned $600,000 in Colorado real estate and that his family was holding “several million” for him. He refused to say more without a lawyer. Then he bragged about his lawyer daughter.
The end
They let him keep his silk tie in the jail cell. Police policy required removing belts and ties from all prisoners. But he was a banker, so they made an exception.
That night, Walter sat on his cot staring at the cell door. At 3:00 a.m. a guard saw him sitting on the edge of the cot. At 3:20 a.m. the guard noticed him standing pressed against the cell door bars, fingers gripping the upper bars. “Don’t ride the door,” the guard yelled.
When the guard passed again, Walter’s eyes were glazed. He’d tied his silk tie to an upper crossbar. His feet were two inches from the floor.
They tried to revive him for two hours. He never regained consciousness.
Echols doesn’t dramatize this moment. She doesn’t need to. The plain facts are devastating enough. Two people who’d seen him before he left Colorado said the same thing: “If they ever find him, they’ll find him dead.”
The wanted poster itself had included this instruction: “Check bodies of all persons found dead.”
Everyone saw it coming. And nobody stopped it.
Book: Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking by Alice Echols (ISBN: 978-1-62097-304-2)