When Leo awoke the next day, September 3, 1929, he could not have known that he was just nine days away from initiating a series of events which would leave him as a minor criminal celebrity and grant him the place of notoriety for which he had been looking for such a long time.  It began with him sitting on the low brick wall that ran behind the motel he was staying at, trying to put together a plan on what he was going to do next.  Much of his prison time had been consumed with thinking about bank robbery and he knew that was the direction in which he wanted go in regard to the future.  It was time for him to make a move into more serious crimes.  He felt he had accumulated a good amount of information over the years and was ready to take action.  The only limitation he put on himself was that he was not going to do anything illegal in New Munich, mostly out of a sense of responsibility toward Olivia, something he had not thought would really matter.  It did though, now that he was back and had seen her again, he just felt a kind of family connection and knew that she was seen as a respectable part of the community.  He did not want to ruin that.  

He spent the remainder of the morning sitting in his room at the small table by the window, writing down some ideas on nearby towns to scout for potential targets.  Around eleven-thirty he had gone into the bathroom and when he came back out was surprised to find Olivia standing in his room right next to the table at which he had been writing.  His notebook was open and he hastened over to close it while attempting to not seem too concerned.  He did not know it at the time but she had indeed looked over the page and had made a mental note of a few things that were written down.  Olivia then invited him to lunch, which he declined, and she left after a few more minutes of conversation.  Leo, resolved to get things into motion as quickly as possible, got into his Essex and drove out of town for the day.

The communities closest to New Munich included Greenwald, Melrose and Freeport, and Leo drove through all of them scouting out the banks.  It was in Meire Grove though that he found a promising opportunity.  The First State Bank of Meire Grove was a small brick building situated on a road near the edge of that town.  This road branched off into two directions about three hundred feet from the building, giving Leo a choice on escape routes and also potentially adding to the difficulty for police in pursuing him.  Pulling over under a tree near the bank, he got out his notebook and sketched a map of the area.  Then he walked into the bank and pretended to be lost, asking a clerk for directions to Melrose.   Chatting with that man for a few minutes, Leo took in the general layout of the bank and tried to assess the place for any potential pitfalls or problems.  When he left, he felt fairly confident that he had found his target, and he spent the next eight days doing more scouting and planning.  He was ready by the evening of September 11th and he went to bed that night with a strange nervousness in his system, one that made his stomach uneasy and caused him to have difficulty falling asleep.

The robbery itself seemed anti-climatic to Leo, especially when he had the opportunity later to look back on it.  His plan had been to commit the hold-up by himself, partly because he did not want to split the money but more due to the fact that he really did not have any criminal connections in the area.  He wanted to get this robbery done and over with so he had some cash and could maybe start putting together his own gang.  That was how he pulled it off too, just Leo going into the bank and sticking a gun into the cashier’s face, despite the fact that some later newspaper reports would say several men were involved.  After getting the  money, which amounted to eight hundred sixty dollars, from the bank, he took off toward the Twin Cities and abandoned the Essex on a street near the Mississippi river in downtown Minneapolis.  He then walked to the Marlborough Hotel and registered under the name Leo Humford, figuring that slight variation should be enough to conceal his true identity.  It also was an alias he had not previously used, at least as far as can be determined from historical records.  As he was walking out of the hotel lobby to go to his room, the hotel’s extroverted janitor Otto Knaack commented that Leo was a, “nifty dresser,” a comment which of course got Leo’s attention.  He spoke to the man for several minutes after that as the floor was wet from just being mopped.  That conversation quickly went from that brief compliment into a rambling discussion of Otto’s family, his recent stint in jail for punching a man he thought had insulted a hotel guest, and why he did not like Ford motor cars.  During this conversation Leo even discussed his opinion of Louisville after Otto mentioned he had a sister living there and working as a seamstress.   As he said good-night to Otto, he made the further mistake of thinking they shared some kind of criminal bond due to the jail time the janitor had mentioned.  Leo told Otto that he would pay him generously for any info he could bring to him in regard to potential police activity around the hotel.  It was more conversation than an on-the-run bank robber should have had and it would come back to haunt Leo. 

St Cloud Daily Times Headline 12 Sept 1929 – Evening Edition

Back in Meire Grove, law enforcement was at a dead end in regard to trying to to apprehend whomever had robbed the First State Bank.  They had a description of the man, a few conflicting ones on the vehicle and that was about it.  The information went out to all local police agencies and it was of course picked up on by reporters, with the story running on the front page of the next day’s newspaper.  In New Munich Olivia read that article while drinking coffee after breakfast and recalled immediately that Meier Grove was one of the town names she had seen written in Leo’s notebook.  She had not been quite sure at the time what it related to, and was still not certain, but after some soul-searching she made contact with the police.  The information she gave them was unknown to a peacefully resting Leo who had just asked Otto to go out to a local diner and pick him up some lunch.  

…to be continued