The Trigger Woman - Irene Schroeder
From an original story by Alan Hynd
Edited and additional material by Guy Hadleigh
The following is from one of the stories in Nearly Forgotten True Crimes: 7 Infamous Cases Revisited (Vintage Crime Series Book 1) by Guy Hadleigh available on Amazon here
It was not until it was fatally late - until time had run out, that 22-year-old Irene Schroeder learned that marriage and motherhood were more important than excitement and high adventure. Irene Schroeder had sold her soul - and the soul of the man who loved her - for adventure. Otherwise, on a bleak day in January 1930, she would not have been sitting in a prison cell, facing the imminent termination of her life in the electric chair, writing to a friend the following letter:
I received your most kind letter and certainly appreciate it. You will certainly have Jesus in your heart to write such a letter to me. I am very glad you pray for us and hope you will please continue to do so. Certainly need someone to pray for us. It sure is a nice thing for you and your wife to be able to go to pray meeting together. I would be very happy if I had the strength to believe as you do because I surely want to. I know if I had the courage to get on my knees and pray, God would forgive me because God is just and he is merciful. More power to you and God bless you
Sincerely,
The Trigger Woman
The champagne eyed blonde who penned those words had come to the end of an incredible road; a road that had begun in simple, homely surroundings and the things that count in life, and which had led through forbidden love, adventure and death, straight towards the dead end called the electric chair. Irene Schroeder and the man who loved her travelled the road that had no turning, yet they need never have travelled it at all....
Irene Crawford, born in 1907, was brought up in New Castle, a small, uninspiring manufacturing city in a remote section of Western Pennsylvania. Her parents were God-fearing and honest, but hard put to make ends meet. She had two brothers, both older than she and both preoccupied with their own lives.
At 15, Irene Crawford - blonde, buxom and physically developed beyond her years, was only vaguely aware of such luxuries of life as nice dresses, costly perfumes and professional hair-do’s. She used to go to a little movie theatre in her hometown and, after seeing Gloria Swanson or Bebe Daniels in a Cecil B. DeMille society epic, wonder if anywhere in the world people actually possessed such things as sunken bathtubs, fresh-cut flowers on the dinner table and silken bed sheets.
There was a boy in Irene’s life named Schroeder. He was a nice boy, about two years older than her. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a good face. He was big and strong and he was ambitious. He was, he told Irene, going to make something of his life. He wasn’t going to be stuck in New Castle. He would get a start there, to be sure, but then move on to a big city - Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia, or maybe that most magic and glamorous of all the cities of the world, New York.
Irene listened, but was not impressed. Young Schroeder didn’t have that indefinable something that appealed to the overdeveloped adventurous side of her nature.
Irene left school to take a job in a factory. She was quick, vivacious and had a fiery disposition. A foreman in the plant, attracted to her, tried to get a little too flirtatious with her one day and she leaped at him like a tigress and deeply clawed his face with her long fingernails. She had not known herself until then she could be so volatile.
Life seemed to stretch monotonously ahead. On all sides of her, Irene Crawford saw only drudgery and the commonplace. She came to have revulsion for New Castle. She called the city a hick town and a dump, although it was like many other typically American cities. The trouble was not with New Castle, but with Irene Crawford. She had never learned the lesson that life returns only what one puts into it. Her parents, baffled by her discontent, suggested that she have a talk with the family spiritual adviser. Irene had already stopped going to church and she only scoffed at the suggestion.
Young Schroeder was meanwhile making his way in the world. He was only moderately successful, but he was the only possible escape from a future that seemed to be closing in on her on all sides. When Schroeder proposed to her, there were, in the back of her mind, Richard Barthlemess and other dark and dashing movie stars of the era, but she told herself that a girl couldn’t have everything and accepted him.
And so at 16, Irene Crawford became Irene Schroeder.* The vistas of an entirely new world, a world of thrills and adventure, resembling the one she had seen in the movies, opened up before her. She imagined that she was very much in love. She told herself that life was always going to be a honeymoon.
Then came disillusionment in the form of humdrum daily housework. As she settled down in the depressing little flat in New Castle, overlooking the railway tracks, Irene felt the first stirrings of discontent.
A few months after her marriage, Irene discovered that she was going to have a baby. Her young husband was overjoyed. She, on the other hand, was depressed. A baby, she felt, would seal off her last possible avenue of escape from the town that she had come to loathe.
The baby was a boy, Irene called him Donnie. He was a little round faced fellow with blue eyes and a ready smile, like his father. For a time, Irene seemed quite taken up with her new role of mother. Then depression set in again.
A year passed. There was a speakeasy in town, just down the street from where Irene lived, and there was a back room for ladies. A dismal little flat, with cheap furnishings, was enough to drive a girl to drink, Irene rationalized. And so, of an afternoon, she took to parking the baby with her mother and going to the back room of the speakeasy. Many an evening she was strangely exhilarated when her husband came home from work, and he wondered why.
As she sat in the back room speakeasy she kept her large eyes alert for travelling men - men who represented far off places and the adventurous life. She met several such men and drank and talked with them of New York and the big cities beyond New Castle, but that was as far as it went. She had no scruples in her mind about her marriage vows, but she was determined not to be bothered with any man unless he gave her what she wanted - and she wanted adventure above all else.
Meantime, the husband began to hear rumors that his wife was drinking with strange men in the speakeasy. He asked Irene about it. She denied it. Resenting the questioning, she began to find fault with everything her husband did. She picked quarrels with him over trifles. She fought with him because he was too tired to take her dancing at night.
The frustrated young wife withdrew further within herself. Slowly, everything was becoming clear to her. She decided that she had made a mistake in marrying anyone so near her own age. She had, she told herself, a mentality beyond her years, and only older men - men in their 30s - interested her.
Sometimes Irene didn’t speak to her husband for days. More and more often, she left little Donnie, now passed his second birthday, with relatives while she drank to the point of getting hopelessly drunk.
At length, Schroeder delivered an ultimatum to Irene. Either she would mend her ways or they could no longer live together. Irene packed up and took Donnie with her and went to live in a boarding house. Her husband sued her for divorce, - she did not contest and got custody of the child, then took a job as a waitress to support herself and Donnie.
Thus Glenn Dague came into her life. Dague, a handsome and dapper insurance salesman in his early 30s, frequently came to New Castle to call on prospects. When he was in town, he always ate in the restaurant where Irene worked.
Dague was definitely a romantic type. He was gracious and appreciative, but formal. One day, however he asked, “what do you do after you are through here, Irene?” Irene smiled, “my time is my own,” she said. “Would you like to take up some of it?” Irene tried to make herself as inviting as possible, and apparently she was as Dague asked her if he might call for her in his car when she was through work.
There was a full moon. Irene suggested a spot out of town where they could view it at its best. Here, she told herself, was the beginning of the road to adventure.
Little was said by either Irene Schroeder or Glen Dague when they reached the spot where they were to look at the moon. In such a setting, it was no surprise that very little moon watching took place.
On the way back to the house where Irene boarded with Donnie, she asked, “When will I see you again?” Glenn Dague didn’t answer for a while. “What’s the matter?” Irene asked. “Don’t you love me, Glenn?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “You know I’m hopelessly in love with you. I have been since the first day I saw you.” “What’s wrong then?” “I’m married” said Glen Dague.
Irene caught her breath, and then recovered. Her lips were set firm. No woman was going to stand in her way now, now that she had found the man who could release her from everything that she had always loathed. Anyway, Glenn’s wife could mean precious little to him after tonight.
“You can’t be happy with her Glenn,” said Irene, “or you wouldn’t have turned to me.”
He was looking straight ahead, grimly, as he pulled the car towards her rooming house. “No,” he said, “I guess I can’t be happy. An odd thing, though, I thought I was happy. Why, I’ve been married for eight years, and I’ve got two of the finest children you ever saw. My wife and I have never had a cross word.”
“But she doesn’t thrill you like I do,” Irene said slyly.
Dague stopped the car and pulled Irene to him, assuring her that she meant everything to him.
Irene Schroeder hummed at her work the next day. Other waitresses wondered what had come over her. Glen Dague; Irene Schroeder knew, was now her slave. He had brains, brains enough to go far on the high road of adventure. Dague had a date with Irene the following week but he didn’t show up and she didn’t hear from him. She looked up his number in the telephone book and made a long distance call to his home. He was immediately frightened when he realized who was calling, afraid his wife would overhear, and said, “very well, Mr Schroeder, I’ll see you tomorrow.” “You’d better,” replied Irene sharply.
Dague kept his word. That night he and Irene drove out to the spot where they’d gone the previous week. This time, Dague poured out his soul. “I’ll do anything you want me to Irene,” he said. “I never knew a woman could mean so much to a man as you mean to me. I’ve tried to fight this. I’ve even prayed for God to make me strong enough to resist you, but it’s been useless.”
“You pray often?” Irene asked.
Dague said that he had once taught Sunday school and that even now he was an officer in the Epworth League. He was sitting in the backseat of the car, with his head in her lap. “Wouldn’t your church friends love to see you now?” Irene murmured.
Once she was sure she had him, Irene began to make demands of Dague. She asked that he take her on a trip to New York. He was hesitant. She threatened never to see him again. “But I don’t have the money right now,” he said. “I still have a wife and family to support.”
“This insurance company you work for,” said Irene, “they have plenty of money don’t they?”
“What are you driving at honey?”
“Borrow some from them and put it back when you have some commissions coming,” she said. “You only live once, you know.” She held her breath, not knowing whether her power over Dague was strong enough to make him break so abruptly with his past. While he was thinking it over she put her arms around him and covered his face with kisses. “All right,” said Dague, “I’ll get the money.”
“When do we leave?” asked Irene.
“Sunday night. We’ll l drive to Pittsburgh and get the midnight train from there.”
The couple spent 10 days in New York - 10 glorious days. Dague had never tasted liquor until this trip. Irene made him hunt for speakeasies and, to keep her company, he took his first drink in a place just off Times Square. He liked the taste of it immediately. He had never smoked before, either, but gave that a try as well.
As Mr and Mrs. Glenn Schroeder they hit the nightspots. While they watched the scantily clad dancing girls in the floor shows, Irene kept asking Dague if he still loved her. He paid little attention to the girls in the shows, and she knew she had weathered her first love test.
A year passed. Irene and Glenn Dague, deep in the abyss of forbidden romance, continued the life that was an adventure for each of them. Dague’s wife thought he was away on business when he was actually in New Castle, visiting Irene, or on a trip to New York with her.
Meanwhile he was getting deeper into trouble - committing the crime of stealing money from his employers. The day of reckoning was inevitable. When he got a sizeable commission having written a big policy, he immediately bought Irene an expensive gift, or blew the money on a trip. He had become jealous of other men’s attentions to her in the restaurant, and got her to give up her job. He also set her up in a small flat, so that he was maintaining two separate homes now - one in New Castle and one in Wheeling.
New Castle was bearable to Irene now, but only because it had become a place to mark time between adventures in New York. She spent her time eating chocolates and reading travel magazines against the day when she Glenn would travel, somehow, to the far West. As a result of her candy eating, she put on considerable weight. But Dague liked the extra weight. It made her more attractive to him than ever, he assured her.
Life was about to change however. Glenn appeared in the New Castle flat one night looking distraught and said, “the accountants went over the books today I’ve been found out. I’m fired.”
“Are they going to send you to prison?” Irene asked calmly.
“No, they don’t want any publicity, so they’re not making any charges.”
“That’s fine then,” said Irene.
“But what will I do for money?” asked Dague plaintively.
Irene had been a step ahead of Dague all the time. She knew that when the day of reckoning came they would be faced with the problem of making money with which to carry on their adventure. And so she had long had a plan in readiness to put into operation.
“You love me with all your heart, don’t you, Glenn?” she began. “Why, yes, of course.”
“And you’d do anything for me,” she said.
“You know I would. What are you getting at, darling?” he asked.
“I’ll come to that in a minute,” she said. “You can’t get another job in Wheeling. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’m in disgrace there.”
“You don’t love your wife, but you love your kids. Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, you’ve got to make some money to support them as well as for Donnie and me. Am I right again?”
“Yes, yes” Dague wanted to be taken out of suspense. “What’s the actual plan Irene?” he asked.
Irene had been noticing in the newspapers for some time how apparently easy it was to stage a stick up and get away with sizeable loot. She broached the subject gently to Dague. He was horrified. “Why, we’ll both wind up in prison!” he exclaimed.
“Look,” said Irene, “the only people who wind up in prison are the dumb ones. I’ve got a new idea of how to do a stickup and get away with it.”
“How?”
“I’ll go along with you and use a gun while you get the cash. Nobody suspects a woman being a hold-up artist, and if we run into any trouble, no cop would ever shoot at a woman.” She threw her arms around him, as she always did when she wanted to influence him. Such was his flaming infatuation for her that he nodded his head mechanically. “When do we start?” he asked.
She had the answer to that too.
And so in August 1929, Schroeder, Dague and a new recruit, Irene's older brother Tom Crawford loaded up their car with young Donnie in the back, and set off on their ill-fated crime spree. First on the list to be robbed was the Meadow Land Inn in Cadiz which went off without any problems and gave the gang confidence that armed robbery was easy. Next on the list four days later, was a gas station and diner which belonged to Jack Cotts resulting in a haul of just $70. Other heists followed in the next weeks as they roamed the countryside robbing stores and gas stations with ease. However, they’d been lucky and things were soon to start going wrong proving that crime was not so easy after all.
On the bitterly cold, gray morning of Friday, December 27, 1929, the gang pulled up in front of a Kroger’s grocery store in Butler, a city 20 odd miles from New Castle. Dague was nervous, but Irene wasn’t. “Wait here,” she told him, getting out of the car. She went to the door of the store, looked in and returned to the car, a bitter smile on her face. “Come on,” she said. “There are only a few people in there. This will be easy.”
Irene took charge when they entered the store. She reached into her handbag and grasped a revolver. “This,” she announced, with a touch of pride, “is a stickup! Get your hands in the air, everybody!”
Clerks and customers froze in their tracks. She approached the clerk nearest the cash register. “Open that thing!” she yelled. The clerk meekly, complied. Irene nodded to Dague and Crawford and they scooped up the money. Then they backed toward the door. She paused just long enough to yell at her victims, “the first one that moves get drilled!” She had heard a gangster in a movie say the same thing under similar circumstances and felt a warm glow of joyous excitement from her scalp to the soles of her feet.
They jumped back into the car and accelerated away back to New Castle. She began to count the loot, almost delirious with delight. It totaled almost $500. Why, with only one good hold-up a week, that would be about $25,000 a year! Her most extravagant dreams had suddenly come true. There would be many trips to New York: in fact she and Glenn could probably live there now. There would be diamonds and mink and orchids and champagne; the exciting new life she’d always hankered after was beckoning.
However, she was reckoning without the hand of justice as the car roared toward New Castle, along a lonely stretch of the Butler-New Castle highway. An eyewitness to the hold-up succeeded in getting the license number of Dague’s car which had gone out over the State Police teletype. And now, as they sped along the highway, they saw two state policemen standing in the middle of the road, waving them down.
“What do we do?” said a thoroughly frightened and panicking Dague.
“Pull up and see what they want,” she said. “They can’t know about us yet. It hasn’t been 15 minutes since we pulled that job.”
Dague screeched to a halt. Cpl Brady Paul and Private Ernest Moore of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, two young men with grim faces, asked Dague for his license “what do you want to see the license for?” asked Irene. She smiled sweetly at Corporal Paul.
“”There’s been a hold-up in Butler,” said the officer, “and we’re checking all cars as a matter of routine.”
At the mention of the word “hold-up” Dague lost his nerve. He whipped out a gun and pointed it at Cpl Paul. Irene sized up the situation in a split moment. She knew that Dague wasn’t very good with a gun and that one of the officers might begin shooting straight away. Her whole future hung in the balance. Without the slightest hesitation she reached into her handbag, drew out her revolver, and fired point-blank at Cpl Paul. He wavered, and then dropped to the floor. (Although he was later taken to Jameson Memorial Hospital, doctors could do nothing for Paul. Fatally shot through his right kidney and liver he had also been hit in the left arm and leg and once in the abdomen ultimately dying about 20 minutes after he arrived at the hospital).
Before Private Moore could bring himself to open fire on a woman, Irene and Dague, together with Crawford sitting in the backseat, opened fire on him. Moore also dropped to the road, though the fates had decreed that he was to recover and to live to face Irene Schroeder on a later and, for her, much sadder day.
“Step on it sweetheart!” Irene shouted to Dague excitedly. This was life! The Trigger Woman, as she was to be called from now on by press and public, glanced in the rear vision mirror as the car spurted ahead. She saw Private Moore getting to his feet. “That guy is not dead!” she gasped to Dague. “Let’s go back and finish him off.”
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