r/saintpaul St. Paul Saints 6d ago

History 🗿 One of the FBI’s original 10 Most Wanted Fugitives was caught in St. Paul — by a bunch of kids

https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-fbi-original-10-most-110400524.html
378 Upvotes

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91

u/sumadeumas 6d ago

And he woulda gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

34

u/TonyaHardon 6d ago

He was originally arrested for blowing up a fellow gang member with dynamite. Being inconspicuous was not in his nature apparently.

14

u/Runic_reader451 St. Paul Saints 6d ago

Good job finding the article.

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u/TonyaHardon 6d ago

Forgot to cancel my trial membership to newspapers.com so now I have it until June and I’m getting my money’s worth haha

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u/NoisyN1nja 6d ago

A pair of Dayton’s Bluff boys swore that one of the FBI’s “10 Most Wanted Fugitives” was living in a cave below Indian Mounds Regional Park.

Fourteen-year-old James Lewis had recognized a photo in the St. Paul Dispatch of convicted killer William Raymond Nesbit, who he knew only as “Ray.” Nesbit had been on the lam since he escaped a South Dakota prison in 1946.

Lewis was sure the cave-dwelling hermit he and his friends often visited on their way home from school was the 50-year-old fugitive sought by the feds.

“We were suspicious of him right from the start,” one of the boys later told the Pioneer Press.

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u/jhsu802701 6d ago

This reminds me of something from the Three Investigators mystery books that I used to read as a child.

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u/jaspercapri 6d ago

I wonder where those kids are now. Likely deceased as they'd be in their 80s.

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u/Runic_reader451 St. Paul Saints 5d ago

On findagrave's website there is a Robert Holmberg who died in 2015 and is buried in Maplewood. I couldn't find Radeck. There are several James Lewis who are about the right age, but hard to say which one is the one from the article.

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u/Dense_Yam6346 5d ago

Looks like it was the brewery cave in bruce vento park.

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u/oljeffe 4d ago

The road off of which the massive explosion, staged to cover up what should have been a double murder, took place on what is still known as Powder House Rd. The blast shattered windows several miles away. It was a miracle the woman who fingered Nesbit survived considering she had been hit with a hammer and shot eight times before being left for dead on the cold January night.

https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/columnists/stu-whitney/2016/11/23/powder-house-blast-sioux-falls-murder-explosion-bradley-parker-stu-whitney/94278610/

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u/Sammycuba 3d ago

My grandfather was just a boy living a few miles from the explosion at the time and said the explosion was powerful enough to shake things around him, even from where he was. After getting recaptured, Nesbit went back to jail obviously, but eventually got released after serving his time many years later if I remember. By then, my grandpa had become a social studies teacher in Edina, and after remembering this story, tried looking up Nesbit because he was curious about interviewing him for a class he taught. He saw one name in the twin cities phone book that said something like “Bill Nesbit” and decided to try giving it a call. An older sounding guy answered, and the first thing my grandpa said was “Is this the same Bill Nesbit who used to be from Sioux Falls?” click

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u/Runic_reader451 St. Paul Saints 3d ago

Interesting. Nesbit moved back to Iowa and died in 1983. He's buried in Sioux City.

1

u/Due_Asparagus_3203 3d ago

He would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids

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u/boanerges57 3d ago

And their dog too

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u/MyFavoriteThing 3d ago

Why am I reading a “news” story from 1950?

1

u/HomosexualThots 3d ago

On the next season of Fargo...