The Greenville Times

Desperate Fight With a Madman in a Chicago Railroad Depot.

Chicago, May 31.—Passenger train No. 6 on the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad, arrived here today an hour and a half late. In charge of a madman.

Out of the twelve or fifteen men, officers and citizens who finally secured him one officer is dead, shot through the body; another probably fatally wounded. Several citizens are injured, and the lunatic himself lies in the county hospital mortally wounded, with three bullets in him.

Shortly before noon today the station policeman at the Wabash St. Louis and Pacific depot, on Polk street, received the following dispatch:

CHICAGO, ILL., May 31, 1885.

I have an insane man on my train who has possession of one car. The police at Kansas City, Jacksonville and Peoria were all afraid to take him. Please send ten or twelve policemen out on No. 6, to take him when we arrive in Chicago. They had better come in citizens' clothes. They will have to look sharp or some one will get hurt.

PUTNAM, Conductor No. 6.

No. 6, which left Kansas City last night was due here at 2:50 p.m. There was a difficulty in starting out No. 6, as directed in the dispatch, and it was decided to meet the train at the depot. Officers Casey, Ryan, Murphy, Rowan, Walsh, Stremming, Dee, Barrett and Keenan in uniform; and Smith, Terry, Amstein, O'Brien and Laughlin, in citizens' clothes, under the command of Lieut. Lough, made up the squad, which arrived at the depot ten minutes before the train was due.

The train being delayed, as was subsequently learned, by ineffectual efforts to capture the lunatic, the police were forced to wait more than an hour.

After considerable anxious speculation as to the condition of things on board train No. 6, the officers were finally anything but reassured by a dispatch from a suburban station warning them that the maniac was well armed, and would resist desperately.

A little later No. 6 appeared, and the police, separating so as to form squads, awaited her arrival on either side of the tracks.

As the train approached, the whistle sounded a number of warning notes in quick succession. People hanging half-way out of the windows were seen gesticulating wildly to the crowd.

Before the train had come to a standstill a number of passengers jumped to the ground and fled, looking back with blanched faces.

Officer Barrett was the first to observe the lunatic. Barrett was standing near the rear end of the smoking car. The mad man, with leveled revolver, glared at him from the front platform of the car, the length of one car distant. Barrett turned half way around but too late, a ball from the lunatic's revolver struck him in the side and in five minutes he was dead.

One look at the maniac was enough to satisfy one that while his ammunition lasted he would not be taken alive. Seeing this, the officers, after removing their wounded comrade, began a fusillade through the windows of the smoking car where the madman had taken refuge.

After a moment or two he plunged out of the car to the platform, fired a couple of shots into the crowd, leaped from the train and dashed down Fourth avenue.

Officer Laughlin started in hot pursuit and at him the lunatic fired the last shot in his pistol, but without effect.

The maniac stopped then and awaited Laughlin's coming with gleaming eyes and frothy mouth. They clinched, the officer tripped his prisoner and they both fell, the madman meanwhile beating Laughlin unmercifully on the head with his revolver.

The officer was in citizen's clothes, and was set upon and terribly pounded by an excited colored man, who mistook the officer for the prisoner.

The rest of the squad arrived shortly. The maniac was secured and taken first to a station, then to the hospital to have his wounds dressed.

When he realized that farther resistance was useless the prisoner grew calm, and said quite rationally that his name was Louis Reaume, that he was thirty-three years old and was on route to his home in Detroit from Denver.

The train men of No. 6 tell a thrilling story of the trip from Kansas City. When the man boarded the train at that place he remarked that people were after him to lynch him, and that if left alone he would molest no one.

At El Paso, Ill., he became violent and with revolver in hand ordered the train men to cease making some change in the make-up of the train.

The passengers all left the chair car, which the madman made his headquarters, and were locked into the others.

No one dared to approach the lunatic, and after he had exchanged several shots with the city marshal he ordered the train to proceed, and from there to Chicago his will was the only law obeyed.