Reno Gang’s Reign Of Terror

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One of the gang then pulled the bell rope to signal the engineer to stop the train. As the train slowed, the gang rolled the Adams Express safe out the door, and shortly thereafter the robbers also stepped off the train. According to John Reno’s autobiography, someone then yelled ‘All right!’ to the engineer, and the train picked up speed. The men backtracked to where they had left the safe and met with Frank Reno, William Reno and some other gang members who were holding the getaway horses. Try as they might, the gang could not pry open the larger safe, which some sources say held up to $35,000 in gold.

The O&M route agent happened to be aboard the train. Alerted to the robbery, he stopped the train a short distance up the tracks from the crime site. As the train was not far from Seymour, the route agent returned to town and brought back some men aboard handcars; this prompted the gang to abandon the safe, which authorities later recovered. A passenger on the train, George Kinney, was a witness to the robbery that fateful night. He told officers that he could identify at least two of the ‘holdups,’ both suspects being members of the Reno Gang.

Unknown to the Renos, the Adams Express Co. was under the protection of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago. Shortly after the robbery, Allan Pinkerton was on the case and installed operatives in a Seymour saloon near the Rader House. Local officers arrested John and Sim Reno, along with Frank Sparks, for the train robbery, but on October 11 the accused made bail and were released. Shortly thereafter, robbery witness Kinney, a local resident, was cut down by gunfire when he answered a late-night knock at his door. Officers soon realized that without their eyewitness, the case they had against the Reno Gang would never hold up in court, and they dismissed the charges.

The year 1866 ended with the December 29 robbery, rape and murder of Marian Cutlor, who lived alone near the village of Clearspring, in western Jackson County. Three men, John Brooks, Jack Eastin and John Talley, were indicted for the heinous crime, arrested and remanded to the county jail in Brownstown. Brooks later confessed that he and Talley were the murderers. That crime, along with the freeing of the Reno Gang after the train robbery and the seeming inability of local lawmen to make cases against the Rockford-based criminals, had Jackson County residents in an uproar.

On the night of March 30, 1867, an event occurred that held forebodings for the future. In a clearing about a mile east of Brownstown, 250 to 300 men gathered to make sure the murderers of Marian Cutlor did not gain their freedom. They organized into an almost militarylike unit and rode into Brownstown in a column of twos, stopping in front of the county jail. Several men dismounted and battered down the jailhouse door with sledgehammers, and then a large group rushed into the jail. The mob took Brooks and Talley to a large tree on the courthouse lawn and hanged them from a stout limb. Lynch law had come to Jackson County, and the vigilantes clearly meant business.

On September 28, 1867, another O&M train was held up at almost the exact site as the first robbery. This copycat holdup at Seymour was at first thought to be the work of the Reno brothers but was later attributed to two local men, Walker (often seen as Walter) Hammond and Michael Colleran. They pulled off the heist without any great difficulty and escaped with as much as $8,000. But then came plenty of trouble. Hammond apparently had eyes for a woman named Lettie Neyland, who John Reno claimed was his girl. The hot-tempered Reno tracked down Hammond, who was in Seymour trying to persuade the woman to leave the area with him and his newfound wealth. Reno gave Hammond a severe beating and then turned him over to the sheriff, telling the officer how Hammond had recently robbed the Adams Express car. In February 1868, Hammond and Colleran, a former O&M newspaper vendor, were indicted for robbery.

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