Lester Gillis ("Baby Face" Nelson): FBI history page

This is the FBI’s own narrative, written long after the events. It says Nelson “was born Lester M. Gillis on December 6, 1908, in Chicago, Illinois,” was sentenced to one year to life for a January 1931 Chicago bank robbery, and escaped prison guards on February 17, 1932 while being returned to Joliet from a trial at Wheaton, Illinois.

It states that near Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin in April 1934 Nelson shot and killed Special Agent W. Carter Baum and wounded another agent and a constable. On November 27, 1934, near Barrington, Illinois, Nelson and John Paul Chase exchanged fire with Inspector Samuel P. Cowley and Special Agent Herman E. Hollis. “Special Agent Hollis was killed during the gun battle which lasted only four or five minutes. Inspector Cowley, mortally wounded, died early the next morning.” Of Nelson the page says: “‘Baby Face’ Nelson died about 8:00 that evening,” and that agents found his body the next day near a Niles Center, Illinois cemetery after an anonymous telephone call.

The page follows Chase to his trial, which it says began on March 18, 1935, as “the first person to be tried under the law that made it a federal violation to murder a special agent of the FBI,” his transfer to Leavenworth in September 1954, his parole on October 31, 1966, and his death in Palo Alto on October 5, 1973. It names Helen Gillis, Nelson’s widow, as sentenced to a year and a day for violating her parole. The FBI calls the events of 1934 a “reign of terror”; this page reports them as the Bureau states them.