On the night of November 10, 1939, a routine prisoner run went wrong on a dark stretch of Highway 13. Two teenage car thieves — Robert Noel, 17, and Nelson Pasha, 14 — pulled a pistol nobody could ever explain, and in the struggle Chief Roland "Tod" Payne of Wisconsin Rapids, a lawman famous for talking wayward boys straight, died in the back seat of the car. His body was unmarked: his heart had given out. The boys handcuffed the survivor to his dead chief, ran 500 miles into the Michigan Northwoods, and were run down by deer hunters and bloodhounds in the snow. Then Wisconsin had to answer a question with no clean answer: can two boys be guilty of murder for a heart attack? The state charged it — and then walked away from it.
Payne's whole reputation was steering first-offender boys straight; the safety patrol was his. Killed by two boys. The town said it out loud at his funeral: "this confidence reposed in youth was... so ruthlessly betrayed."
a dead chief with no wound on him. The felony-murder theory vs. a 65-year-old heart that gave out mid-struggle. Can a heart attack be a homicide?
the title beat. Early reports say two shots (one through Bluett's coat); the sentencing story says one; the boys said none. The record can't keep its own story straight — which is itself the story.
searched, fingerprinted, guarded at every lunch stop — and still armed in the back seat. Where the pistol came from "was never clearly learned."
Bluett spent hours shackled to Payne's body, through the doctor's office and the ride home, until the cuffs were cut. The survivor's ordeal is the episode's POV.
the man with the most reason to want the boys hanged testified, in effect, for them: "I am convinced now that the heart attack came."
same night, same acts: the 17-year-old is tried as an adult; the 14-year-old is a "delinquent." Neither answers for the death itself.
radio-age policing (descriptions across two states in 15 minutes) ends with two dozen deer hunters, three bloodhounds, and a boy shivering over a fire in the snow.
November 1939: Payne's funeral shares the front page with the opening months of WWII. The biggest thing that ever happened to Wisconsin Rapids was already being crowded into the margins — which is how a story becomes forgotten.
Noel keeps running (gas pipe, Waupun, escape, Tucumcari) while Pasha, by later account, quietly builds a decent life. One boy disproves Payne's philosophy; the other proves it. Both are true.
Every fact in this file traces to a primary-source clipping. Tap any headline to read the full entry.
WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis., Nov. 11.—(AP)—Two youths driving a sheriff’s automobile were hunted after a daring break for freedom last night in which Chief of Police Roland S. (Tod) Payne, 65, of Wisconsin Rapids, died reportedly of heart disease. The youths were being returned by Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett from Plymouth, Ind., where they were arrested Tuesday on a car theft charge. Sheriff Harvey Phillips of Plymouth identified them as Nelson Pasha, 14, of Mosinee, Wis., and Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich. Two Shots Fired The break for freedom came near Adams, Wis. Officials agreed that two shots were fired by the youths, that Payne was taken from the car dead, and that the youths left Payne and Bluett handcuffed together. Sheriff Frank Holman of Adams county found them. Two doctors said Payne was unmarked. Deputy Sheriff Ray Brayback said Bluett also was unhurt. Brayback quoted Bluett as saying the youths produced a pistol and fired when he was driving about 60 miles an hour, with Payne in the front seat beside him. The second shot went through Bluett’s coat. Take Officer’s Pistol Brayback also quoted Bluett as saying the youths took Payne’s pistol but not his, and that the “three of them” had “difficulty” in removing Payne’s body from the car. The (Ford) sedan which the youths took from the officers was reported to belong to the Wood county sheriff. Payne had been on the force 27 years and was chief for 21. His daughter, Lola, is desk sergeant. His widow also survives. Wisconsin Rapids police reported that the Noel boy recently visited relatives at Mosinee and met Pasha. The two came here by train, and then were picked up at Plymouth when they ran out of money and gasoline.
Two youths, both under 21, were held at Plymouth, Ind., today awaiting the arrival of Wood county officers who will charge them with the theft here Tuesday night of a car belonging to the Dawe-Bevins garage. Chief of Police R. S. Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett, accompanied my N. J. Daly, insurance man, left this morning for Plymouth, armed with warrants naming Robert Noel, said to be from Dearborn, Mich., and Nelson Pasha, Mosinee, on car theft charges. The two, according to information reported by radio to Milwaukee police and relayed to the sheriff’s office here, were picked up at Plymouth with the stolen car sometime Wednesday. The car was taken from its parking place in front of the Lyle Roets residence at 550 Eighth avenue north sometime after 6 p. m. Tuesday.
Officers Hunt Two 17 Year Old Boys Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.—(UP)—Officers throughout the middle west were primed today to watch for two fugitive 17-year-old youths who escaped, leaving a police chief who died of a heart attack while scuffling with them handcuffed to another officer. Coroner Robert W. Roseberry and physicians who assisted him reported that there were no external signs of violence on the body of Police Chief Roland Payne of Wisconsin Rapids and that a heart attack during his exertions to subdue the boys apparently caused his death. Examination of Undersheriff Cliff Bluett of Wood county at a hospital disproved his belief that he had been shot and revealed only bruises and abrasions. The two officers were returning Robert Noel, Dearborn, Mich., and Nelson Pasha, Mosinee, Wis., from Plymouth, Ind., where they were arrested Nov. 9 on suspicion of stealing an automobile from a Wisconsin Rapids garage. Make Break Near Adams Reports from various sources differed regarding details of what happened when the two youths made their break for freedom near Adams, Wis., last night. But all sources seemed in agreement on the main phases of the escape. These were that the youths became unruly in the back seat of the officers’ automobile near Adams, which is only a short distance from the jail to which they were bound here. Chief Payne thought he heard two shots and ordered Bluett to stop the car. Reaching into the back seat, Chief Payne tried to quiet his unruly prisoners. During a scuffle they acquired his gun and he collapsed of a heart attack. Pointing the chief’s gun at Bluett, the youths then disarmed him and handcuffed him to the dead officer. Bluett and Payne then were dragged from the car and left lying beside the road while the youths, now becoming frightened by signs of their violence, sped off in the officers light model black coach. The machine bore a 1939 Wisconsin license number 144-337. Up the road a short distance the youths stopped at a restaurant and filling station to inform Proprietor Jack Lane that a man had been hit in an automobile accident and that he was lying beside the road. Following their directions, Lane found the two officers about 12 miles south of Adams and telephoned other authorities. An immediate police radio alarm was sent out, but trace of the fugitives soon was lost.
ST. IGNACE —(AP)— State Police detachments concentrated at a remote spot in Michigan’s vast Northern woods Saturday night in pursuit of two daring youths who escaped from a Wisconsin police car after a fight fatal to one officer. The troopers, aided by bloodhounds in tracking the fugitives, reported they believed that they had trapped Robert Noel, Dearborn, Mich., and Nelson Pasha, Mosinee, Wis., both 17, about 20 miles northwest of here. The pair, believed heavily armed, escaped Friday night upon putting up a fight in a speeding police car taking them to Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., from Plymouth, Ind., to face an automobile theft charge. During the struggle Police Chief Roland S. Payne collapsed and died, apparent victim of a heart seizure.
St. Ignace, Mich., Nov. 13.—(AP)—Two youthful fugitives who braved the dangers of the deep woods in a futile attempt to avoid recapture today awaited a hearing and transfer to Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., on charges of automobile theft. State troopers and sheriff’s officers tracked down the boys early yesterday and ended a 300-mile chase which left one police officer dead of a heart attack. The youths were Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich., and Nelson Pasha of Mosinee, Wis., who said he was 14 years old. The pair escaped Friday night from Wisconsin officers taking them from Plymouth, Ind., to Wisconsin Rapids and fled in the officers’ automobile across Michigan’s upper peninsula. Police Chief Roland S. Payne of Wisconsin Rapids suffered a fatal heart-seizure while grappling with the boys. Deputy Sheriff Cliff Bluett, his companion, said the boys fired a shot which ripped his coat, disarmed him, and handcuffed him to his dead companion beside the road. Michigan police set up a blockade which the boys once eluded, then followed them into the woods when the car was found abandoned near Brevort, northwest of here. After a night during which the boys built furtive campfires to ward off the biting cold, the posse overtook them. The fugitives’ weapons had been left in the car, and they surrendered after a warning shot had been fired. Wisconsin authorities said they would ask a murder warrant based on the death of Chief Payne. After an all-night search in a bottle-necked area near the Straits of Mackinac, state troopers and sheriff’s officers sighted the youths at 8:30 a.m. Sunday near Brevort, 20 miles northwest of here. Car Spotted State troopers took up the search for the two Saturday when Trooper Mike Lalich spotted an automobile that had carried the youths on a speedy 300-mile ride into Michigan’s upper peninsula. Abandoning the car near Brevort, the youthful fugitives plunged into the heavily wooded area. The officers set up a blockade and, through a cold night in which the temperature was in the 20’s, closed in on them. The youths were lightly clothed. Although the officers believed Noel and Pasha were heavily armed, they had no weapons when they surrendered. In their anxiety to get into the cover of the woods, the youths left guns and blackjack in the abandoned auto, as well as a quantity of provisions. Funeral Services On Tuesday Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., Nov. 13.—(AP)—Funeral services will be held at Lincoln fieldhouse tomorrow afternoon (2 p.m.) for Chief of Police Roland S. Payne, 65, who died Friday night attempting to prevent the escape of Robert Noel and Nelson Pasha. Members of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police association will serve as honorary pallbearers. Coroner P. E. Wright said he believed a blow on the head, coupled with the excitement and exertion of the struggle, probably were contributing factors toward Chief Payne’s death.
WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis. —(U.P.)— Public funeral services will be held here Tuesday for Police Chief Roland S. Payne, 65, who died Friday while returning two boys from Plymouth, Ind., to face charges of automobile theft. Members of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police association will be honorary pall bearers at Payne’s funeral. Arrested in Michigan, Pair Faces Possibility Of Trial for Murder ST. IGNACE, Mich. —(U.P.)— Two 17-year-old youths whose 36-hour flight for freedom across two states ended in a northern Michigan woods were taken today to Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., to face possible charges of murder. Robert Noel, 17, Dearborn, Mich., and Nelson Pasha, 17, Mosinee, Wis., who escaped Friday night from officers taking them from Plymouth, Ind., to Wisconsin Rapids on automobile theft charges, formally waived extradition at noon. They were placed in custody of Sheriff Henry Becker of Wood county, Wisconsin, who started at once for Wisconsin Rapids. Willing To Return Under Michigan law, Noel and Pasha were told by Circuit Judge Victor D. Sprague of their right to resist extradition if they wished. They said during questioning that they were willing to return to Wisconsin to face automobile theft warrants, the charges on which they were captured near here yesterday. The youths were being taken to Wisconsin Rapids by Police Chief Roland S. Payne, 65, Wisconsin Rapids, and Deputy Sheriff Cliff Bluett when they escaped. The boys started a commotion in Payne’s automobile and seized his gun. One of the boys fired a shot which passed through Bluett’s coat. Payne suffered a heart attack during the scuffle and died. The boys subdued Bluett, manacled him with his handcuffs to the dead police chief, dumped them out and fled. They were captured Sunday by deputy sheriffs in a woods near Brevort, 20 miles north of St. Ignace. They had abandoned Payne’s automobile, the guns with it, near Brevort. Will Ask Murder Warrants Sheriff Henry S. Decker of Wood county, Wisconsin, where Payne died, said he would ask murder warrants against the youths on the basis of a statement by Coroner P. E. Wright that a blow on the head, in addition to excitement which induced the heart attack, was a contributing factor in Payne’s death. Bluett said he believed Payne suffered the heart attack before being struck. He said he had not been able to see in the unlighted automobile and was not sure which youth struck Payne. In addition to the original automobile theft charge and the possibility of the murder charge, the youths are subject to a second automobile theft charge for taking Payne’s automobile, a federal charge of escaping across a state line after commission of a felony and assault and a charge of assaulting Bluett.
Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., Nov. 14—(AP)—Nelson Pasha and Robert Noel, youths who escaped from Wisconsin Rapids officials last Friday night in a struggle after which Chief Roland S. Payne died, were arraigned in justice court today on charges of automobile theft. District Attorney Fulton Collipp of neighboring Adams county, where Payne died, said he was studying the case and would issue warrants against the boys but that there was a question whether Pasha’s age would necessitate his case being taken into juvenile court. When brought before Justice of the Peace George C. Jacobson, Pasha insisted he was only 14 years old. Noel said he was 17. They asked for a preliminary hearing, which was scheduled for November 22. Bail was fixed at $2,500 each. Pasha’s home is at Mosinee, Wis., Noel’s at Dearborn, Mich. Dr. P. E. Rice, Wood county coroner, declared today his examination showed that a head injury suffered by Chief Payne contributed to his death. Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., Nov. 14—(AP)—Sheriff Henry Becker said that Nelson Pasha and Robert Noel would be arraigned in justice court today on the only warrant against them, charging them with theft of a car from a Wisconsin Rapids garage. The two were returned late last night from St. Ignace, Mich., where they waived extradition after their apprehension. It was the car theft charge which led to the death last Friday night of Chief of Police Roland S. Payne of Wisconsin Rapids. Payne and Deputy Sheriff Cliff Bluett were returning the boys from Plymouth, Ind., when they were overpowered near Adams, Wis. Payne died in the fight. Noel last night admitted he was 17. Pasha insisted he was 14. An attorney said Pasha’s case would be pleaded on a juvenile basis. Becker said the justice court arraignment was to permit holding the boys in case more serious charges are filed. Officials of neighboring Adams county, in which Payne died, have taken no formal action as yet. Upon their return, the boys said they drove south first, to Portage Wis., then turned north and crossed the Michigan border at Hurley. They had $93 when apprehended. Payne and Bluett lost $108 in the fracas. Noel was morose, Pasha more philosophical. Both denied any shots were fired in the fight.
FRIENDSHIP, Wis., Nov. 16.—(U.P.)—Robert Noel, Dearborn, Mich., and Nelson Pasha, Mosinee, Wis., were expected to be brought to Friendship today or tomorrow for questioning regarding a scuffle in which one of two Wisconsin Rapids officers died. Dist. Atty. Fulton Collipp said that he would withhold decision on what charges are to be made until after he has questioned the two. “It appears that some people have been trying to make the decision for me in advance,” Collipp said, referring to announcements from other sources that some degree of murder charge would be brought against Noel. Held Under $2,500 Bond. “I understand,” Collipp added, “that Pasha’s age has been established at 14 years, which of course would make him subject to juvenile authorities. Noel, being older, is subject to regular court procedure.” Pending further action in the case, the youths were held under $2,500 bond on a charge of stealing an automobile from a Wisconsin Rapids garage. This was the charge on which they were being returned to Wisconsin Rapids on Nov. 10 when they made a sudden break for freedom about 12 miles south of Adams, Wis. Police Chief Roland S. Payne, 65, died, apparently of a heart attack during a struggle with the boys. They left his body handcuffed to Undersheriff Cliff Bluett. Subsequent examination of Payne’s body by Dr. P. E. Wright revealed a bruise on the top of the officers’ head which Wright said might have contributed to his death.
WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis.—(AP)—A writ of habeas corpus which sought the release from the Wood county jail of Nelson Pasha, 14-year-old Mosinee boy, was denied late yesterday by County Judge Frank W. Calkins. Pasha and Robert Noel, 17, Dearborn, Mich., escaped from Chief of Police Roland S. Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett near Adams, Wis., a week ago while they were being taken to Wisconsin Rapids after their arrest in Plymouth, Ind., on an automobile theft charge. Payne died in the escape fight. Attorney Walter Graunke of Wausau, who had sought Pasha’s release, successfully requested that Pasha’s juvenile hearing on a delinquency charge be postponed until next week. Noel is awaiting a hearing Nov. 22 on the car theft charge.
WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis., Nov. 18—(AP)—District Attorney Fulton Collipp of Adams county disclosed he probably would come to Wisconsin Rapids next Monday to question Nelson Pasha and Robert Noel, boy principals in the escape from two officers near Adams, Wis., Nov. 10, in which Chief of Police Roland S. Payne of Wisconsin Rapids died. Arraignment Postponed. Collipp said at Friendship yesterday that questioning and arraignment of Noel, 17-year-old Dearborn, Mich., youth, had been postponed at the request of his attorney, Walter Graunke of Wausau. Wood county (Wisconsin Rapids) charges against the boys concern only the original automobile case which led to their arrest at Plymouth, Ind. The boys were taken into custody again last Sunday near St. Ignace, Mich.
Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. —(U.P.)— District Attorney Fulton Collipp of Adams county said last night that Robert Noel, 17, Dearborn, Mich., will be arraigned at Friendship tomorrow on charges of murder, assault while armed, armed robbery and theft of an automobile. Collipp announced this action against Noel after conferring with Wood county authorities. Noel will be taken to the arraignment at Friendship with Nelson Pasha, 14, his companion when they escaped in Adams county Nov. 10 from Police Chief R. S. Payne of Wisconsin Rapids and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett in a struggle which ended in death for Payne. Physicians said he died of a heart attack, although a bruise on his head might have contributed to his death. Pasha is being held only as a delinquent juvenile because of his age. Noel’s attorney, Walter Graunke, Wausau, said he would ask a preliminary hearing for the youth on the murder charge to which he would plead innocent. Pasha and Noel were captured in a woods near St. Ignace, Mich., to which they had fled after the escape.
Friendship, Wis. —(AP)— Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich., pleaded innocent in county court today to a charge of murder in the death Nov. 10 of Police Chief Roland S. Payne of Wisconsin Rapids. Payne died during a struggle near here with Noel and a 14-year-old boy who escaped while being taken to Wisconsin Rapids for questioning in an automobile theft case. Noel also pleaded innocent to charges of armed robbery, assault while armed, larceny of an automobile and driving a car without the owner’s consent—all in connection with his escape from Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett of neighboring Wood county. A preliminary hearing was waived. Judge Charles Gilman bound Noel over to circuit court for trial. Arrangements were made for Circuit Judge Clayton F. Van Pelt, of Fond du Lac, to hear the case here Dec. 1. Noel’s 14-year-old companion is awaiting a hearing on a delinquency charge in juvenile court.
Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.—(INS)—Wisconsin’s strangest murder case will go to trial here Friday when Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich., will be prosecuted for the “heart attack” slaying of Police Chief Roland S. Payne. Payne died from a heart attack in a struggle with Noel and Nelson Pasha, 14, of Mosinee, Wis., while he and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett were returning the boys to Wisconsin Rapids from Indiana to face car theft charges. Pasha’s case will be handled by juvenile authorities, but Noel must face first-degree murder charges. Sheriff Bluett’s statement that one boys opened fire on the officers in the fight were denied by Noel but police said he admitted having struck Payne on the head with a flashlight. The youths fled into Michigan where they were captured by state police after an all-night chase through an upper peninsula swamp.
Friendship—(AP)—The trial of Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich., on a charge of murder in the death of Police Chief R. S. Payne of Wisconsin Rapids, has been postponed until some time next week, Adams County authorities said today. Noel, who pleaded innocent, has waived a jury and will be tried by Circuit Judge Clayton F. Van Pelt, of Fond du Lac. The youth also pleaded innocent to charges of assault while armed, armed robbery, larceny of an automobile, and driving a car without the owner’s consent—all in connection with his escape, together with a 14-year-old boy, from Payne and another officer while the boys were being taken to Wisconsin Rapids Nov. 10 for questioning in an automobile theft case.
Robert Noel, charged with murder in connection with the death last November 10 of Chief of Police R. S. Payne, will face Circuit Judge Clayton Van Pelt at Friendship Friday morning. Noel, who escaped from custody of Chief Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett while being returned with his juvenile companion, Nelson Pasha, from Indiana to face charges of car theft here, has been held in Wood county jail since his arraignment at Friendship November 22. Faces Other Charges In addition to the general murder charge, Noel is held for armed robbery, assault while armed with intent to rob and murder, larceny of the officers’ car and operating a vehicle without consent of the owner. The 17-year-old Michigan boy will be taken to Friendship with Pasha. Judge Van Pelt is expected to hear testimony of the two youths and Undersheriff Bluett. A plea of guilty, probably to an adjusted complaint, is expected. Noel waived a preliminary examination on the charges. Pasha’s Case Pending Pasha is held in the custody of Deputy Sheriff Ben Hanneman at his home. As a juvenile, he could not be confined in the jail which lacks proper facilities for young prisoners. Disposition of Pasha as a delinquent juvenile will be made in Wood county court next Wednesday, authorities indicated today. Noel will be represented by Atty. Walter Graunke of Wausau. Dist. Atty. Fulton Collipp of Adams county will appear for the state.
FRIENDSHIP, Wis. — (U.P.) — Robert Noel, 17, Dearborn, Mich., was sentenced Friday to four concurrent terms ranging from 1 to 10 years in Green Bay state reformatory for his part in an escape which resulted in death of Chief of Police R. S. Payne, 65, Wisconsin Rapids, on Nov. 10. Circuit Judge Clayton F. Van Pelt, Fond du Lac, dismissed a murder charge against the youth at the request of Dist. Atty. Fulton Collipp, Adams county. Noel pleaded guilty to four charges and Judge Van Pelt imposed concurrent terms of 3 to 10 years for armed robbery, 1 to 10 years for armed assault with intent to rob or murder, and 1 to 5 years each for larceny of the officer’s automobile and for driving the machine without the owner’s consent. Was Neglected Defense Atty. Walter Graunke, Wausau, urged the court to extend clemency to Noel on the ground that his had been a neglected childhood. Van Pelt criticized Noel’s unruly conduct severely, but added that he would withhold the heavier penalty which might have been imposed for possible conviction on the murder count. Procedure before the court was brief. Undersheriff Cliff Bluett, Wood county, described to the court what happened when Noel and a companion, Nelson Pasha, 14, Mosinee, Wis., escaped from Payne and Bluett as the two officers were returning them to Wisconsin Rapids from Plymouth, Ind., on a car theft charge. Payne died in a scuffle with the youths during which one shot was fired south of Adams, Wis. The youths disarmed the officers and left them handcuffed together beside the road, pausing as they fled to notify a tavernkeeper of the officers’ whereabouts. Physicians who examined Payne decided that he died of a heart attack. But one heald onto that the bruise on the top o fhis head might of contributed.
Wisconsin Rapids—(AP)—A 14-year-old Mosinee boy, who was involved in a fight Nov. 10 with Police Chief R. S. Payne during which the chief died, today was under a juvenile court order of commitment to the State Industrial School at Waukesha until he is 21. The order was signed yesterday by County Judge Frank W. Calkins. At Waupaca today, Circuit Judge Herman J. Severson denied a motion by counsel for the boy to delay commitment. The youth was arrested with Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich., who is under sentence of one to 10 years on charges of armed robbery, armed assault and driving a car without the owner’s consent. While being returned from Plymouth, Ind., to face an automobile theft charge, the youths escaped from Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett. Payne died of a heart attack while struggling with the boys.
Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., Dec. 18—(AP)—A 14-year-old Mosinee boy, who was involved in a fight November 10 with Police Chief R. S. Payne during which the chief died, today was under a juvenile court order of commitment to the state industrial school at Waukesha until he is 21. The order was signed Friday by County Judge Frank W. Calkins. At Waupaca Saturday, Circuit Judge Herman J. Severson denied a motion by counsel for the boy to delay commitment. The youth was arrested with Robert Noel, 17, of Dearborn, Mich., who is under sentence of one to 10 years on charges of armed robbery, armed assault and driving a car without the owner’s consent. While being returned from Plymouth, Ind., to face an automobile theft charge, the youths escaped from Payne and Deputy Sheriff Cliff Bluett. Payne died of a heart attack while struggling with the boys.
Labeled “one of the toughest young fugitives in Wisconsin” by law officers here, Robert Herman Noel, 22, who bludgeoned the late Police Chief R. S. Payne in a getaway fight which resulted in the chief’s death November 19, 1939, escaped last night from the state prison’s No. 1 farm at Waupun, Wis. Officers here, remembering Noel’s record, were amazed that the youthful desperado had been allowed farm liberty and the opportunity thus offered for escape. Noel, whose home was at Dearborn, Mich., and who had once lived in Mosinee, Wis., was apprehended in Plymouth, Ind., early in November of 1939 with Nelson Pasha, then a boy of 14, of Mosinee, the two admitting that they had stolen an automobile from the Dawe-Bevins garage here. Norbert M. Daly, insurance man, rode to Plymouth with Chief Payne and Undersheriff Cliff Bluett in Sheriff Henry J. Becker’s car, Daly returning with the stolen car, the officers bringing Pasha and Noel in the sheriff’s car. Shooting Starts It was just 15 miles south of Adams, on a lonely stretch of highway at about 8:30 p. m., when a shot rang out in the car and a bullet passed through the coat of Bluett, who was driving. The two officers were in the front seat and the boys, not manacled, were in the back seat. As the shot was heard, the police chief made an exclamation and then dove into the rear seat to get the youth with a gun. Bluett quickly brought the car to a halt—they had been traveling over 60 miles per hour in their effort to reach home at an early hour—and then he, too, joined in the mad scramble in the rear seat. Finally Pasha, flourishing a gun, escaped from the car and held up the officers and the two boys handcuffed the officers, took their guns and some $50 in cash and drove north toward Adams. Leave Officers in Ditch As they rode along, Chief Payne said, “Boys, boys, you know what this means to you,” and those admonitory words were the last he ever said. Shortly he gasped, slumped over against Bluett who was handcuffed to him. Near Jack Lane’s tavern the boys helped Bluett drag the police chief from the car, left the two officers manacled beside the road. At Lane’s the two boys stopped, told Lane “there’s a couple fellows back there who look like they been— See—ROBERT NOEL—Page 8 Robert Noel (Continued from Page One) hit by a car,” then they wheeled around, headed south again, passing the two officers, one lying and one sitting, beside the road. Lane quickly came and he got word to Adams and Wood county officers, so that 15 minutes later police radios throughout Wisconsin and northern Michigan were retelling descriptions of the boys and Sheriff Becker’s stolen Ford. In the meantime, Bluett and Payne were taken to a doctor’s office in Adams, where the police chief was pronounced dead from a heart attack, of which a blow from a gun butt on the head was listed as a “contributory cause.” Bluett, still locked to the wrist of the dead chief, returned here where the locks were severed. He counted himself lucky, for two wild shots were fired in that car that night, one passing through his coat. Surround Boys in Michigan That was a Friday night, and on the following Sunday, November 12, the two boys were surrounded by officers in a wild bit of Michigan forest in the Peninsula country, 20 miles north of St. Ignace. They waived extradition and were returned here on Monday, November 13. On December 8, in circuit court for Adams county at Friendship, Noel pleaded guilty to armed robbery, assault while armed with intent to rob and murder, larceny of a car and operating an automobile without the owner’s consent. Drop Murder Charge Fulton Collipp, Adams county district attorney, moved for dismissal of an earlier charge of murder and the youth, upon advice of his attorney, Walter Graunke of Wausau who pleaded for leniency, was sentenced by Judge Clayton F. Van Pelt to serve 3 to 10 years in the state reformatory at Green Bay. Only Bluett testified about that wild night of November 10 and Noel, who did not take the stand on his own behalf, wept while the judge imposed sentence. When Judge Van Pelt explained that he was being exceedingly lenient in his sentence, he quizzed the boy, asking him why he and Pasha had tried to escape the officers. Said Noel briefly, “The closer we got to Wisconsin Rapids the scareder we got.” When the reformatory doors closed on Noel he dropped quickly into prison routine and out of the news until a year ago, when he stole a piece of gas pipe, backed two guards into a narrow corridor and hit one of the guards over the head in what purported to be an attempt at escape. Transferred to Waupun Too tough even for Green Bay, he was promptly transferred to Waupun, where he remained until the prison authorities late last night broadcast the news of his escape. Seventeen years old at the time of the Adams county affair, Noel is now 22, is 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighs 136 pounds, has blue eyes, brown hair, light complexion and is termed “slim and youthful in appearance.” Where the boys got the gun which they used in their escape was never clearly learned. The youths had been searched and fingerprinted at Plymouth, Ind. At Aurora, Ill. and Sauk City, Wis., where they and the officers stopped for lunch, they were constantly under guard. The handcuffs they took from the glove compartment of Becker’s car.
Robert Noel, 22, who escaped from prison farm No. 1 on Oct. 15, was recaptured Saturday in Tucimcari, N. Mex., according to word received by Wisconsin State prison officials. Whether Noel will be returned to the prison immediately is not known, as he may be held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the charge of transporting a stolen automobile across state lines. Noel, whose home was in Dearborn, Mich., originally was sentenced to the state reformatory from Milwaukee county on an automobile theft charge. He was transferred to the state prison about two years ago after he had attacked a reformatory guard in attempting to escape. At the time of his escape he was described as one of the toughest young criminals in the prison.
5A. The Daily Tribune (Wisconsin Rapids, WI) — November 13, 1939, p. 1 (Payne funeral) Mayor Asks Business Places to Close for Funeral of Chief Payne Law enforcement authorities from all parts of Wisconsin and the middle west joined with Wisconsin Rapids citizens Sunday and today in paying tribute to the late Roland S. Payne, chief of police, as Mayor W. T. Nobles issued a proclamation requesting local business places to close for two hours tomorrow afternoon during public funeral services in Lincoln field house. For an hour preceding the public rites, between 1 and 2 p. m., the body of the late head of the police department will lie in state in the field house where services, conducted by the Rev. George C. Westphal, will be held before an assembly expected to include some of the most prominent police officers in the state. Mayor's Proclamation Mayor Nobles' proclamation is as follows: "I, W. T. Nobles, mayor of Wisconsin Rapids, do hereby request that in so far as it is possible to do so, that all public places and places of business close during the hours from 1:30 to 3:30 o'clock, out of respect for our late chief of police, R. S. Payne, and to enable all those who so desire to attend the funeral services to be conducted at the field house, commencing at 2 p. m." Floral tributes and messages of condolences from many of the chief's friends were being received today and preparations were being made for one of the largest funerals in the city's history. Wisconsin Rapids service clubs and other city organizations offered aid to the family and the police department in conducting the services in the field house. Name Pallbearers Members of the Wisconsin Rapids police force will serve as active pallbearers and officers of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police association, of which Chief Payne was long an active member, will be honorary pallbearers, together with members of the local fire and police commission. Private rites for members of the family and relatives will be held at 10 a. m. in the Krohn and Berard funeral chapel. The body will be taken to the field house at 12:30 p. m. and the relatives will again gather at the Krohn and Berard funeral chapel at 1:40 p. m. before proceeding to the field house. To Deliver Eulogies Eulogies will be delivered during the public services by Attys. John Roberts and M. S. King of this city, both close friends of the veteran chief. The cortege will move to Forest Hill cemetery following the last rites. Organizations which today planned to attend the funeral in a body included the Kiwanis club, of which Chief Payne was a charter member; the Wisconsin Rapids school boy safety patrol which had been organized and enthusiastically fostered by the late chief; the fire and police commission; and city officials and aldermen. Mayor Pays Tribute Mayor Nobles, a life-long friend of the late chief, said: "In the passing of R. S. Payne there has been removed from our midst an esteemed friend of all and a worthy, honorable citizen. His reputation as an efficient police chief and law enforcement officer extended beyond the borders of our state. The uniform courtesy which characterized him in all of his relations of life endeared him to a large circle of good and faithful friends and to his associates and brother members of the force by all of whom he is justly held in grateful remembrance. "He was keenly devoted to and loved the work which was uppermost in his mind. He was a most capable, cheerful and courteous official and he often told me that one of his aims in life was to assist the younger growing generation, whom he loved so well, in solving the problems that confronted them from day to day; and it is sad to think this confidence reposed in youth was upon this occasion so ruthlessly betrayed. "He had the respect and confidence of all of his fellow officers on the force and he in turn was fair with each and every one in his dealings, and through this cooperation and confidence the city of Wisconsin Rapids today enjoys the reputation of having one of the most capable, efficient and courteous police forces in the state of Wisconsin. "His was a life well spent in faithful service as a citizen and a public servant to the community in which he resided and loved so well, and his position in the department and in the affections of the people will be hard to fill. "He loved his home and his family, and I wish therefore to extend to the members of his family my heartfelt sympathy in these hours of their bereavement, and trust that the Divine Providence which gives us strength at such times to bear our burdens patiently will assist and comfort them." Lauded by Conway President Byron B. Conway of the Wisconsin Rapids Community club said: "The city of Wisconsin Rapids and its surrounding community is deeply saddened by the loss of our beloved 'Tod' Payne. The good that Tod did will live after him. His unusual ability as an officer kept the community free of major crime. To me it seems that of equal importance is the lack of juvenile crime in this community. "I think that Tod Payne's understanding of young boys is the reason that we have had so little juvenile crime. Many a time youngsters who made the first mistake were brought into the chief's office and given a talking to that straightened them out and started them on the way to useful citizenship. "We will have difficulty replacing Tod. His family can not replace him. I urge that all citizens of Wisconsin Rapids who can possibly do so attend the services to be held for Chief Payne tomorrow afternoon, and I urge that all business places that can possibly do so close during the hour of service so that the employees may attend." Other Messages F. E. Pooler, captain of the Milwaukee railroad police department: "You have our heartfelt sympathy in this hour of your bereavement. I wish we might find words with which to express our sorrow at your loss, which is also ours. To have enjoyed the friendship of your husband, we hold one of the greatest privileges of our lives." E. J. Bodah, mayor of Marshfield: "My sympathy goes out to you at the untimely death of your husband and father. I did not know Mr. Payne very long but during that time I came to know him very well, and to my belief, an upright man of such strong character will be hard to replace by the city of Wisconsin Rapids." W. H. Ludwig, Marshfield leader in promotion of state police radio system: "... You have lost a true and loving husband and the community a faithful law enforcement officer, honest, fearless, and one who could and would express his opinion regardless of the opposition even of his friends ... 'Tod' spoke a language a child could understand and a man should be able to understand. This entire community is indebted to 'Tod' for his work not only in his peaceful handling of strikes and labor disputes, but in his energetic work or **[sic]** organization of highway safety campaigns as well as his enforcement of law and order." ---
5B. The Daily Tribune (Wisconsin Rapids, WI) — November 13, 1939, p. 1 (manhunt, continued) Fugitives (Continued from Page One) […] put to work on a farm under supervision of Michigan parole and probation authorities. Pasha has no record as far as is known. Officers here calculated the pair had travelled more than 500 miles during their flight which lasted just 24 hours before they were seen and chased by a Michigan state trooper near St. Ignace. Michigan state police had been notified to watch for the car after it was seen early Saturday at Tomahawk. Trooper Mike Lalich of the St. Ignace detachment detected the car as it sped by him shortly after dark Saturday night. He gave chase, and after 20 miles the boys apparently abandoned the car and fled into the woods. They left behind them two revolvers and a quantity of food. Posse Surrounds Woods Lalich and the Michigan officers responded. Twenty-four deer hunters and sheriff's officers were notified and the area into which the youths fled was surrounded by heavily-armed men. Through the night, Pasha and Noel eluded the cordon. Early Sunday a deer hunter saw Pasha shivering over a small fire about 75 yards from a highway. He notified the posse and Pasha surrendered without a fight. His companion was found a short distance away about 15 minutes afterward. Temperatures in the 20's, accompanied by a snowfall, had left the boys weakened. They were dressed in light clothes and said they had built fires occasionally during the night to ward off the numbing cold. Bloodhounds on Trail Three bloodhounds in charge of Undersheriff John Reindl of Menominee, Mich., were on the trail of the boys throughout the night and were almost upon the fugitives ready to close in when Pasha was sighted. The youths had no weapons on them when they surrendered. Their arraignment at St. Ignace this morning was scheduled to be before Circuit Judge Victor D. Sprague of Cheboygan. Sheriff Becker informed his office here about 1 p. m. Sunday that difficulty in obtaining custody was expected. The officers with the two boys were expected back here tonight. Undersheriff Cliff Bluett, who with Chief Payne acting as a constable was returning Noel and Pasha here from Plymouth when the two made their break about 15 miles south of Adams on Highway 13, said this morning that the chief doubtless suffered a heart seizure as he went over the seat to grapple with the boys in the tonneau of the car. "I am convinced now," the undersheriff said, "that the heart attack came. It is the only explanation to account for the fact that Pasha was able to get out of the car with the gun. The chief seemed to be lying on Pasha with Pasha wriggling out from under him." Chief Seemed Dazed After Pasha, smaller of the two, got out of the car and turned a gun on the officers, the undersheriff said the chief sat up in the seat as though dazed completely. Chief Payne died minutes later after the officers had been handcuffed together and were being driven away by the boys. Dist. Atty. Charles M. Pors of Wood county conferred with Michigan authorities Saturday night, authorizing payment for the use of bloodhounds to effect capture of the youths. He also authorized two Wisconsin Rapids police officers to accompany Becker. Pors said at Marshfield today he had not yet determined the course he would take in the prosecution of the fugitives. ---
This case is the flip side of "The Confession" (Episode 3, case file OH-1928-005). In Canton, the question was whether a husband's cruel sentence could legally cause his wife's suicide — "moral murder." Here, it's whether two boys' armed escape can legally cause a 65-year-old chief's heart attack — felony murder. Two jurisdictions, eleven years apart, circling the same line: when a death has a trigger but no killer's hand, what does the law do?
Both times, the answer was the same. Canton's grand jury ignored the case; Adams County's own district attorney stood up and dismissed his murder count. Two deaths, two prosecutions that walked away — and in both files, the one person closest to the dying said the harder, more honest thing: in Canton, a husband who admitted his brutal remark; near Adams, a survivor who swore the heart attack came before any blow.
One more thread: in both cases, the record can't agree on its own details — Hutter vs. Horner there; Wright vs. Rice vs. Roseberry, two shots vs. none, here. The contradictions aren't errors to hide. They're what an eighty-year-old story looks like up close.
Click any exhibit to open the original scan.
First-degree murder against Robert Noel, 17 — a felony-murder theory resting on the coroner's finding that a head blow, "in addition to excitement which induced the heart attack," was a contributory cause of Chief Payne's death. Plus armed robbery, armed assault with intent to rob or murder, auto larceny, and driving without the owner's consent.
December 8, 1939, at Friendship, before Circuit Judge Clayton F. Van Pelt. Noel waived a jury; D.A. Fulton Collipp moved to dismiss the murder count and the court granted it. Collipp's stated reasoning was never printed — the likeliest read is the cause-of-death problem: a body two doctors called "unmarked," a disputed "contributory" blow, and the only eyewitness, Undersheriff Bluett, on record that the heart attack came first.
Noel pleaded guilty to the four remaining counts — four concurrent terms of 3 to 10 years at the Green Bay reformatory. Van Pelt called himself "exceedingly lenient" while criticizing Noel's conduct severely; defense attorney Walter Graunke had pleaded a "neglected childhood." Only Bluett testified. Noel wept as sentence was imposed. Asked why they ran: "The closer we got, the scareder we got."
Never faced the murder question — his age, "established at 14," routed him to juvenile court. Committed by County Judge Frank W. Calkins to the State Industrial School at Waukesha until age 21; Circuit Judge Herman J. Severson denied a motion to delay.
No one was ever convicted of Roland Payne's death. The state charged it, investigated it hard, and let it go — it wasn't murder, and it wasn't nothing.
Noel — a 1943 gas-pipe attack on a reformatory guard, transfer to Waupun as "too tough even for Green Bay," escape from the prison farm October 15, 1944, recapture at Tucumcari, New Mexico ~November 25, 1944, with talk of federal auto-transport charges. After that the paper trail ends. Pasha — released ~1946; by Trevor's own (lightly sourced) later research, he cleaned his life up, stayed out of trouble, and lived a full, decent life, never resurfacing in the crime record. The chief's philosophy — that a boy who makes a terrible mistake can still be saved — got both of its answers, one from each boy.
The complete verbatim podcast script, preserved exactly as recorded.
The Death of Chief Roland "Tod" Payne · Adams County, Wisconsin · November 1939
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Slow pacing. Night. No music yet — just the narrator's voice. Let the dark do the work.]
Picture a car on a dark stretch of Wisconsin highway. It's a Friday night — the tenth of November, 1939 — and the car is moving fast, better than sixty miles an hour, north on Highway 13, about fifteen miles south of a little town called Adams. Two men are in the front seat. Two boys are in the back. And the two men up front are lawmen, driving those boys home — and every one of them just wants to get where they're going before it gets any later.
It is, by every measure, the most routine kind of night. A prisoner run. You pick up your prisoners, you drive them back, you book them, you go home to bed.
And then, somewhere on that black highway at about half past eight, a shot goes off inside the car.
The man behind the wheel feels the bullet pass through his coat. The other lawman — the older one, in the passenger seat — shouts something, and throws himself over the seat back into the dark, grabbing for the boy with the gun. The car lurches to a stop. Both officers are in the back now, wrestling two teenagers for control of a pistol.
And the boys win.
One of them comes up with the gun and turns it on both men. And then, calm as anything, the two boys take the officers' own handcuffs and lock the two of them together — wrist to wrist. They take their guns. They take the cash out of their pockets. And the older officer, the one who had gone over the seat, says just one thing to them. He says: "Boys. Boys. You know what this means to you."
And then he stops talking. And he sags, all his weight, against the man he's handcuffed to.
The boys drag the two officers out of the car and leave them there — cuffed together in the roadside dark. Then they climb into the front seat and drive off, north, into the night.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Beat.]
And here's the part I can't get past. A minute up the road, the boys pull over at a little roadside tavern. They lean in and tell the man behind the bar that there's a couple of fellows back down the road who look like they've been hit by a car. And then they drive on.
Within about fifteen minutes, police radios in two states were crackling with their descriptions. Within a week, a prosecutor was going to stand up in a Wisconsin courtroom and try to prove that what happened in that car was murder. And almost ninety years later, I still can't tell you for certain that it was.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand what happened on that highway — and the question it left behind, back there in the dark past those taillights — we have to start with the two men in the front seat. With the one who lived it and could tell it. And with the man he was handcuffed to — an old small-town police chief named Tod Payne, who had spent his whole life trying to keep boys exactly like the two in that back seat out of trouble.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Transition music into the intro.]
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you're a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe — that way, when we drop a new episode, you'll be the first to know. And come check us out at Section29.com, where I post a lot of the cool things I dig up for each episode, including the original newspaper clippings and the photos of the people involved. This one has a great stack of them, so go take a look. All the links are down in the description below.
Now — parts of this story may contain opinions and speculation, and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to believe it happened, built out of the newspaper record and the public documents that survive. And where I'm reading between the lines, I'll do my best to tell you that I'm doing it. These stories depict violent crimes and may be a trigger for some listeners, so listener discretion is advised. This one isn't gory — but it is the story of a man who died doing his job, and of two kids, one of them just fourteen years old, whose lives came apart in a single night. Keep that in mind as we go.
And I want to set the scene for you, because of when this happens. It's November of 1939. And if you know your history, you know what that means. Two months earlier, Germany had invaded Poland, and the Second World War had begun. When I pulled these newspaper clippings, this story I'm about to tell you was sitting right there on the front page — crowded in next to headlines about German planes bombing islands off Scotland, air-raid sirens over Paris, and a war about to break out in Finland. The whole world was tilting toward the deadliest thing that ever happened to it. And in a quiet corner of central Wisconsin, in the middle of deer season, a small-town police chief got in a car to drive two boys home. And he never made it back.
Let me tell you, this story has everything. It has a beloved old lawman whose entire life's work was keeping kids out of trouble. It has two teenagers, a stolen car, and a five-hundred-mile run for freedom that ends with bloodhounds closing in through a frozen Northwoods swamp. It has a shot fired in the dark, a chief who goes down, and two officers left handcuffed together in a roadside ditch. It has a funeral that shut down an entire city. And it has a question that a prosecutor, a coroner, and a whole grand jury wrestled with — a question I'm honestly not sure anybody ever answered: whether those two boys could be charged with murder for the way that man died.
All of this happened near a little town called Adams, in central Wisconsin, in November of 1939. And almost nobody talks about it today. So let's fix that.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Warmer here. This is the man we're going to lose. Take your time.]
So let me tell you about the man in that passenger seat. Because the whole weight of this story rests on who he was.
His name was Roland S. Payne — but I don't think anybody in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, ever called him Roland. To that whole town, he was "Tod." Tod Payne. He was sixty-five years old, and he'd been a police officer there for twenty-seven years — the last twenty-one of them as chief. Think about what that means. If you were a grown adult in Wisconsin Rapids in 1939, Tod Payne had been the chief for basically your entire life. He wasn't just a cop. He was a fixture — the kind of small-town chief who knew everybody's name, and everybody knew his.
And here's the thing about Tod Payne — the thing that matters more than anything else in this whole story, so I need you to hold onto it. Of everything a police chief does, the thing Tod Payne was known for, the thing people loved him for, was kids. Boys, specifically. Boys who got into trouble.
This was a paper-mill town on the Wisconsin River, in the tail end of the Great Depression, and like every town in America it had its share of boys who ran a little wild — boys who swiped things, boys who got into scrapes. And Tod Payne had a whole philosophy about those boys. He believed a kid who made his first mistake wasn't a criminal yet. He believed you could still reach him.
The president of the local community club, a man named Byron Conway, put it about as plainly as you can after Tod was gone. He said Payne's understanding of young boys was the very reason the town had so little juvenile crime to begin with. "Many a time," Conway said, "youngsters who made the first mistake were brought into the chief's office and given a talking-to that straightened them out and started them on the way to useful citizenship."
That was Tod Payne. A boy would get hauled in for something stupid, and instead of throwing the book at him, the chief would sit him down and talk to him. And it worked often enough that the whole town believed in it. One of the tributes after he died, from a man named Ludwig, said Tod "spoke a language a child could understand." He'd even built up the local school-boy safety patrol himself — the kids who help the little ones cross the street — because he loved having those boys around and loved giving them something to be proud of.
And it was a family thing, too. His own daughter, Lola, worked at the department as the desk sergeant. Picture that. You walk into the Wisconsin Rapids police station, and the chief is Tod Payne, and the sergeant sitting at the front desk is his daughter. It was that kind of operation. That kind of town.
And I'll be honest with you — the more I read about Tod Payne, the more this one got under my skin. Because here is a man who spent twenty-one years building his whole reputation on one simple idea: that a boy who makes a mistake can still be saved. That you talk to him. That you don't give up on him. Hold onto that. That's who he was.
So how does a sixty-five-year-old chief of police, a man who spent his whole life keeping boys out of trouble, end up in a car in the dark, on a lonely highway, driving two teenage boys the length of the state? To answer that, we have to leave Tod Payne for a minute. We have to back up four days — to a Tuesday night, and a car that went missing off a quiet street in Wisconsin Rapids.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Pick the pace back up. This is the setup — keep it moving.]
On a Tuesday night, the seventh of November, 1939, somebody stole a car in Wisconsin Rapids. It was parked on Eighth Avenue North, in front of a house, and it belonged to a local garage — the Dawe-Bevins garage. Sometime after six in the evening, it was just gone.
Now, in the scheme of things, a stolen car is a small crime. Nobody's hurt. It's the kind of thing Tod Payne had built a career on handling quietly. But this one didn't stay in Wisconsin Rapids. Because whoever took that car was running.
And here's who took it. Two boys. The older one was named Robert Noel — seventeen years old, from Dearborn, Michigan. The younger one was Nelson Pasha, from Mosinee, Wisconsin, up the road a ways — and when they asked Pasha his age, he told them he was fourteen. Fourteen. The way the papers pieced it together, Noel had come out to Mosinee to visit some relatives, and that's where he met Pasha, and the two of them fell in together. They came into Wisconsin Rapids by train. They took that car. And they pointed it south, and they ran.
They didn't get far. Because these were two broke kids in the middle of the Depression, and about three hundred miles later, down in Plymouth, Indiana, they ran out of the two things you can't run without. They ran out of money, and they ran out of gasoline. And that's where the law caught up to them — sitting in a stolen car with an empty tank and empty pockets. The sheriff down in Plymouth held onto them and put in a call up to Wisconsin.
So that's the errand. That's the whole reason for the trip. Two teenage car thieves, stranded in Indiana, need to be brought home to answer for a stolen car. And the man who went to go get them was Chief Tod Payne.
He didn't go alone. He went with the Wood County undersheriff — a man named Cliff Bluett — and an insurance man named Daly, and they drove down in the county sheriff's own car. Daly's job was to drive the recovered stolen car back. The two lawmen would bring the boys.
And I want you to notice how carefully they did this, because it matters. Down in Plymouth, the boys were searched. They were fingerprinted. On the long drive back north, the officers stopped for lunch — once at Aurora, Illinois, once at Sauk City, Wisconsin — and at every stop, the boys were kept under guard. When it came time to secure them, the handcuffs came out of the glove compartment of the sheriff's car. These were experienced lawmen doing everything by the book, with two kids who, as far as anyone knew, were just a couple of broke runaways who'd swiped a car.
There was only one thing they didn't account for. One thing that, to this day, nobody has ever been able to explain.
Somewhere on that drive — searched, fingerprinted, watched at every stop — one of those two boys had a gun. A loaded pistol. And nobody knew it was there.
Where did it come from? How did two kids who'd been frisked and printed and guarded the whole way still have a pistol on them in the back seat? The honest answer is: no one ever figured it out. It was "never clearly learned," as one of the papers put it. It's one of the small, nagging mysteries of this case that just never got solved.
But it was there. And about fifteen miles south of Adams, in the dark, on Highway 13 — it went off.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: This is the center of gravity. Slow, tense. Let the quiet before it sit.]
So now we're back in the car. The one from the very beginning.
It's Friday night, November tenth. They've been driving all day — down to Indiana, back up through Illinois, into Wisconsin. Everybody's tired. Everybody wants to be home. Cliff Bluett is behind the wheel, doing better than sixty on Highway 13 to make up time. Tod Payne is beside him in the front seat. And the two boys are in the back, quiet.
They're about fifteen miles south of Adams. It's around half past eight, and it is full dark, and it is cold — this is deer season in central Wisconsin, the nights already down in the twenties.
And then a gun goes off inside the car.
Bluett feels it before he understands it — the bullet tears through his coat as he's driving. For half a second, nothing makes sense. And then everything happens at once. Tod Payne — sixty-five years old — shouts something, and he does the thing a lifetime of being a cop tells him to do. He throws himself up and over the seat back, into the dark of that back seat, reaching for the boy with the gun. Bluett stamps on the brake, gets the car stopped, and piles in after him.
And now picture this. A car stopped dead on a black highway. Two grown lawmen, in the back seat, in the dark, wrestling two teenagers for a loaded pistol.
And the lawmen lose.
It's the little one who comes up with the gun. Pasha. The one who said he was fourteen. Somehow he squirms out from under the two men, and he comes up with that pistol, and he turns it on both officers. And just like that, it's over. The boys take the officers' own handcuffs, and they lock the two men together — wrist to wrist, Bluett shackled to his chief. They take the lawmen's guns. They take their money.
And Tod Payne looks at these two boys — two boys, exactly the kind of boys he had spent his whole life talking back from the edge — and he says the last words anybody would ever hear him say. He says: "Boys. Boys. You know what this means to you."
And then he stops. And Cliff Bluett feels the full weight of the man he's chained to come down against his shoulder.
The boys dragged the two officers out of the car, there in the dark near a little roadside tavern, and left them lying in the ditch, still cuffed together. Then they climbed into the front seat and drove off north, and left them there.
And Tod Payne was dead.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Beat. Let it land.]
Now — here is where this stops being a sad story about a good man, and starts being a mystery. Because when it was over, when the other officers got there and the doctors looked him over, there was not a mark on Tod Payne. The bullet that went through Bluett's coat never touched him. There was no wound. A sixty-five-year-old man wrestled two boys in the back of a car for thirty seconds, said what he said, and died — with, as far as anyone could see, nothing done to him at all.
And that simple, strange fact — a dead police chief with no wound on him — was about to turn a stolen-car case into something almost nobody in Wisconsin had ever seen before. But before we get to that: the two boys who did this were still out there in the dark, in a stolen sheriff's car, running north — and about to touch off a manhunt that would sweep across two states.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Momentum — this is the chase. But don't lose the cold. Make the listener feel it.]
Let's start with Cliff Bluett, because I can't stop thinking about where he was during all of this.
While the two boys were driving off north, Bluett was still back there in the ditch. Handcuffed to Tod Payne. To Tod's body. The boys had locked the two officers together with their own cuffs and left them, and there was no getting free of it. So Bluett stayed there in the cold and the dark, shackled to his dead chief, until help finally came. They got the two of them to a doctor's office in the town of Adams, where a physician confirmed what Bluett already knew. And even then, he was still locked to him. Bluett had to be brought all the way back to Wisconsin Rapids before somebody could cut the handcuffs and separate the living man from the dead one.
I just — sit with that for a second. The last few hours Cliff Bluett spent with the chief he'd worked beside, he spent chained to his body.
Now, back at that roadside tavern — the boys had stopped, remember, to tell the tavernkeeper, a man named Jack Lane, that there were "a couple of fellows back there who look like they'd been hit by a car." And Lane did not waste a minute. He got word to the county. And here's where you feel how modern this was getting, even in 1939 — within about fifteen minutes, police radios were crackling all across Wisconsin and up into northern Michigan, carrying the descriptions of two teenage boys and a stolen sheriff's Ford. Overnight, that car became the most wanted automobile in the upper Midwest.
And the boys ran. God, did they run. Over the next twenty-four hours, these two kids put something like five hundred miles on that stolen car — a panicked, looping, going-nowhere flight north and east, up through Wisconsin and across the line into the wild Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They were spotted up at Tomahawk. Michigan was warned to watch its roads.
And on Saturday night, after dark, near a little town called St. Ignace, a Michigan state trooper named Mike Lalich saw a car come speeding past him — and knew it. He gave chase. After about twenty miles, the boys gave up on the car. They pulled off near a place called Brevort, abandoned the Ford, and ran on foot into the deep woods. And they left almost everything behind in that car — including, and hold onto this, two revolvers, a couple of blackjacks, and what little food they had.
And now the manhunt turns into something out of another century. Because this is the Northwoods, in the middle of November, in the middle of deer season — so the men who came to hunt these two boys were, a lot of them, actual deer hunters. Two dozen of them, along with sheriff's officers, surrounded the stretch of forest the boys had run into. An undersheriff from over in Menominee, Michigan, a man named John Reindl, brought in three bloodhounds and put them on the trail. And all night long, in temperatures down in the twenties, with snow coming down, those dogs worked through the woods after two kids who were dressed in almost nothing. The boys built little fires — quick, furtive fires — just trying not to freeze to death.
And early Sunday morning, it ended about the way you'd expect. A deer hunter came through the trees and found one of them — Pasha, the little one, the one who said he was fourteen — crouched over a tiny fire about seventy-five yards off a highway, shaking with the cold. He didn't run. He didn't fight. He just gave up. And about fifteen minutes later, they found Noel close by. Neither of them had a weapon on him — they'd left the guns back in the car. They were just two freezing, exhausted kids in the snow.
And that's the part that gets me about this whole stretch. Three days earlier, these two had swiped a car because they were broke, or bored, or both. Now one of them is fourteen years old, half-frozen in a Michigan swamp, bloodhounds on his trail, a dead police chief in a ditch behind him. Whatever this had started as, it was something else entirely now.
The boys waived their right to fight extradition, and on Monday they were brought back to Wisconsin — back to Wood County, back toward Wisconsin Rapids. Back to a town that had just lost Tod Payne. And that town was about to bury him.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: This is the gut-punch. Slow, elegiac. Let the irony land — don't rush it.]
While those two boys sat in a Wisconsin jail cell, the town of Wisconsin Rapids stopped everything, and buried its chief.
They buried him on Tuesday, the fourteenth of November. And it was, the paper said, one of the largest funerals in the history of the city. The mayor — a man named W. T. Nobles, who had been Tod's friend his whole life — issued a formal proclamation. He asked every business in town to close its doors for two hours that afternoon, so that anyone who wanted to could come and pay their respects. And they came.
They laid Tod Payne in state in the Lincoln field house. Police officers came from all over the state of Wisconsin — the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police association served as his honorary pallbearers, and his own men, the Wisconsin Rapids force, carried him. The Kiwanis club came, the club he'd helped charter. The city officials came. The aldermen came.
And the safety patrol came. Those schoolboys — the little crossing guards Tod Payne had organized himself, and loved, and been so proud of — they came to help bury the man who built their patrol.
And I want you to really feel the shape of this. Because here is a man who spent twenty-one years believing — publicly, out loud, as his entire philosophy — that a boy who goes wrong can be brought back. That you don't give up on a kid. That was the thing he was known for. The thing he was loved for. And he was killed by two boys. In a car, on a dark road. Two kids exactly like the ones he had spent his whole life saving.
And I didn't have to reach for that irony — because the people who buried him felt it too. Mayor Nobles, standing up to eulogize his friend, said it right out loud. He talked about how Tod had told him, more than once, that one of the aims of his life was to help the younger generation, the kids, work out the problems that faced them. And then Nobles said this. He said it was "sad to think this confidence reposed in youth was, upon this occasion, so ruthlessly betrayed."
The confidence reposed in youth, so ruthlessly betrayed. That's the mayor of the town, at the funeral, saying the quiet part out loud. Tod Payne trusted boys. And it got him killed.
And here's a small thing I can't shake, as somebody who digs these old papers up for a living. When I look at the page that carried Tod Payne's funeral — the proclamation, the pallbearers, the tributes — I'm also looking, right there beside it, at headlines about German planes and a war in Europe and the whole world coming apart. To Wisconsin Rapids, in November of 1939, the death of Tod Payne was the biggest thing that had ever happened. It shut the whole town down. And it was sitting right there on the page next to the opening days of the Second World War, already being crowded toward the margins. Which is, I suppose, exactly how a story becomes forgotten.
So they buried him. And you would think that would be the end of it — a good man gone, two boys in a cell, a town in mourning. But it wasn't the end. Because there was still that strange, nagging fact sitting in the middle of everything. There was not a mark on Tod Payne. And a district attorney over in Adams County was about to stand up and ask a question that nobody in Wisconsin had ever quite had to answer before: if a man dies like this — with no wound on him — can you charge the boys who were fighting him with his murder?
[PRODUCTION NOTE: This is the thinking-out-loud act. Slow down on the question. Let the listener sit in it.]
So let's talk about how Tod Payne actually died. Because this is the question the whole case turns on, and it is not a simple one.
Here's what the doctors found. There was no bullet wound — the one shot fired in that car went through Bluett's coat, not through the chief. There was no knife wound. Two different doctors examined the body and agreed: Tod Payne was, physically, unmarked. So what killed him? A heart attack. A sixty-five-year-old man threw himself over a car seat, wrestled two teenagers in the dark, and his heart simply gave out.
Now — sit with the problem that creates. Because a man is dead, and two boys did something. But what, exactly? You can't charge them with shooting him — they didn't. You can't charge them with beating him to death — there's not a mark on him. The thing that actually stopped Tod Payne's heart was Tod Payne's heart.
And yet. A man is dead, and he would not be dead if those two boys had not pulled a gun and started a fight in that car. So the question lands in the lap of the district attorney over in Adams County — because that's the county where Payne died — a man named Fulton Collipp. And Collipp has to decide: is this murder?
There's an old idea in the law that if a person dies during the commission of a serious crime — a robbery, say, or in this case an armed escape — the people committing that crime can be held responsible for the death, even if they never meant to kill anyone. The felony itself makes them answerable for whatever it causes. So the theory would go: the boys committed an armed escape, and a man died because of it — therefore, murder. And there was real public pressure to charge it that way — enough that Collipp, before he'd even finished investigating, pushed back on it out loud. "Some people," he said, "have been trying to make the decision for me in advance."
And then the case for murder actually got a little stronger. Because the coroner — and here's a taste of how messy this old record is, the papers can't even agree on the man's name, one calls him Dr. Wright and another calls him Dr. Rice — the coroner said it wasn't only the heart. He said there was a bruise on Payne's head. And that a blow to the head, on top of the sheer excitement and exertion of the struggle, had helped bring the heart attack on. A "contributory cause," he called it. And there was something to hang that on — because Robert Noel reportedly admitted that, in the fight, he'd hit the chief over the head. With a flashlight.
So now you can almost see the murder charge taking shape. The boys start a fight. One of them cracks the chief on the skull. The blow and the terror stop his heart. That's a death caused by their crime.
Except. There was one man who was actually in that car — the only living witness to what happened in that back seat. Cliff Bluett. And Bluett did not believe those boys killed Tod Payne.
And listen to what he said — remembering that this is the man who was handcuffed to the body, the person with more reason than anyone alive to want those boys to hang. Bluett said, and I'm quoting him: "I am convinced now that the heart attack came." Not the blow. The heart attack — first. And his reasoning is actually kind of brilliant. He said it's the only way to explain how a skinny fourteen-year-old ever managed to wriggle out from under a grown man and come up with the gun. Payne, Bluett said, "seemed to be lying on Pasha, with Pasha wriggling out from under him." In other words: Tod Payne didn't let that boy get away. Tod Payne's heart stopped, and his full weight went slack on top of the kid — and that's how the kid got loose. By Bluett's account, the chief was already dying before the rest of it even happened. And Bluett admitted he never actually saw a blow land. It was dark. It was chaos. He couldn't say who hit whom.
So there is your murder case. A coroner who says a blow helped kill him. And the best eyewitness there is, saying no — his heart went first, before anything else. One of them is right. And almost ninety years later, I can't tell you which one.
Fulton Collipp charged Robert Noel with first-degree murder anyway — murder, plus armed robbery, plus assault, plus stealing the car, the whole stack. And for a few weeks, it looked like Wisconsin was going to have itself a genuinely strange murder trial.
And then — on the eighth of December, in the courthouse at Friendship, in front of a judge named Clayton Van Pelt — Collipp stood up and moved to dismiss the murder charge.
Just like that. The murder count was gone. Instead, Noel pleaded guilty to the lesser things — the armed robbery, the assault, the stolen car — and Van Pelt sentenced him to three to ten years in the state reformatory at Green Bay. The judge called himself "exceedingly lenient." The only person who testified about that night was Cliff Bluett. Noel never took the stand — he just sat there and wept while the sentence came down. And when the judge asked him why, why the two of them had ever tried to escape in the first place, Noel gave an answer I cannot get out of my head. He said: "The closer we got, the scareder we got."
As for Pasha — the little one, the one who said he was fourteen — his age did exactly what you'd expect it to do. He never faced the murder question at all. He was sent up to the state industrial school at Waukesha, to be held until he turned twenty-one.
And so here's where we land. A man was dead. And when all the dust settled, the official answer to the question everybody had been asking — did those boys murder Tod Payne? — was, essentially, nothing. No one was ever convicted of his death. The state charged it, looked hard at it, and then quietly let it go — the same way the law looked at that whole terrible night and decided it couldn't quite call it the thing the town wanted to call it.
And that, for four years, was the end of the story of Robert Noel and Nelson Pasha. Two boys who started a fight in a car and got a good man killed, and mostly walked away from it. Until, in the fall of 1944, Robert Noel put himself right back on the front page.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Coda energy. A little colder, a little faster. The story's echo.]
Here's what happened to Robert Noel.
He went off to the reformatory at Green Bay to serve his three-to-ten years, and for a while, he did the very thing Tod Payne always hoped a boy in trouble would do. He disappeared into the routine. He dropped out of the news. And you could almost let yourself believe the story had a quiet ending after all — that this particular kid was going to do his time and come out the other side.
He did not.
About a year in, Robert Noel got hold of a length of gas pipe. He backed two reformatory guards into a narrow corridor, and he cracked one of them over the head, and he made a run at escaping. It didn't work. But it told the state everything it needed to know. Because a reformatory in Green Bay is for boys you still believe you can save. And whatever Robert Noel was by then, he wasn't that anymore. He was, in the words of the officers who knew him, too tough even for Green Bay. So they shipped him to Waupun — to the state prison, with the grown men.
And on a night in the middle of October, 1944, Robert Noel walked off the Waupun prison farm and vanished.
He was twenty-two now. Not a scared kid freezing over a campfire — a hardened man the papers were calling one of the toughest young fugitives in the whole state. And when the newspapers told their readers who this escaped convict was, they went back and retold that night on Highway 13 — five years gone by now, the details already drifting. One paper even got the date of Tod Payne's death wrong. That's how these things go. The story was already turning into legend. Already half-forgotten.
And then Robert Noel did the one thing that ties this whole story into a knot. He ran. Again. He ran the way he'd run in 1939 — far, and fast, and going nowhere. Wisconsin caught up with him about six weeks later, more than a thousand miles away, in a little town called Tucumcari, New Mexico. And even then, he'd been at it again — there was talk of federal charges, for hauling a stolen car across state lines. The very crime that had started the whole thing.
For Robert Noel, that's about where the paper trail runs out. I don't know for certain what happened to him after Tucumcari — whether he ever got out, ever settled down, ever became anything other than a man who kept running until somebody stopped him. In the record I can find, he just keeps running, right off the edge of it.
But Nelson Pasha — the little one, the fourteen-year-old who was shivering over that campfire — Pasha's story goes somewhere else. And I want to be careful here, because I couldn't turn up a mountain of detail on him, and I'll always tell you when I'm working with less than I'd like. But from the little I was able to gather, Nelson Pasha did the hardest thing there is to do. He came out of that industrial school, and he cleaned his life up. He stayed out of trouble. And by every indication I could find, he went on to live a full, decent, ordinary life. That fourteen-year-old who helped get a police chief killed on a dark highway grew into a man nobody ever had a reason to write a newspaper story about again. And I mean that as about the highest compliment there is.
And that is the thing I can't stop turning over. Because remember Tod Payne. Tod Payne bet his whole life on a single idea — that a boy who makes a terrible mistake can still be reached. Can still be saved. And these two boys, who did the very same thing on the very same night, went out into the world and answered him. One of them, Robert Noel, spent his next years proving there are some kids the system just can't hold. And the other one, Nelson Pasha, quietly grew up and proved Tod Payne right. Same crime. Same night. Two completely different men on the far side of it. So which one is the truth about Tod Payne's life's work? I think the honest answer is — both of them. And that is where I want to end.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Reflective. This is you, straight to the listener. Then the sign-off.]
So where do I land on all this?
On the question everybody argued about in 1939 — whether those two boys murdered Tod Payne — I think, honestly, the district attorney got it right when he let the murder charge go. And I don't say that lightly, because a good man is dead. But you cannot stand in front of a jury and prove that two teenagers murdered a sixty-five-year-old man whose own heart gave out — not when the one person who was in that car with him swore the heart went first. "Murder" is a heavy word. It needs a killer. And the honest truth of that night may be that the thing which killed Tod Payne was the strain of being Tod Payne — of throwing himself, at sixty-five years old, over a car seat into a fight to protect the man beside him. That's not murder. That's something sadder, and harder to name.
But here's the other half of it, and I can't let this go either. A good man went to work, did his job, and did not come home — and when it was all over, the law had no box to put that in. Nobody was ever really held to account for the death of Tod Payne. And both of those things are true at the same time: it wasn't murder, and it wasn't nothing. Sometimes the law doesn't have a clean answer, because life didn't hand it one.
And I want to say a word about Cliff Bluett, because he is the reason we know any of this. Think about what that man carried. He was in the car. He felt the bullet go through his own coat. He was handcuffed to his chief while the man died against his shoulder — and stayed cuffed to the body for hours after. And then he stood up in a courtroom, the only witness there was, and instead of pointing at two boys and calling it murder — which would have been the easy thing, the popular thing — he told the truth as he understood it. He said: no. I think his heart went first. That is a hard, honest thing for a grieving man to say. I hope somebody thanked him for it.
And I keep thinking about the timing of all of this. These were kids in the fall of 1939. Within two years, the whole country's boys — boys exactly like Noel and Pasha — were shipping off to the biggest war the world has ever seen. Robert Noel spent most of that war behind the walls at Waupun. And the death of Tod Payne, which shut down an entire Wisconsin city for an afternoon — well, the war came, and the world moved on, and a chief who mattered to everybody he ever met became a name in a stack of old clippings that nobody pulls out anymore. And that is the whole reason I do this show. Because these people were real. They mattered. And somebody should still say their names.
So let me say his. Roland Payne. Tod. Chief of police in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, for twenty-one years. A man who believed, right up to the last night of his life, that you never give up on a kid. He was killed by two boys — and then one of those boys grew up and proved him right. I think Tod would have liked knowing that. I really do.
[PRODUCTION NOTE: Pause / beat before the outro.]
If you know anything more about this case — about Tod Payne or his daughter Lola, about the Noel or the Pasha families, about how any of these lives turned out — I would genuinely love to hear from you. You can reach me, and see the original newspaper clippings from this whole story, over at Section29.com.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with somebody who loves a good story.
Until next time, this is Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there. And just know — you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.
[Not read aloud in full — for show notes / the outro credit. Read the music credit aloud only if desired.]
Music. Music for this episode is by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. Find them at tracktribe.com. Additional music via Pixabay, free to use under the Pixabay Content License: "Smoking Noir," "Stalking My Next Victim," and "True Crime Mystery Music" by Joel Fazhari; "Mystery Investigation Documentary Music" by Tunetank; and "Energy Rock" by Jonas Blakewood.
[If this episode did not use TrackTribe, drop that line and keep only the Pixabay credits.]
A note on AI. We use AI tools to enhance the narration and edit the audio on this show.
Sources. All sources are newspaper clippings accessed via Newspapers.com, as compiled in the case file for this episode — 22 articles across 10 papers, November 1939 to November 1944. Principal coverage: The Daily Tribune (Wisconsin Rapids), which carried the death, the manhunt, Chief Payne's funeral, and Robert Noel's 1944 escape; the Niles Daily Star, Kalamazoo Gazette, Green Bay Press-Gazette, and Stevens Point Journal on the killing and the chase; the Journal Times (Racine), Oshkosh Northwestern, Kenosha News, and Marshfield News-Herald on the arraignment and the murder question; the Waukesha County Freeman on the sentencing; and the Waupun Leader-News on Noel's recapture in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Full transcriptions in Two Shots Near Adams - Article Transcriptions.