Part 1Cold Open
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.
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.
Part 2Introduction
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.
Part 3Tod
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.
Part 4The Two in the Back Seat
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.
Part 5The Break
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.
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.
Part 6The Manhunt
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.
Part 7The Town Buries Tod
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?
Part 8The Charge That Vanished
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.
Part 91944
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.
Part 10Closing Thoughts
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.
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.