Historic Pinole: Mail Train Bandits at Large

As both personal contemporary experience and history teach us, conclusions are difficult to derive from a single newspaper article. This week's Historic Pinole is a snapshot about a crime yet to be solved.

It seems that some men robbed a mail train near Benicia. While two East Bay cabin dwellers were arrested, there was some doubt about their involement. So police continued a search that went from Martinez to Oakland to San Francisco to Pinole. The story ends there.

The article is from the April 20, 1910 edition of the Los Angeles Herald.

TWO SUSPECTS HELD FOR ROBBERY OF MAIL TRAIN

Hunt for Bandits Extends Over Large Territory

SAN FRANCISCO, April 19.—The hunt for the two bandits who held up the China-Japan fast mail near Benicia last Saturday night shifted today from the hills and canyons near Martinez to San Francisco, then to Oakland, and late tonight back to Pinole, fifteen miles from Benicia.

It developed this evening that Police Captain Bock and Detective Richard McSorley of the Oakland police arrested two men in San Francisco early today. They are now in the city prison at Oakland.

John Lubbe, who owns the cabin in which the robbers lived near Martinez, and Harry Knight, who also had seen them several times, went to the Oakland jail. Neither of these identified the two suspects as the supposed bandits, but they will be held until the engineer and fireman of the train are given an opportunity to see them.

Late tonight Sheriff Veale, his deputies and several detectives returned to Pinole, where, it is said, they have two other suspects under surveillance.

This article comes from the California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc. The collection has digitzed more than 400,000 images from newspapers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Images dated between 1846 and 1922 are in the public domain and not subject to copyright.