The capture of the ‘Blonde Tigress’ captivated Chicagoans in 1933. Then she vanished.
In 1993, Doug Jarman made a last-ditch effort to find a grandmother whose last known whereabouts were a prison she fled in 1940. Harrison Ford’s movie “The Fugitive” made stories like hers a hot topic that year. So Jarman showed John O’Brien, the Tribune’s ace crime reporter, a letter he’d recently received:
“I am still alive,” it read. “They never caught me. This is your notorious grandmother, ‘The Blond Tigress.’ I am in my 90s now and having some medical problems.”
The letter was sent to Doug Jarman’s former business address, which an impostor might be unlikely to know. That was one factor that made O’Brien confident in writing about the letter. In that and subsequent stories, he included details about Eleanor Jarman beyond those in the mental picture her grandson drew from family lore.
Eleanor Jarman was serving a 199-year sentence as an accomplice to a murder her lover committed.
Doug Jarman’s father, LeRoy, said he had dug a 4-by-12-foot tunnel beneath his garage. LeRoy Jarman had hoped his mother would one day show up at his Sioux City home, once she’d shook the cops and prison officials who surely would be looking for her, and he needed a way to hide her.
“Dad had a plan to bring her to the house,” Doug Jarman told O’ Brien. “He would pick her up in a car, drive into the garage, and walk her inside (the house) through the tunnel.”
But she never surfaced, nor did the authorities ever find her. Instead, Eleanor Jarman went into the annals of criminology as one of the most successful prison escapees, measured by the length of time she evaded recapture. She’s not likely to be displaced from that list. When she died is unknown.
Born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1901, her parents were German immigrants who named their 10th child Ella Marie Berendt. So many mouths to feed made theirs an impoverished household. Dropping out of school, Eleanor, as she came to be known, “worked irregularly as a waitress since 12 years of age,” according to prison officials.
In 1920, she married Michael Roy Jarman. They had two children, LeRoy and LaVerne, and moved to Chicago in 1923. Drinking heavily, her husband stopped supporting Eleanor and the boys. She got her own apartment at 4300 W. Madison Street, and George Dale, a factory worker became her live-in lover.
Dale — aka George Kennedy, as well as other aliases — wanted to make more money for less effort. Jarman was supplementing her meager earnings as a laundress and waitress with “relief allottments,” the Tribune later reported.
So with Leo Minneci, a punch-drunk boxer, they formed a robbery crew. Minneci drove the getaway car, Jarman stood lookout, and Kennedy/Dale was the gunsel. He waved a pistol in the victim’s face, often the proprietor of a store. The money in a cash register was grabbed with an in-and-out maneuver, and the crew gone before witnesses got a good look.
Beginning in January 1933, the Tribune ran a series of stories about what could have been the Kennedy/Minneci/Jarman crew under headlines like: “A girl assisted a two-gun bandit in the robbery at the fruit store at 1614 Devon Ave. last night.”
The crimes were soon attributed to a “Blonde Tigress,” a headline-grabbing nickname based on her hair color and testimony from witnesses saying she was much more than just a lookout.
“If the proprietor made any show of resistance, Jarman would administer a merciless beating with her blackjack,” The Tribune’s longtime police reporter Patricia Leeds wrote in “The Blonde Tigress!” a 1951 retrospective. “On her record, she is still the most dangerous woman alive.”
Jarman always denied she was the “Tiger Woman.” “However, twenty-three recent victims of northwest side robberies identified her and two male companions yesterday as bandits who specialize in daylight holdups,” the Tribune reported Aug. 11, 1933.
Chicago was experiencing a crime wave that put enormous pressure on cops and the state’s attorney of Cook County. The Blonde Tigress gave them an opportunity to show they weren’t soft on crime.
During a robbery of a haberdashery at 5948 W. Division St., George Dale shot and killed the owner, 70-year-old Gustav Hoeh. A witness scribbled down the license plate number of Minneci’s car, and the trio was apprehended.
“Witnesses testified yesterday that although Jarman didn’t fire the fatal shot she helped Dale beat Hoeh when he attempted to prevent their escape after the robbery of his store,” the Tribune reported of the trial followed.
Behind bars, Jarman played the mother card. “From her cell in the Austin Police Station she moaned: “Oh what will become of my poor little boys? Who will take care of them now?” the Tribune reported.
All were speedily convicted. Minneci and Jarman went to prison. Dale got a death sentence. The day before his execution, he wrote a love letter to Jarman.
Jarman remained a model prisoner until 1940, when she climbed over the fence of the Dwight, Illinois, penitentiary.
As for her motive, one theory is that she received a letter that her sons had run away or were planning to do so, compelling her to escape to check on her sons in Sioux City. Finding them to be OK, she went underground.
After that, Dorothy Berendt was one of a handful who told Doug Jarman they’d seen his grandmother. The wife of Eleanor’s brother, she, her husband, and Doug’s father met the Blonde Tigress at the Sioux City bus station, then drove to a nearby lake to talk. At one point, a police car drove by, Dorothy Berendt told O’Brien.
“Relax,” Eleanor Jarman said, “they stopped looking for me years ago,” Berendt recalled.
Her son, Doug’s father, tried to talk her into returning to Illinois to straighten things out. But his mother refused, saying: “I have a lot of friends where I’m at. They know the story.”
The rendezvous ended with the Blonde Tigress returning to the bus station alone. “I don’t think she wanted us to know what bus she was taking or where it was going,” Berendt told O’Brien.
By 1993, Doug Jarman had surmised that his grandmother feared being returned to prison. He hired an attorney to seek a pardon he hoped would bring her out of hiding.
The attorney’s petition turned on a clever argument. In all the years since she climbed over a reformatory fence, Eleanor Jarman hadn’t been arrested. So she must have rehabilitated herself. A pardon wasn’t forthcoming.
After Doug Jarman died , true crime author Silvia Pettem took up his quest. She compiled an exhaustive list of women who could have been the long-sought fugitive. In “The Search of the Blonde Tigress,” Pettem narrowed her list down to Marie Millman, a waitress who was buried in Denver.
Jarman had a similar sounding alias and once was a waitress in Denver. Waitresses are paid in cash, an attractive proposition for someone on the run who would be leery of leaving a paper trail.
Pettem’s conclusion is based on numerous assumptions that violate a classic Yiddish maxim: “If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a baby carriage.” English translation; Skepticism is advisable when encountering something almost too good to be true.
So even now, what became of the Blonde Tigress remains a mystery for many. But perhaps Pettem’s research can steer another literary detective toward a more definitive conclusion on what happened to Doug Jarman’s grandmother.
Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.
