Bruce Dainard, to arrive from a nearby hospital where he also worked. He showed up at about 10:30 P.M. and parked his car in the lower level garage. Suddenly, the two gunmen jumped him. Dainard shrieked. The ambushers subdued him with threats. They led him inside the house with one pressing a gun against his back and the other holding a gun against his temple. Mrs. Shoemaker’s unsuspecting housekeeper had not heard anything that went on in the garage. She was on the lower level when the armed intruders entered with the captive physician.
The gunmen appeared to be acquainted with the alarm system and asked the housekeeper if she had turned it on yet. She shook her head and replied, “No.” Next, she and Dainard were led upstairs to Helen Shoemake’s bedroom. The gunmen ordered the housekeeper to lie down on the floor next to Shoemake’s bed but she pleaded that she had a bad back and it would be difficult and painful for her to do so. The intruders instead allowed her to sit on Shoemake’s bed. The physician was ordered to lie down and remain on the floor near the bed. His arms and feet were bound with wire. Afterward, the robbers cut all the phone lines.
Shoemake woke up briefly during the robbery and complained about being too hot. One of the robbers gently removed a blanket from her and then continued ransacking her home, ignoring expensive antiques and silver in the dining room. Finally, after a little over an hour, he and his partner found three boxes full of Shoemake’s finest jewelry pieces in a hall closet. Many of the pieces were one-of-a-kind, designed by Helen Shoemake’s late husband, Walter. Among the pieces the thieves absconded with were a double strand of pearls, a heart-shaped ring with forty-five diamonds, a diamond watch and band, a two-carat diamond on a chain and a couple of diamond bracelets. They took a diamond solitaire ring in which the diamond was described to be as “big as a thumb.”2 They also stole jewelry and silver pieces they found in Dainard’s bedroom. In the end, the thieves got away with jewelry which would be worth well over one million dollars on today’s market.
In spite of the huge value of the loot they took from Helen Shoemake’s home, the thieves did something odd. They took twenty dollars from the housekeeper’s wallet and thirty-five dollars from Dainard’s wallet. Perhaps this was in an effort to prove that they were not the same men who were also involved in the Dodge Ridge heist, where one of the thieves was quoted in the press as telling Sue Stewart and her husband, “We don’t take hard-earned money from working folks like you.”3
The next morning, police found footsteps leading from Shoemake’s house to Dry Creek. It appeared to them that the robbers waded across Dry Creek to reach a getaway car parked on the other side of the creek on Morton Boulevard.
None of the pieces stolen from Helen Shoemake were ever recovered. She passed away a couple of months later, unaware she had been robbed.
Law enforcement intelligence theorized that the Dodge Ridge and Shoemake crimes were Ettleman’s handiwork, just as they knew he supplied talent, muscle and planning for the mob. It was catching him in the act that proved to be a challenge. In a San Mateo Police Department report he was listed as the leader of an organized burglary ring.
His ring operated nationally, with a focus on western states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Colorado.4 But Ettleman did not set limits on his crew and on occasion they also worked in eastern states. He was aquainted with Francesco Joseph Scibelli, listed in an FBI report as a member of the Patriarca La Cosa Nostra (LCN) family, a New England mob outfit with strong ties to New York crime families. Ettleman was introduced to Scibelli by Colorado mob boss Scotty Spinuzzi when they both traveled east “on business.”5
An ex-wife once referred to Ettleman as “the top thief in the nation” when he was at the peak of his criminal career. A law enforcement intelligence officer who had interactions with Ettleman in a case in San Jose recalls him as being “a mean son of a bitch” and his group as “true organized crime.”6 His other services included being a contract hit man, a muscle man, a con man, a drug dealer and running stolen credit card rings. He was, indeed, the master of a criminal juggling act, blending in like a chameleon as he shifted between the high and the low in the criminal world. With his safecrackers he dressed loudly, wearing cowboy hats and boots. They knew him as “Willie the Worm.” With the Mafia, he dressed like a boss in finely-tailored suits. And if they needed quick cash, he was the go-to guy.
Ettleman was particularly tight with the hot-headed Colorado boss, Scotty Spinuzzi. They shared a close friendship and a business relationship. A couple of Ettleman’s family members believe he carried out “hit man” contracts for Spinuzzi. They claim he also tampered with jury witnesses in Colorado for Spinuzzi and he is listed in FBI reports as a suspect in unsolved murders.
The week before Dodge Ridge, Ettleman was in Pueblo attending the funeral of Scotty Spinuzzi’s brother. About a week after the Dodge Ridge heist, FBI surveillance spotted Ettleman again in Pueblo, Colorado. This time, he was with San Jose boss Angelo Marino, who was meeting with Spinuzzi.
Earlier the same year, in January of 1970, the FBI received information from an informant that Spinuzzi had asked Ettleman to muscle in on certain Las Vegas casinos, making a fortune operating crooked card games with the use of peepholes and electronic surveillance devices. Spinuzzi wanted a share of the action, which he planned to split with Ettleman if he helped him take over.7 That would not be the last time that Spinuzzi pushed Ettleman to help him take control in Las Vegas. He knew that if he needed planning, Ettleman was the one to turn to.
The Mormon Trail was a thirteen-hundred-mile trek that the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embarked on when they emigrated west. Their journey to forge new settlements started in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1846. Thirty-eight years later, Council Bluffs became the birthplace of Harry Philmore Langdon, a comic whose deadpan expression and feeble grin made him a legendary Hollywood silent screen star. It was also in Council Bluffs where the teenage William Ettleman kicked off his criminal career.
Today, Council Bluffs and Omaha are united by Interstate 480. But originally, a truss bridge, the Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge—Nebraska spelled backwards—was the first road bridge to cross the Missouri River connecting the two cities. The teenage Ettleman stole a car on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River and drove it for less than six miles, taking it over the Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge to Iowa where an observant policeman stopped and arrested him. He received a five-hundred-dollar fine and the first mark on his criminal record.1
“He gave our parents a lot of grief growing up,” Ettleman’s younger brother, James—now deceased—once stated.2 The family moved frequently to avoid the embarrassment his delinquency caused them. And when Ettleman was twelve, his brother added, “He almost got me killed when he talked me into sneaking off with him to train hop. He grabbed my hand and pulled me up just in the nick of time, before I could fall under the wheels of a box car. Our parents were beside themselves when they found out afterwards from someone they knew who saw us.”
At age seventeen, Ettleman joined the army. He was caught stealing an automobile and driving it from Colorado to Iowa with a group of buddies. As a result he was dishonorably discharged and locked up for three years in a medium-security facility at the Federal Reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, for violating the Dyer Act—transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines.3
More skirmishes with the law followed Ettleman after his release from El Reno. At twenty-one, he was picked up on a morals charge in Nebraska, and at twenty-five he was arrested for possession of burglary tools. This time, he was sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary. But approximately two years later he was a free man again, heading an operation that involved a series of
