Here we are pleased to present the 1950 Interesting Case File on the late William Raymond Nesbit, available online - available anywhere - for the first time ever.
Nesbit holds two dubious claims to fame - wanted by the FBI for escaping from a South Dakota prison in the 1940s, he was one of the original "Ten Most Wanted" when that program was introduced by the late, great, J. Edgar Hoover in 1950.
More interesting to us is the place of his capture - the North Star Brewery cave, better known as Montana Bill's Cave, a smallish manmade sandstone cave in the bluff on the East side of downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. You can still visit the cave, which is in the portion of the Bruce Vento parkway "under" Indian Mounds Park. Though the cave entrance is sealed with bars, and few people remember "Ray", his crimes, or his capture anymore, we present to you the concise, straightforward narrative of the life and times of William Nesbit.
The file is seventeen pages long; each is presented as a roughly 350KB image of the scanned sheet. Click on each image to go to the next page.
One of two "interesting case" memoranda prepared about Nesbit, this memo is an unserialized inclusion in Nesbit's main (HQ) FBI file, which was released to a local explorer in response to a Freedom of Information Act request a few years ago. A later interesting case memo, produced in 1954, is substantially identical in content, and less legible.