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PAGE 194
expenditures from February 28 to May 6. It shows the receipt of twelve letters and that he sent eight. After the notations of sending letters are the initials "W. B."
He repeatedly shows his bitterness against George W. Hoffstetter who "betrayed him like Judas" for the $1,000 reward.
Arriving in Chicago yesterday he was lodged in jail with a convicted murderer. He has expressed himself as glad to be returning to Wabasha to face the music. When he stepped off the train at Chicago his first question was concerning his family. He was handcuffed to Deputy Sheriff Fitzgerald and posed for photographs as he greeted the crows at Illinois Central Depot.
He looked seedy and shabby and had a two day growth of beard. He was friendly and glad to get back to Wabasha county and have it over with. "I got nothing out of it myself. It makes me sick just to think of those folks among whom I spent my life. It makes me even sicker to think of my wife and children and the shame they will feel. I tried to save the bank and the people who invested money in it," are phrases constantly repeated by Sylvester. He broke down and cried Wednesday afternoon and has broken down several times since, and it is expected that at any time he will give the whole story.
He likes to tell of his rise from a bookkeeper at $200 a year to the presidency of the bank. The land investments were made he said to try to recoup poor loan paper. Everybody was making money on land but the break came and land that cost me $200 per acre couldn’t be sold for $100.
G. W. Hoffstetter, the man who gave the information that brought about the arrest tells the following story:
"This man was working for me on my truck farm. He came along and asked. That gave me a hunch. I just allowed, seemed like other floaters and I was interested in him and watched him. Something about him always seemed queer.
One day I was reading a Minneapolis paper. I used to live up there and I have read the paper ever since. There was a story abut a banker Edwin L. Sylvester, who had disappeared from his home and who was wanted on charge of embezzling some of the bank’s money
The very next day I noticed this man’s mail came from Minnesota. He told me his name was S. L. Edwin and his mail came addressed that way. That gave me a hunch. I just allowed maybe he had changed his name from Edwin L. Sylvester to Sylvester L. Edwin. I wrote the Burns Detective Agency in Minnesota and asked them about this man Sylvester they were hunting. Before I got any reply, the man left my truck farm and went into the pine woods north of here to work. He didn’t stay very long. When he came back I got him a job in the hotel. Then I got one of those circulars with Sylvester’s picture and description and I knew it was the banker. I told the sheriff and they arrested him."
February 5, 1926- Rochester Post Bulletin – by Jack Crewe
I Can’t Live
Won’t Have Many More Birthdays or Hunt Deer, He Says
Planned to Move Family to South
"Guess Those Poor People Thought I was on the Square"
Chicago, Feb. 5 – E. L. Sylvester planned to secure a truck farm in Mississippi, move his family there and settle down "after things blew over."
He called the bank examiners "sticks" for not discovering the shortage before and related vividly the betrayal scene when "that Judas who was worth sixty or seventy thousand dollars, sold me out for a thousand."
He told of how he constantly evaded a Plainview woman who is spending the winter in the Mississippi town where Sylvester delivered milk and butter. He delivered
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