The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota*

4 indictments against Edwin Sylvester; wife Hettie under nurse's care

February 5, 1926

PAGE 198

Sylvester will doubtless be arraigned here tomorrow morning in district court, and will be brought before Judge Karl Finkelnburg Monday when a special term of the Wabasha district court will open.

To Face Four Indictments
There are four individual indictments against him returned by the grand jury last May. These indictments charge him with grand larceny, receiving money in an insolvent bank, making false entries, and jointly charging him again with all those offenses with the other officers of the bank.
Minneapolis, Minn. Feb. 5 – Mrs. Hetty Sylvester, leader in Women’s club work and once a member of the Minnesota Republican State Central Committee, today is on her way to Wabasha to stand by her erring husband, E. L. Sylvester, president of the Plainview State Bank.
Mr. Sylvester fled a year ago when he no longer felt equal to the task of manipulating the tangled affairs of the Plainview banking house, which manipulations had been under way for 18 years and he feared the trap which he set for himself through studied peculations would be sprung.
Back to Face Accusers
Today, in the custody of Wabasha county authorities, he was to be brought back a prisoner, to face his accusers. A broken man, his eyes swollen and his hands trembling, according to word which preceded him to Wabasha, the 65 year old banker, once the outstanding citizen, was to receive a cheery greeting from his wife.
The word Plainview means something more to Sylvester today. Disgraced, his family humbled, Plainview’s fugitive whose unlawful transactions through the years caused many an honest man’s savings to flit away and evaporate through another spending, returned to plain view of those he had defrauded.
I’m going to stand by my husband," Mrs. Sylvester said at her apartment home at 3142 Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis last night. Mrs. Sylvester, worn by the ordeal, which has been intensified since the capture and arrest of her husband at Gulfport, Miss., insisted she had nothing to say for publication.
Under Care of Nurse
"I have been under the care of a nurse and I do not wish to talk about this affair," she said. Mrs. Sylvester was told that, according to private press messages to the Winona Republican Herald, her husband had said that he had exchanged letters with his family, that they knew at the time of his hasty departure that he was fleeing justice and that the condition of the bank was known in Sylvester’s domestic circles when he left.
"I never knew anything about the condition of the bank," Mrs. Sylvester answered, still insisting that she had no word to give out for publication. "I never have received any information from my husband since he left and I had no idea when he left that he wasn’t coming back. I shall go to Wabasha tomorrow to meet my husband and stand by him."
On Board Train With Sylvester Party En route to Wabasha, Friday Noon
Edwin Sylvester and his party are on the last leg of their trip back to Minnesota. Hour by hour the final climax of the trip is growing nearer, and hour by hour the gray man from Plainview is getting more nervous. He can hardly sit still now and every once in awhile cries a few tears.
He has told most of his story to County Attorney John R. Foley, and the discussion now has narrowed down to details about specific matters. His memory is quite clear on all those details, and he recalls events of the bank’s business which few men could do without the records.
Much of the information he is giving now has already come out in the Arthur S. Kennedy and Adolph Stoltz trials at Wabasha, and is no longer news to the people back

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* SOURCE: Manzow, Ron (compiler), "The Sylvester Family of Plainview, Minnesota - a collection of information taken from the Plainview News, other newspapers, letters, and diaries beginning in 1884": Plainview Area History Center, 40 4th St. S.W., Plainview, MN 55964. Compiled in 2001.

NOTE: from Ron Manzow, December 2001: "Feel free to reproduce the pages for anyone who wants a copy. It was compiled to be shared... All I ask is that they consider sending a check to the [Plainview Area] History Center to help us out. That should be enough."