Police Seek Safeblowers
Officers Run Down Crime Clues
February 11th, 1941
With the recovery late last week of the wrecked safe, stolen last December 26 from the postoffice at Tionesta. Modoc county, Postoffice Inspector William Daly of Reno assisted by Sheriff Olin S, Johnson of the county are running down clues which may result in the arrest of the truck cracksmen, who carted the vault more then 100 miles into Lassen county to blow it up and escape with $80 in stamps and between $50 and $60 in silver and currency.
The robbery of the postoffice had been reported the day the vault had been carted away. The affair remained a complete mystery until last Thursday when C. E. Jones of Janesville, bound home from a business trip to Alturas, stopped at the Jay Gibson ranch at Litchfield to get water to replenish the radiator in his car.
Near an isolated and abandoned cabin in a grazing field jones saw the doorless safe and later fount the wrecked door some distance away, whither it had been blown by a charge of nitroglycerine.
He notified Mr. and Mrs. Grant Martin at Janesville, the latter postmistress there. Mrs. Martin called Inspector Daly in Reno and before the day ended the safe had been moved to Susanville and the search for the cracksmen begun. It was believed the safe was too heavy for one man to handle or crack.
The papers, books and accounts in the safe, which were intact, were placed in possession of Mrs. Martin temporarily.
