School Teacher to Bandit: The Notorious Dell Fellows

How does someone growing up in a family of school teachers along the Connecticut River in northeastern Vermont become a notorious criminal by the time he’s in his twenties?

“Dell” Fellows never revealed why, but his notorious reputation was more than justified.

George Irdell “Dell” Fellows came into this world on December 22, 1899, the son of farmer George Irving Fellows and his school-teaching wife, Ada. In many turn-of-the-century farm families, more children meant more laborers, and the Fellows clan in the rural community of Guildhall, Vermont was no exception.

When George arrived, he already had two older sisters, four-year-old Harriet, and two-year-old Esther. Over the next twenty years, four more sisters and two brothers were added to the family, with his oldest sister following his mother into teaching.

As this is a story one hundred years old and spread over 10 years and almost as many states, reports of the events sometimes conflict. What is presented here is an attempt at sorting all of this out, and when appropriate, I have tried to give the conflicting renditions of an event.

For the early life of Dell Fellows, little is found beyond his record in census records as a child. The exceptions were a brief recounting of his youth in a 1928 Ballston Spa Journal where he was called the “black sheep” in his family and a mention that at an early age, he was “hard to control,” from the Washington D. C. Times of 1925.

A Life of Crime Begins

It was during his school years that young Dell first showed his tendency to respond to situations with violence. As is often the case with young men, it started over a girl. While attending High School in nearby Granby, Vermont he was involved in a “shooting affair” which resulted in another student being seriously injured.

As can best be determined from the rather jumbled accounts collected years after the incident, what started at school came to a head when Dell found his rival had won the girl and her parent’s approval. During the confrontation that ensued, Dell shot his rival in the hand, an act that at the time he claimed was in self-defense.

A judge issued an arrest warrant, and the local police went in search of Fellows. When he was taken into custody, he was unwilling to peacefully comply, using a revolver as a club to attack the officer. Once subdued, he was taken to Guildhall and placed in jail. It was from here that he made the first of several jailbreaks, and with his escape successful, according to one account, he hopped a freight train going west and joined the Marines.

What we know from the public record is that at the age of eighteen and eight months, Dell became eligible for the First World War draft when the minimum age was lowered to 18 in September 1918. That same month he registered at the recruiting office in Island Pond, Vermont, and within days left for basic training at the Marine Barracks Naval Yard in Mare Island, California.

Only eleven months later, after having spent weeks in the base hospital, he was discharged from the service. His military papers noted that he was dismissed “In line of duty, not own misconduct, character excellent.”

After his military service, he made his way back to Vermont and his family. While he was away, his father had worked to resolve the affair from which he had fled. His efforts were so successful that by 1921 Dell followed the lead of his mother and sister and became a teacher.

It was at a school in Lunenburg, Vermont, fifteen miles north of their home in Guildhall, where trouble again surfaced.

Here again, we are confronted with a set of conflicting accounts. As the choice is a detailed description published in the January 24, 1921, Barre, Vermont Daily Times at the time of the incident, or a sensationalized recounting some years later, we will begin with the earliest account.

It all started when Dell was approached by the local minister concerning rumors of his giving special attention to two female students. While the matter had been brought to the attention of the School Board by the minister’s wife, she was not satisfied and had sent her husband to his classroom to demand his resignation.

Words were spoken, and the matter ended in the hallway with the minister knocked to the floor. As details emerged, the blow was given only after Dell had been poked in the eye, with all involved agreeing it was self-defense. When the board finally met, they ruled in favor of Principal Fellows, with him and the minister accepting the decision with a handshake.

For the more sensationalized version we will turn to the November 10, 1925, Washington D. C. Times where this was included in a retelling of his early life:

“The village minister called at the school one day to suggest that discipline was lax in the school. Fellows promptly grabbed the clergyman by the collar and threw him bodily from the schoolhouse. He was arrested and placed in Lunenburg jail. Securing a saw by some means unknown, Fellows cut the bars of his cell and escaped.”

The story continues with something that could have filled the pages of the dime novels popular during that era. Pursued by a posse, Fellows was soon cornered in a farmhouse. Giving the impression he would surrender; the fugitive struck the deputy sheriff with a concealed sawed-off shotgun and again made his escape through an open window and into the woods.

As Dell Fellows was well versed in both woodcraft and firearms, he eluded capture for weeks as he traveled on foot through the winter weather sixty miles north to Plymouth, New Hampshire.

All of this makes for a very compelling story, and there is no doubt that the travel south, arrest, and escape happened at some point during these years. Yet, as you will soon see, it had to have occurred within a few months of his marriage on June 16, 1924, to Marion E. Bunnell and around the time he was working as a railroad inspector in Colebrook, New Hampshire.

Arrested in Tennessee

For reasons that are never explained, Dell’s next move was to return to Vermont, pick up his wife, and head south. It was in Tennessee that Fellows started the next stage of his criminal career.

Arrested for robbery in 1925, Dell was tried and convicted under the name of George Frank. His wife Marion, pregnant with their first child, was at his side through the trial and did not head back north until he was sent away to serve his time.

Fellows was taken to Tennessee State Penitentiary in Jackson, Tennessee to serve his sentence. As part of the prison’s work detail, he was assigned to help assemble stoves. Always one to take advantage of an opportunity, Fellows hid in a carload of stoves and escaped in October of 1925.

You must wonder if the prison officials realized something about Dell, and were happy to be rid of him, as only $25 was offered for his capture.

It took Fellows a month to make his way to Ashland, New Hampshire, there reuniting with his wife and for the first time meeting his now sixth-month-old son, Herbert Irdell.

In prison, Dell must have learned some new tricks, as one of his first stops once back in New Hampshire was at the druggist to buy carbolic acid, a very poisonous antiseptic agent now known as Phenol.

Without a prescription his request was refused, so his next stop was the office of local physician Dr. Otten. Recognized as a fugitive by the receptionist, who had been a high school classmate, the physician filled out the prescription and then telephoned the police.

It did not take long for Chief of Police George Dow to locate Fellows, even catching him in the act of rubbing the acid on his fingertips in hopes of destroying his prints. When Chief Dow grabbed him by the shoulder Fellows turned and fired a hidden revolver into the man.

Quickly a bounty of $300 was offered for Fellows dead or alive. Within days, additional rewards for his apprehension would bring the total to over $4,000. Near the end of the first week, over a thousand men from the state military and sheriffs Department, as well as armed citizens had spread out across the search area around Lake Waukewan in the town of Merideth.

The posse even had bloodhounds on the trail, though their effectiveness was hampered by another trick Fellows had learned, sprinkling citronella on anything he had left behind carrying his scent.

During the pursuit, he was only spotted once, when after six days on the run he was seen by constable Frank Pelotte and the two exchanged shots before Fellows fled the scene. In August of the next year, a Vermont Automobile Inspector was held at gunpoint In St. Johnsbury, Vermont when he approached a possible stolen vehicle.

The man holding the gun was farm worker Harry Ray, who then quickly disabled the inspector’s car and then drove off. One possibility offered by law enforcement was that Fellows had fled 225 miles north into Vermont to elude New Hampshire authorities and then by using an alias found work as a farm hand.

It was three years later that Fellows again surfaced, this time in New York State. In mid-July of 1928, he was arrested, this time under the alias of Fred Brown when he was picked up in a raid at a farm near Fortsville, a rural village in the town of Moreau, Saratoga County.

It was from here that he had headed up a bootleg and high-jacking gang that operated along a route out of Canada south through New York State that roughly followed what today is Route 9. Held on active warrants in Massachusetts and Vermont, he was brought to the Saratoga County Jail in Ballston Spa to face arraignment.

Over the next days, details of what led to his arrest in Fortsville were revealed, with facts that pointed to his wife as an unintentional source.

Captured, But Ready to Escape

It started when Marion Fellows attended a church social at Fortsville and had her car stolen. The automobile was located in Bennington, Vermont a few days later. When found, it was identified as an auto stolen in Vermont.

The driver, Robert Blaise, confessed that while he had stolen the car, he had stolen it at the Fortsville Church, and it was Dell Fellows who had stolen it previously. Pieces of this puzzle began to fall into place when a car thief in Plattsburgh confessed to being involved with the gang and was released from prosecution for revealing names and the location of their hideout.

Back at the Ballston Spa lockup, Brown, with his true identity of Fellows still not realized, was again well prepared for an escape. Having secreted a saw in his clothing before he was arrested, late on the night of July 27 , 1928, he began cutting the bars of his cell.

The noise of the saw woke a resident of the adjoining house where Undersheriff George W, Knight lived, and he was quickly alerted.

Joined by jailer Fred Currier and Deputy Benjamin Samon the three entered his cell, with the prisoner pulling out a pistol and shooting Jailer Currier. After firing all his ammunition at the other officers without effect, he quickly surrendered. Fred Currier had been hit at least once, with a wound to his stomach and a bullet also perforating his intestines.

As the authorities still had not realized his identity, they charged Brown with first-degree assault with an expectation that it could soon rise to murder. It would take three days for authorities to uncover the real name of Currier’s shooter, and ironically, he was identified despite his attempts to hide his identity: his fingerprints.

Once his name was revealed, his wife Marion stepped into the limelight as his spokesperson and advocate. In the September 15, 1928, Troy Times under a seemingly benign headline “Wife comes to the assistance of her husband,” we are given this account of her support:

“A woman once known as “the prettiest girl in town” in the little New Hampshire village where she lived, is making daily visits to the cell of her husband in the Saratoga County Jail at Ballston Spa and is preparing to do battle to save him from conviction.”

An article published in the Ogdensburg Republican Journal on the same day revealed that his father had also visited and had refused to pay for his lawyer, as he had in the past warned George of the consequences of his lawless behavior.

His wife, however, quickly announced she had assured her husband that she would engage an attorney before the case went to trial. What had not been revealed is that Marion Fellows was the mother of three children by Dell: three-year-old Herbert; and George, who had turned one in April, and she was four months pregnant with their daughter Marion.

A month after his first unsuccessful escape, Dell Fellows made another attempt at a breakout. On doing the nightly rounds, Jailer Ben Simons noticed that newspapers had been spread across the floor in Fellows’ cell. Stepping in to investigate while Dell lay silently on his cot, Simons found that the bowl section of the toilet had been ripped from its foundation and the concrete flooring chipped away.

If the prisoner had been able to enlarge this opening, he could have entered a wall cavity and found an escape route to the roof. After this attempt, it was also revealed that Fellows had made a detailed map of the jail that he was trying to pass to his gang on the outside. In response, the jail began posting additional guards around the building.

Behind Prison Bars

Since Fellows’ arrest in July, the authorities had been working diligently to tie him to other crimes, including murder. On June 14, 1928, the automobile of James F. Deforest Hollenbeck, a financial broker from Albany, had been found standing in the Hudson River near Corinth.

At that time, the police believed that Hollenbeck had been murdered by the Fellows Gang and his body dumped in the river. After spending a week blasting the river with dynamite in hopes of raising the body, the search turned to the gang’s hideout. After investigating every spot of newly turned earth in the surrounding meadows the search for a body was abandoned.

Two years later Hollenbeck finally surfaced and called his wife from the Crescent Athletic Club in Brooklyn. He informed her that he was alive and well, having spent the time in a New York Hospital being treated for a breakdown in his health, and was now back conducting business. Her response, from the Cohoes American of April 4, 1930, was simply that “her husband was still solvent.”

Fred Currier survived his injuries and was released from the hospital in late October. The jailer was an incredibly lucky person, as he had been shot in the line of duty before, that time losing an eye, and surgery for that injury had been performed only weeks before this latest incident.

Though he was not charged with murder, at his trial Dell Fellows was charged with assault, where he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

In early November the doors of Clinton Prison in Dannemora, New York closed behind George “Dell” Fellows. As he was settling into the daily prison routine his wife Marion worked to stay in his life.

By 1930 she had brought herself and her family to Plattsburgh, only fifteen miles from the prison. Here she supported her young family as a laundress and likely visited her husband when she could.

In the ensuing years, the reality of the situation with Dell set in, and she began listing herself as a widow in the local directory, finally filing for divorce in 1935.

Two years later Marion Ethel Brunell Fellows, aged thirty-three, married thirty-seven-year-old iron-worker Carl W. Moore. Over time she began using Mary as her first name, and her children changed their last names to that of their stepfather.

After serving 13 years of his 25-year sentence, in January of 1941, the doors of Clinton Prison swung open for the notorious George “Dell” Fellows.

Unfortunately for Dell, now in his forties, he was quickly escorted into the arms of the New Hampshire State Police where he would be charged with enough crimes to keep him behind bars for another 20 years.

Read more stories about crime and justice in New York.

Illustrations, from above: George “Dell” Fellows and Mrs. George Fellows photos published in the Albany Times Union, July 30. 1928; “School Teacher to Bandit,” Glens Falls Times, August 29, 1928.