to a meeting at Snake Kinney's saloon at Second and Carr with Tom Egan and John "Guinea Mack" McAuiliffe. As he left, Lohrman was stabbed to death at the corner of Sixth and Carr. Despite the murder of the suspected snitch, Skippy Rohan made plans to avoid the hangman's noose on his own. On August 30, 1897, Rohan escaped from the St. Louis Workhouse along with Buck O'Malley and "Sport" Heffernan. Rohan would later claim he bribed a jailer to gain access to materials that led to his break. After robbing a local saloon for funds, he and his fellow escapees fled to Chicago, where they were re-captured four months later. Skippy Rohan was ultimately acquitted of the murder of Casper Beimfohr on May 22, 1898. While he was sent to prison on unrelated robbery charges, Rohan declared that he had found the Lord and reformed. Over the next decade, Skippy Rohan would be in and out of prisons across the United States. He is known to have served time in New York's Sing Sing Prison. By 1914, Rohan had returned to his home town of St. Louis a broken down old thief. Years of hard living and prison time had taken their toll and Skippy Rohan truly aspired to go straight. Rohan married and obtained a job as a shoeworker. While he was away, his old gang, the Egan's Rats, had mushroomed into the most powerful criminal organization in the state of Missouri. His old pal, Tom Egan, was now looked upon as the crime boss of St. Louis. While Skippy frequently joined Egan for drinks at his saloon at Broadway and Carr streets, Rohan appears to have been serious about going legit. Skippy's life, however, would be changed by a chance encounter. As a condition of his parole, Skippy Rohan would check in with St. Louis detectives at their headquarters at the corner of Twelfth and Clark streets. As he left one of these sessions in December 1915, Rohan ran into Egan gangster Harry "Cherries" Dunn, who mumbled a greeting and hurried away. It turned out that Dunn had visited the cops in order to offer to snitch on his fellow gang-mates in order to get his brother John sprung from an Illinois prison. As a result of this chance encounter, Cherries Dunn became paranoid that Tom Egan would find out about his disloyalty and kill him. As