 Welcome to Scene of the Crime, I'm author investigative reporter and historian Scott Firmstein. Today we're coming to you from Bloomfield Township at the corner of Telegraph Road in Quarton to talk about the last major headline-grabbing murder committed by the infamous Purple Gang during Prohibition. It was the early morning of November 26, 1933 double homicide of Purple Gang hitmen Eddie Fletcher and Abe Axler. The newspapers called it the Siamese Twin Slanes because that was the moniker of the pair on the streets of Detroit at the time. Fletcher and Axler were two of the most notorious purples of that era and they were dubbed the Siamese Twins because they were best friends and rarely seen apart, a vicious tandem of killers and extortionists who had arrived in the Motor City together in 1926 from New York and quickly shopped their way into the media's glare with their role as trigger men in the 1927 Mil Flores Massacre. Fletcher himself became public enemy number one for DPD after the massacre that left three St. Louis bootleggers dead on the floor of an area boarding house. He killed the three out of towners with a machine gun, the first documented use of an automatic weapon in the history of the Detroit underworld. Fast forward to 1933 and the Purple Gang, Detroit's most iconic and ruthless criminal organization and the nation's only self-contained Jewish mob was on its last legs. Prohibition was coming to an end and the purples were disbanding. As the area's Italian mob began absorbing the gang's rackets, the remaining purples were left to fight over the scraps. Fletcher and Axler had gotten too big for their britches and were grabbing for a bigger piece of the pie than their bosses in the purples felt they deserved. So on Thanksgiving week 1933, the Purple Bosses ordered the execution of the Siamese Twins. The evening of November 25, 1933 was a Saturday and Fletcher and Axler attended a party at a Pontiac beer garden near where the Circuit Court building resides today. They were with their fellow Purple Gang lieutenants and felt comfortable to let their guard down. After they were both good and liquored up, after the clock had turned midnight and had become November 26, the purples they were with offered to drive them home. Driving south on Telegraph, the killers stopped near the Court Intersection. One of them got out and feigned like he was going to relieve himself on the side of the road. Instead, he turned to the backseat of the vehicle and unloaded his gun into Fletcher and Axler. Today, the location sits in the shadow of Conan Elementary School and Bloomfield Hills Middle School. Back then, the property behind me was all undeveloped, just grass and woods. When the police finally discovered Fletcher and Axler's body the next day, they were riddled with bullet holes and had been left upright in the back of the abandoned car with their hands and arms interlocked. It was a message from their bosses in the game to the public. The Siamese Twins lived their lives as a dangerous duo and they died just the same. Experts placed the Purple Gang's body count at well over 500 in a mere 10 years of existence. Some estimated it was closer to 1,000. Fletcher and Axler were responsible for a good chunk of those murders. In a dark blood drenched irony, they were two of the last to go themselves. I'm Scott Bernstein for Click on Detroit and Local 4 Plus.