A Stranger in a Boom Town:

The Murder Trial of Robert Vanella and the Limits of Justice in Early Twentieth-Century Montana

Background: A New York Criminal in the Montana Borderlands

In the autumn of 1907, the small railroad settlement of Laurel, Montana, was in the midst of a rapid and chaotic transformation. The Northern Pacific Railroad had determined that year to establish at Laurel the largest terminal yards between Minneapolis and Seattle, a decision that swelled the town's population almost overnight. Officially incorporated in 1908, Laurel's population surged as railroad jobs attracted settlers looking for new opportunities, and businesses quickly sprang up along Main Street, close to the tracks. It was into this raw, transient environment that a twenty-eight-year-old New York City native named Robert Vanella arrived sometime in 1907.

Vanella was born on May 15, 1879, in a tenement at 68 James Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in the Corlears Hook neighborhood. By the time the two boys were teenagers, he and his neighbor John Torrio helped form the James Street Gang, an East River auxiliary for Paul Kelly's Five Points Gang. By 1907, however, the partnership between Vanella and Torrio had fractured, and Vanella relocated to the American Midwest. Newspapers noted that he had many friends in the Chicago area and family back in New York. His reasons for continuing westward into Montana remain unclear in the historical record, but his path placed him in Laurel alongside a compatriot and fellow Italian immigrant named Raffaele Orasio, with whom he shared lodgings.

The Death of Raffaele Orasio

On October 11, 1907, Raffaele Orasio died from a gunshot wound to the head in a room he and Vanella shared near Laurel, Montana. In October 1907, Orasio died from a gunshot wound to the head in a room they shared near Laurel, Montana. Two days later, on October 13, authorities acted. Vanella was arrested in Laurel, Montana and charged with the shooting death of his roommate and associate, Raffaele Orasio, sometimes spelled Raffael Orasse.

The central question the prosecution would have to answer at trial was one of intent and agency: had Orasio been shot by Vanella, or had he taken his own life? Vanella maintained from the outset that the death had resulted from a dispute, and some accounts suggest he claimed it was a suicide. The physical evidence, however, was thin, and the case would rest largely on circumstantial testimony. No confession was forthcoming, and no eyewitness to the actual shooting appears to have come forward. This evidentiary fragility would define the trial — and haunt the legal proceedings for years afterward.

The Trial at Billings

Vanella's case was moved to Billings, the seat of Yellowstone County and the largest city in the region, where it would be heard before a jury in the Thirteenth Judicial District. The trial began on January 22, 1908. At trial, a witness testified to having seen Vanella run down an alley with a coat over his arm after shots had been fired. This flight-like behavior, observed by a witness identified in later legal records as Louis Fava, was placed before the jury as evidence of consciousness of guilt. Vanella was charged with murder in the first degree.

The defense was represented by attorney Fred H. Hathhorn, who challenged the prosecution's case and worked to cast doubt on the circumstantial nature of the evidence. The charge on which Vanella was tried was murder in the first degree. Hathhorn apparently argued that the evidence fell short of establishing premeditation, a position that, while not securing acquittal, did influence the jury's deliberations.

After several days of testimony, the jury returned its verdict on January 24, 1908. His trial occurred in Billings, Yellowstone County, where a jury convicted him of second-degree murder on January 24, 1908. The jury found Vanella guilty of murder in the second degree — a finding that acknowledged the killing without accepting the prosecution's theory of full premeditation. Vanella was found guilty of murder in the second degree by the jury last Wednesday morning. The charge on which he was tried was murder in the first degree.

Sentencing and Immediate Aftermath

On January 25, 1908, Vanella appeared before the bench for sentencing. The Semiweekly Billings Gazette, covering the proceedings, reported what followed in plain terms. Vanella was sentenced to fifty years at hard labor in the state penitentiary by Judge Fox in the district court yesterday morning for the murder of Raffael Orasio. He was found guilty of murder in the second degree by the jury last Wednesday morning.

Fifty years at hard labor in the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge was, in practical terms, a life sentence. Unless he is acquitted, pardoned, or outlives the three score and ten years allotted to man, the sentence imposed yesterday means life imprisonment for Vanella. The defendant received the sentence without visible distress. When Vanella was called up for sentence he appeared equally as cool and collected as at any time during the trial and when asked if there were legal reasons why sentence should not be imposed, replied in the negative.

Hathhorn moved quickly to signal that the legal battle was not over. Vanella's attorney, Fred H. Hathhorn, stated last night that a motion for a new trial would be made in a few days. It is understood that newly discovered evidence will be contained in the grounds for new trials. It is said that if the attorneys fail to get a new trial, an appeal will be taken to the supreme court, and every means of legal procedure will be exhausted before attempts to secure acquittals are abandoned.

The motion for a new trial was denied at the district level, but the case did make its way to the Montana Supreme Court. The appeal was decided on January 7, 1910. The Montana Supreme Court, in State v. Vanella, 40 Mont. 326, 106 P. 364 (1910), upheld the conviction, with the opinion touching on questions of constitutional rights in criminal proceedings — specifically the right of a defendant to confront witnesses. The case later entered into the body of Montana jurisprudence as a cited authority on defendants' rights, referenced in subsequent decisions including State v. Storm (1954), where the Montana Supreme Court quoted from the Vanella decision in discussing the confrontation clause of Montana's constitution. The Montana Supreme Court in State v. Vanella, 40 Mont. 326, 106 P. 364, 367, stated that the defendant is entitled to meet the witnesses against him face to face, if he insists upon it — these are rights which he may invoke.

The Convergence of Outside Pressure

While Vanella was settled at Deer Lodge, events outside the prison walls were conspiring to alter his fate. Two forces — one darkly criminal, one reformist — worked independently but with convergent effect.

The first was the death of the chief witness against him. The chief witness against Vanella, Louis Fava, was later found dead in Taft, Montana in September 1908. Police suspected that Vanella's underworld friends had eliminated the witness. Taft, Montana, was itself a notoriously dangerous railroad boomtown. The boomtown was founded when the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad arrived, and it was notorious for drinking, gambling, a murder rate higher than Chicago, and a reputed five prostitutes for every man. One reporter described it as the wickedest city in America. Whether Fava's death was the result of organized retribution or simply the hazards of life in a lawless camp cannot be established conclusively from surviving records, but the timing was not lost on anyone following the case.

The second force was organized advocacy. A public campaign for Vanella's release was launched by his mother in New York and by socialite Ethel Eppstein of San Francisco, claiming that Vanella had been unfairly convicted entirely on circumstantial evidence. Eppstein, who appears in San Francisco newspaper records of the period as a figure of some public prominence, investigated the circumstances of Vanella's conviction and concluded that the jury had acted without adequate direct evidence. Her campaign attracted attention at a moment when the broader American progressive movement was scrutinizing the conditions of criminal justice and prison life. The elimination of the prosecution's key witness, meanwhile, substantially weakened any argument that the original verdict had rested on reliable testimony.

Commutation and Release

The campaign eventually reached the office of Montana's governor. On December 24, 1913, Vanella received a Christmas Eve commutation of his sentence from Governor Sam V. Stewart to twelve years. Stewart, a Democrat who had taken office in January of that year, was elected governor in 1912 and re-elected in 1916, serving two terms from 1913 to 1921. His decision to commute Vanella's sentence reflected the weight of the advocacy campaign and, very possibly, the practical reality that the principal witness supporting the conviction was dead.

The commutation was not an exoneration, but it opened the door to early release through the state's parole mechanisms. In April 1914, Vanella was released on parole by the state board of pardons, having served only six years of his original fifty-year sentence. He left Deer Lodge a free man — free of Montana, at any rate.

The Broader Context: Immigration, Criminal Justice, and Early Montana

The Vanella trial belongs to a pattern of cases in the early twentieth-century American West in which Italian immigrants and Italian-American crime figures intersected with frontier judicial systems. Laurel in 1907 was a town at the edge of institutional formation. In one year, from 1907 to 1908, Laurel's population jumped to over one hundred families, and by 1909 there were one hundred and six businesses and organizations, including two newspapers. It was the kind of place where social and institutional frameworks were still taking shape and where outsiders — particularly those with connections to big-city criminal networks — could operate with a certain degree of invisibility until something went wrong.

The evidentiary record of the case, as it can be reconstructed from newspaper accounts and the Montana Supreme Court's 1910 opinion, suggests a prosecution that succeeded largely on the basis of behavioral evidence: a man seen running from the vicinity of a shooting. The jury's decision to convict on second-degree rather than first-degree murder indicates some collective hesitation about the strength of the case for premeditation, but not hesitation sufficient to acquit. The circumstantial character of the evidence was precisely the argument Ethel Eppstein and Vanella's mother made to the public and to state officials in the years following the trial.

The case also illustrates the intersection of the formal legal system with the informal power structures of the urban underworld. A less public campaign was also helpful to Vanella's cause: the chief witness against him met with a violent end in the railroad town of Taft, Montana, in October 1908. Police suspected that Vanella's underworld friends had eliminated the witness. Whether or not that suspicion was well-founded, the death of Louis Fava materially changed the evidentiary landscape of any potential retrial, making the original conviction increasingly difficult to sustain in proceedings before an appellate or pardon-granting body.

Legacy

After his release in 1914, Vanella left Montana and never returned. Following his release from prison, Vanella moved to Chicago to reconnect with Torrio, and a few months later, the two were implicated in the July 1914 death of a Chicago police sergeant. He eventually returned to New York's Lower East Side, where he reinvented himself as a labor leader, Tammany Hall associate, and undertaker — becoming, in the vernacular of his neighbors, the Mayor of James Street.

The trial of Robert Vanella in January 1908 remains a small but instructive episode in Montana's legal history. It demonstrates the fragility of circumstantial prosecutions, the capacity of organized advocacy to penetrate executive clemency processes, and the limits of frontier justice when confronted with the reach of eastern criminal networks. The Montana Supreme Court case it generated — State v. Vanella, 40 Mont. 326 (1910) — endured in Montana case law for decades, quoted in subsequent decisions concerning defendants' constitutional rights. In Yellowstone County's district courtroom, what began as the death of one obscure Italian immigrant in a muddy railroad town produced a legal legacy that outlasted nearly everyone connected to the original events.

Works Cited

"Ct Passd on Italian and N.Y. Crowe: Vanella Sentenced for Murder of Orasse." Semiweekly Billings Gazette, 28 Jan. 1908, p. 2. Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/171943221/. Accessed 22 May 2026.

"Laurel, Montana: Crossroads of Opportunity." BNSF Railway, https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/heritage/laurel-montana.html. Accessed 22 May 2026.

"Laurel History." City of Laurel, Montana, https://www.laurelmontana.org/laurel-history/. Accessed 22 May 2026.

Mafiahistory.us. "Calabrian Prowess Aided Prohibition-Era Mob." American Mafia History, https://mafiahistory.us/a031/f_calabrian.html. Accessed 22 May 2026.

Montana Historical Society Preservation Office. "Historic Downtown Laurel, Yellowstone County, Montana." Montana State Historic Preservation Office, mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/docs/Laurel.pdf. Accessed 22 May 2026.

State v. Storm, 265 P.2d 971 (Mont. 1954). Justia, https://law.justia.com/cases/montana/supreme-court/1954/265-p-2d-971.html. Accessed 22 May 2026.

State v. Vanella, 40 Mont. 326, 106 P. 364 (Mont. 1910). Court Listener, https://www.courtlistener.com/c/Mont./40. Accessed 22 May 2026.