Notorious Kansas Bank Heists by Rod Beemer

In 1923, she said, the gang wasn’t yet well-known. The four men who robbed the First National Bank in Ottawa later were identified as the Fleagle Gang, which Barker said carried out a number of robberies in Kansas and Colorado towns between 19.

“And from there it went pretty bizarre.”īeemer said he also will speak about the history of banking, including a time when it was illegal to be a banker in Kansas and Nebraska. “They put his clothes back on and somebody put a gun in his hand, and he stood there for five years as kind of a curiosity,” he said. While determining what to do with it, someone found the body could stand on its own. He was embalmed with arsenic, but no one claimed his body. The outlaw was killed by the posse, Beemer said, but wasn’t buried for 66 years. The event will be free and open to the public.īeemer said he also will discuss other robberies, likely including one in southeast Kansas after which the outlaws split up and a posse followed one south into the Oklahoma hills. Beemer recently published “Notorious Kansas Bank Heists,” which he will discuss, along with the gunslingers and gangsters responsible for them, in his presentation. Researcher and author Rod Beemer, of Minneapolis, Kan., will be the keynote speaker. 31, at a meeting of the Franklin County Historical Society at the Neosho County Community College’s Ottawa campus, 900 E. Tales of this and other infamous bank robberies will be recounted during a presentation at 2 p.m. The robbers then locked all 15 people inside a vault used for safety deposit boxes before escaping in a Buick touring car they had left parked at the curb. “They forced 10 bank officials and employees and five customers to lie flat on the floor while they ransacked the safes and the cages and the vaults.” “There were no shots fired,” Barker said. 2, just after the bank opened, four men entered the bank, waving guns and ordering everyone inside to hold up their hands, according to Deborah Barker, executive director of the Franklin County Historical Society. For decades, the 1923 robbery of the First National Bank in Ottawa remained the biggest story in town.Ībout 9:05 a.m.

Notorious Kansas Bank Heists by Rod Beemer