The 1931 Hastings Bank Job & the Bloody Bandit Trail by Monty McCord

Author:Monty McCord [McCord, Monty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-07-15T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

A Startling Detective Story

Make ’em open the safe demselves, see?

—Ogden Standard Examiner, April 12, 1931

Most major bank robberies made the newspapers across the country, and Hastings was no exception. One notable report appeared in the Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner on Sunday, April 12, 1931. The full-page article was captioned, “Here’s a Dime Novel Thriller in Real Life—How Three Texas Bandits, a Mother and a Baby, Corralled Thirteen Bankers, Eleven Sleuths, and a Fortune in Loot.” The article included the basics of the robbery, albeit partly written in a true dime novel style: “Stick up de bank guys when dey come in see?…Make ’em open the safe demselves, see?…De bulls will chase all over the state, see?…Den we move out wid de jack.” A lavish layout of photographs included “Big Jim” Thomas, the Creightons, Officer Wood, Captain Yetman and the East Sixth Street bandit house. Not pictured was someone named “Brazo Bill,” said to be bandit number three.

Detective magazines, sometimes referred to as “pulps,” were extremely popular from the 1930s to the 1990s. Hastings mayor Joe Davis’s son Leon was one of many Americans who devoured the sordid crime stories covered in each issue. They apparently bolstered his confidence in being able to find the hidden money in the bandit car.

Seven years after the great Hastings bank robbery, the crime was covered in one of these pulps. The article in Startling Detective Adventures magazine again brought the Hastings bank robbery into the national spotlight. The 1938 issue featured an article by W.F. Yetman, police captain at the time of the robbery, as told to Jack DeWitt. It was titled, “Nebraska’s Terrorists and the Kidnapped Sleuth.” It’s unknown who contacted whom to collaborate on the article, but true to the nature of these magazines, the information presented was full of name, place and other factual errors. Yetman himself may have mistaken some facts seven years after the event.

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