The Bank Robbers Had Guns. Iowa Farmers Had Telephones

 

Abner Hicks (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

On the morning of December 16, 1903, burglars hit the Citizens’ Savings Bank in Quimby, a small town in Cherokee County in northwest Iowa. They got inside, attacked the safe with explosives and left with thousands of dollars in cash and a stack of notes worth considerably more.

 

It looked like another successful small-town bank job.

 

Fifteen hours later, two of the men were surrounded in the countryside near Sheldon. They had three revolvers, a magazine gun, and hundreds of cartridges. They surrendered without firing a shot. The other two men made it all the way to Kansas City before authorities caught up with them.

 

The four men who eventually went to prison were Charles White, John Wicks, Elmer Dunning, and Abner Hicks. Their mistake wasn’t robbing the bank. It was trying to escape across northwest Iowa in 1903.

 

Bank robberies had become a problem in Iowa. The men who did it were sometimes called yeggmen. They traveled, often by railroad, looking for banks in small towns where police protection was thin and safes could be attacked at night. They didn’t need a teller to cooperate. They needed explosives.

Pat Crowe Spent Five Years Running From The Law, Then Spent The Rest Of His Life Fighting For Prison Reform

 

Pat Crowe at the time of Eddie Cudahy's kidnapping
(The Duluth News Tribune. May 29, 1921)

Pat Crowe spent five years running from the law. Then they caught him.

The strange part came later. A jury let him go; Crowe admitted the crime anyway, and the outlaw who had embarrassed police and Pinkerton detectives started lecturing about prison reform.

He was an unlikely man for the job. By the time Crowe became famous, he’d already robbed, stolen, escaped custody and spent years moving between Iowa, Nebraska and cities farther east. He knew jails, the police, and how much he liked money.

In 1919, Crowe talked about his past with the San Antonio Light. “I had got the habit of easy money,” he said, “and it was easy money I wanted.”

That explained a lot.

Crowe grew up in Iowa and left his parents’ farm near Vail as a teenager. He opened a small butcher shop in Omaha in 1886, but the business failed after running into competition from a Cudahy retail operation.

Old Blackhawk Beer Advertisement Independent Malting Co. Davenport

 

Another fun brewery advertisement for Old Blackhawk Beer, brewed by the Independent Malting Co. This one is from The Daily Times. July 16, 1907.

Sioux Falls Brewing & Malting Co, Advertisement 1907

 

Interesting advertisement for Blue Label Beer, a product of the Sioux Falls Brewing & Malting Co, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This one was publised in The Sioux City Journal. June 8, 1907.

The Iowa State Bank Robbery At Des Moines (1919)

 

(Des Moines Tribune. March 25, 1919)

For seven weeks, M. R. Pharmer was the victim. Then the police decided he might have helped plan the robbery.

Pharmer was assistant cashier at the Iowa State Bank in downtown Des Moines. On the morning of March 25, 1919, two gunmen talked their way through the bank’s locked door, pulled revolvers and forced Pharmer and two other employees into a back room.

Minutes later, the gunmen were gone with a bag full of cash and bonds.

The Des Moines Tribune put it across the top of the front page:

BANK ROBBERS GET $20,000

Police searched Des Moines and the surrounding countryside, questioned witnesses, checked automobiles, and chased suspects.

Nothing worked.

Three days after the robbery, the chief of detectives admitted he had no fresh evidence. Two men had walked into a downtown bank in broad daylight, taken a small fortune and disappeared.

They Robbed Two Iowa Banks And Escaped - Then They Ran Out Of Gas

 

Jerry Nepovin

At 10:15 on the morning of May 8, 1928, two young men entered the Swisher Trust & Savings Bank. They carried guns but didn’t bother with masks. Both wore overalls and blue denim jackets. They were in their twenties, about five feet eight inches , 150 pounds. One was dark-complexioned, the other light.

The robbers ordered assistant cashier Jerry Bys and customer J. Doskocil to turn around and put up their hands. Then they tied them up.

One robber stayed with Doskocil while the other forced Bys to explain how to open the safe. When it was over, $2,017 was gone.

Outside, two young women were sitting in a parked car. Instead of walking out, the robbers waited inside the bank until the women drove away. Then they emerged, climbed into an old red Marmon, and headed out of Swisher.

It should have been the beginning of their escape. Instead, the car began to fall apart.

The Marmon was an old touring car. A 1921 model with yellow wheels and a broken rear window patched with dark material. Part of the license plate had been painted over. It was about the worst getaway car two bank robbers could have chosen.

And people noticed it.

A farmer north of Swisher saw a car matching the description heading toward Cedar Rapids. Other witnesses saw it too.

The Minister Was A Bank Robber

 

The Get-a-way car. (The Sioux City Journal. October 2, 1929)

On the morning of September 30, 1929, a masked man robbed a bank in Sioux Center, Iowa. A few hours later, he was dying on a farm outside Le Mars with a bullet through his head.

 

The dead man was Rex Frokley, 38, and that’s what made the story strange. He wasn’t a drifter or some hard case passing through northwest Iowa. Frokley was a Le Mars business person, former radio station owner, college football player, husband, and father.

 

He was also an ordained minister.

 

The newspapers went wild with it. One called him a “WEIRD THUG.” Another ran the headline, “ORDAINED MINISTER TURNS BANK ROBBER, SHOOTS SELF WHEN TRACED THRU AUTO.” The Independent Record called him “DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE.”

 

It wasn’t much of a stretch.

 

Frokley had been born and raised near Kearney, Nebraska, and attended Western Union College in Le Mars, where he played football. He was ordained in the Evangelical Church, but had never held a regular pastorate. He filled pulpits while in college and performed a few marriages.

 

Then he went into business.