The Train Robbery That Put Early Iowa On Edge

 

An early newspaper depiction of the Council Bluffs train robbery

The men who robbed the Burlington Fast Mail Train No. 8 in Council Bluffs on November 13, 1920, didn’t ride horses or wear masks. They didn’t wave revolvers from the saddle or disappear into canyon country like dime novel bandits.

 

They were local boys.

 

Boys who knew the rail yards. Boys who knew the schedules. Boys who knew that one train rolling through town that night carried more wealth than most people would see in ten lifetimes.

 

By sunrise, they had stolen millions.

 

Council Bluffs was built on rails. Freight trains rattled through at all hours. Passenger coaches came and went. Mail runs cut through the darkness. Stock cars groaned. Couplers slammed together like gunshots. Steam drifted across the yards in white clouds. Lanterns swung through the night in the hands of switchmen and brakemen. The whole place smelled of coal smoke, hot iron, grease, mud, and livestock.

 

If a man wanted to vanish into noise and confusion, there were easier places to fail and few better places to succeed.

 

Burlington Train No. 8 looked like any other fast mail run. Cars loaded with sacks. Clerks sorting letters under dim light. Men hauling packages and registered pouches. Nothing about it advertised fortune.

But mixed in with ordinary mail were registered shipments carrying cash, Liberty Bonds, securities, and valuable papers moving between banks and businesses across the country. Wealth rode quietly in canvas sacks with government seals tied shut.

Principal train robbers: 1. H. A. Reed 2. T. A. Daly. 3. Orville Phillips
4. Merle Phillips 5. Fred Poffenberger

The man who knew that was railway mail clerk Merle Phillips, twenty-one years old.

 

He knew how registered mail moved. He knew where it was stored. He knew when a train was vulnerable and when busy railroad men stopped noticing anything outside their own jobs.

 

He also possessed something thieves have prized in every generation.

 

Inside information.

 

His younger brother, Orville, was in on the scheme. So were Fred Poffenbarger, nineteen, and Keith Collins, twenty-six. They weren’t criminal masterminds. Just young men with hungry eyes staring at a chance too large to ignore.

 

Money has a way of making boys think they are men.

 

Poffenbarger was already known to police as a holdup man and auto thief. Collins liked uniforms, attention, and stories about himself. Merle had access. Orville had loyalty to the bloodline over the law.

 

Put those things together in the dark, and trouble usually follows.

 

The plan was simple.

 

After the train left the transfer point in Council Bluffs, it would slow near a crossing and switch area before fully getting underway. For a few moments, crews would watch signals, movement, track positions, and timing. Eyes forward. Minds busy.

 

That was the opening.

 

As departure time neared, Merle approached Engineer Quimby and asked for a ride toward the Burlington station. It sounded harmless enough. One railroad man asking another for a favor.

 

Quimby had no reason to refuse.

Keith Collins

Merle climbed into the cab. Steam hissed. Iron trembled beneath their boots. The engine tugged the train forward. He made conversation while the locomotive rolled into the night.

 

While attention stayed in the cab, two men moved along the side of the train as it pulled from the transfer depot. They climbed aboard a moving mail car, smashed a window, reached inside through the broken glass, and worked the latch.

 

Then they slipped through the door.

 

Inside the car, clerks worked among sacks and parcels, unaware that thieves were now riding with them in the dark.

 

When the train slowed near the crossing, the robbers moved fast.

 

The mail car door flew open.

 

Registered pouches came sailing out into the night.

 

One after another they hit the weeds and cinders beside the tracks with heavy thuds. Canvas bags packed with money and negotiable paper tumbled into the darkness like feed sacks from a wagon.

 

Ten bags were thrown out.

 

Outside, Keith Collins waited in a stolen Maxwell automobile with the engine running.

 

The men jumped down, boots sinking into the wet ground. They grabbed the sacks, strained under the weight, and heaved them into the car. Some were hidden temporarily in a nearby schoolhouse. Others were hauled off immediately before anyone knew what had happened.

 

The entire job took less than ten minutes. No gun battle, screaming passengers, or posse racing after them beneath a harvest moon.

 

Just government mail vanishing into the Iowa night.

 

It was nearly perfect.

 

Then they made one mistake.

 

They left one pouch behind.

 

When Conductor Wood saw it lying beside the tracks, he stopped to inspect it. A registered pouch did not belong in the weeds.

Merle Phillips

He called Quimby.

 

The engineer looked down at the abandoned sack and understood in a flash why Merle Phillips had wanted a ride in the cab.

 

He had been a distraction.

 

Trust can turn sour in a second.

 

When the train reached Creston, Quimby wasted no time calling the station agent.

 

“Merle Phillips is in on that robbery.”

 

Railroad men sent word ahead. Postal inspectors were alerted. Authorities moved fast. Local police began knocking on doors while the thieves were still deciding what to do with their fortune.

 

The first estimates of the loss were enormous.

 

Then they climbed higher.

 

When officials checked manifests and registered shipments, they found that nearly $3.5 million had disappeared.

 

Cash.

 

Negotiable Liberty Bonds.

 

Securities.

 

Financial papers entrusted to the United States mail more confidently than to armed guards.

 

The Des Moines Register told readers that the “Mail robbery makes Jesse James a piker.”

 

That was not newspaper exaggeration. A handful of reckless young men had just carried out one of the richest train robberies in American history.

 

Then came the hard part.

 

Stealing money is easier than using it.

 

Many of the sacks did not contain neat bundles of bills. They held bonds, documents, and paper requiring knowledge, contacts, and patience to convert into cash. To amateurs, much of it was dead weight.

 

The boys had stolen treasure; they didn’t know how to spend.

 

Meanwhile, the law was already tightening around them.

 

They didn’t need fingerprints, wiretaps, or laboratories to solve this case.

 

They needed common sense.

 

Merle Phillips was the obvious suspect.

 

Only two hours after Quimby made his call, Merle was in custody. Four hours later, he had confessed.

 

However tough he imagined himself, a jail room and hard questions stripped it away fast.

 

Once Merle talked, the rest collapsed.

 

Officers arrested Fred Poffenbarger. After two days of relentless questioning, he confessed too.

 

“What did you do with the $800,000 in bonds?”

 

“We burned them in the kitchen stove,” he said.

 

Merle and Orville Phillips had helped feed them into the fire.

 

Imagine it.

 

Fortunes curling black in stove flames because the thieves had no better idea what to do with them.

 

Postal inspectors searching the house found three valuable diamond brooches tossed in a corner.

 

“There ought to be two or three more around somewhere,” said Poffenbarger. “We had so much money. Nobody wanted the diamonds. So we threw them away.”

 

That may be the most criminal sentence in the entire story.

 

Harry Reed, a boarder at the Daly home, had not taken part in the robbery. He got dragged into the wreckage because the boys handed him $15,000 simply because they could.

 

Easy money spreads stupidity quickly.

 

Keith Collins was the next man implicated.

 

Newspapers said he strutted around town in a captain’s uniform despite having served only as a private in the Army Aviation Corps. The medals on his chest were said to be as fake as the rank.

 

He had driven the getaway car, taken five bags, vanished on his partners, then returned hours later and handed them $25,000 as their share of the cash.

 

Greed often enters partnerships right after success.

 

When postal inspectors questioned Collins, he claimed he had burned everything except the $500 found on him.

 

There was also talk that Collins expected fame once prison was over.

 

“There is no doubt in the world but that the movies will want me,” he told reporters.

 

Some men can stand in ruins and still admire themselves.

 

Collins received the heaviest punishment. Fred Poffenbarger and Orville Phillips were also convicted. Long federal sentences followed.

 

The boys who believed they had beaten the system were headed through prison gates instead.

 

But much of the stolen property was never recovered.

 

That kept the story alive.

 

Rumors lingered for years that portions of the take remained buried, hidden in walls, tucked under floorboards, or quietly held by relatives who knew when silence was worth money.

 

People remember missing fortunes longer than handcuffs.

 

The robbery shocked the country because it felt like two eras colliding.

 

Train robbery belonged to the nineteenth century. Jesse James. The Dalton Brothers. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Horses, ambushes, revolvers, canyon escapes.

 

But this was something new.

 

An automobile waited nearby. The planners used railroad procedure instead of brute force.

 

The primary weapon was knowledge.

 

No gunfire was needed because the thieves knew exactly when the train would slow and where men would be looking.

 

That was the future.

 

America was changing fast. Cities grew. Cars multiplied. Prohibition had just begun. Organized criminals everywhere were learning that information, speed, nerve, and timing could beat old-fashioned law enforcement.

 

Council Bluffs learned it in one night.

 

There was also something sad beneath the headlines.

 

These weren’t seasoned gangsters. They were barely men at all. Young, impatient, greedy, and certain they were smarter than everyone around them.

 

For a few hours, they were.

 

They fooled the railroad. They fooled the postal service. They fooled the public.

 

Then reality arrived in badges, warrants, courtroom benches, and prison cells.

 

The Council Bluffs train robbery is mostly forgotten now, buried beneath louder gangland stories from Chicago and the Roaring Twenties.

 

But in its day, it was enormous news.

 

Millions stolen.

 

Mail sacks tossed from a moving train.

 

Local boys at the center of it all.

 

It remains one of Iowa’s greatest crime stories because it contains what people never stop staring at.

 

A fortune.

 

A perfect plan.

 

A fatal mistake.

 

Young men who reached for more money than they could ever hold.

 

And for one night, almost had it.

 

Stuff like this is what I always end up chasing—the little lines in old newspapers and magazines, the parts most books skip over.

 

I pulled a bunch of those stories together into Iowa Crime Time if you want more of it.

 

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