[Zeb]

I have read about this gang and the loot never found before in the past from treasure magazines. Thought I would share it here.

Published 5/3/2008
Garen City Telegram

In the spring of 1928, the Fleagle brothers of Finney County made their plan for robbing the First National Bank of Lamar, Colo., a job they had been considering for some seven or eight years. Their first step was to locate a hideout, a farm a few miles south of Marienthal, near Leoti. It later became known as the "Horseless Horse Ranch." Two former accomplices were chosen to assist in the robbery, Howard Royston and George Abshier.




On May 23, 1928, the robbery was carried out. At 1:10 p.m. the gang entered the bank, each carried a pistol. They ordered the bank employees and two customers to put their hands up. A. N. Parrish, president of the bank, reached for a gun from the drawer in his desk. Parrish fired at Royston, hitting him in the jaw. Royston and two of the bandits fired back and Parris fell, mortally wounded His son, John, rushed to a closet for a gun, and he too was shot and killed. Abshier and Jake scooped up $218,000 in cash and negotiable securities. The bandits grabbed two bank employees, Everett Kessinger and E. A. Lundgren, as hostages and ran for their car.

Sheriff L. E. Alderman was phoned. He and Harry Anderson, a witness to the crime, gave pursuit in Alderman's police car. The bandits could be easily trailed out of Lamar as their vehicle left wide tire marks as it careened around corners leaving Lamar.

The bandits released Lundgren a few miles from Lamar.

Because no police radios were used in police cars at the time, Alderman stopped at least three times during the chase to inform several people as to the direction of the pursuit. They in turn phoned officials in Lamar. At one point, the robbers stopped and fired high-powered rifles at the sheriff's car partially disabling it. Alderman and Anderson managed to limp into Bristol, Colo., and called other authorities in the vicinity. Officials, thrown off for a time by a false report of a capture at Cheyenne Wells, Colo., allowed the bandits to follow their plan and make their get-away to the Horseless Horse Ranch.

The following day hundreds of citizens searched the area to no avail. Authorities were becoming fearful that Everett Kessinger, the kidnapped bank teller, would not be found alive.

Hundreds continued the search on the 25th. Dr. Wineinger's body was the first to be found. His car and body were located at the entrance of a canyon in Scott County. Alderman visited the crime scene an hour later with Roland S. Terwilliger, of the Garden City Police Department, a recognized fingerprint expert. Both Terwilliger and Richardson searched the car thoroughly for prints and, among those obtained, found one unidentifiable print. It was that of a right index finger, found at the top of the right rear window.

The bandits eliminated all possible witnesses, those who definitely might be able to put the law on their trail. Bank teller Kessinger was shot to death the same day as Wineinger. His body was found three weeks later in an isolated, abandoned shack south of Liberal.

The criminals, now guilty of robbery and four murders, went separate ways. Ralph Fleagle went to San Francisco. There he passed as a stock broker and as such was able to dispose of stolen Liberty bonds.

Law enforcement agencies continued working to reveal the identity of the person who had left the mysterious fingerprint on Dr. Wineinger's car window. On July 19, 1929 - almost fourteen months after the robbery, a letter from the FBI was received by Garden City Chief of Police Lee Richardson informing him that the man who had made the fingerprint had been identified as Jake Fleagle. Along with the letter was a mug shot of Fleagle.

A few days later, a letter from Ralph Fleagle to his parents was intercepted by Chief Richardson at the Garden City Post Office. It revealed that Ralph would be in Kankakee, Ill. With the assistance of the Chicago police, Alderman arrested Ralph and returned him to Garden City.

Thinking he would not receive the death penalty, Ralph implicated Jake Fleagle along with Abshier and Royston. On Sept. 12, 1929, the three pled guilty to murder, bank robbery and kidnapping at the arraignment in Lamar, Colo. The jury decreed the death penalty for all the men. All three died at the state penitentiary in Canon City in July 1930.

Jake eluded capture for another year. Going on information supplied by Jake's common-law wife, Beatrice Holden, investigators finally captured Jake as he arrived by train at Branson, Mo. Jake was wounded and died during an emergency operation.

In light of today's technology, investigative techniques in 1928 were, by comparison, primitive. Small town officers usually provided their own car and had no form of two-way radio transmission. They had the barest essentials in training. There was little in the way of a centralized criminal records agency. In 1924, there were only 810,000 fingerprint cards in the entire FBI Identification Division.

Officers such as Alderman of Lamar and Richardson and Terwilliger of Garden City were dedicated and relentless in their pursuit, committed to bring the criminals to justice. Resourcefulness and persistence solved the case. Using unfamiliar practices for the time like air search for the bandits, handwriting analysis and fingerprint collecting and identification, local law enforcement officers not only set a precedent but an example for the rest of the country.