Washburn Bank Robbery

Last time I wrote about Henry Starr's robbery of the Bank of Seligman on December 20, 1920, and I had previously written on this blog about the robbery of the Bank of Exeter that occurred on December 22, 1921. However, those heists were just two in an outbreak of five bank robberies that occurred in Barry County within a two-year period from the late teens to the early twenties.
The first of the five occurred on December 11, 1919, when two unmasked youths pulled up in an automobile outside the Bank of Washburn about two o'clock in the afternoon and left the car running as they strode into the bank armed with revolvers. They rifled through the tills and then forced cashier W. H. Jones and his wife (who was the assistant cashier) to open the safe at the point of a gun. The young robbers took about $4,000 in currency and several thousand dollars worth of Liberty Bonds, slammed the vault door shut on Jones and his wife, and made their escape. 
The crime was not discovered until twenty minutes later, when a customer came into the bank and found Jones and his wife locked in the vault. A posse was quickly organized, and the getaway car was found abandoned on the road southwest of Washburn. No other trace of the robbers was found, but it was thought they might be headed for Oklahoma.
However, the suspects were located near Stella two days later. One of them, a 28-year-old World War I vet named Claude Leonard, surrendered when officers opened fire on the duo, but the other young man, whom Leonard later identified as 21-year-old Bob Pankey (aka Paukey) of Lamar, made his escape to the woods. Leonard, who gave his hometown as Eldorado Springs, had about $1,650 on him, but he said Pankey had about $2,000 in currency and several thousand in bonds. The bank's total loss was placed at about $12,850. The chase after Pankey continued into the next day, December 14, before finally being called off when the lawmen lost the fugitive's trail.
On December 15, however, Pankey was arrested by police at a Joplin hotel where he had registered. He admitted the robbery, and he said his real name was Bob Forge (also given as Froge) but that he'd been reared by the Pankey family. He had about $8,500 in cash and bonds on him. He said he "used to be a Sunday school boy but somewhere I got away from it. But I never have sworn, smoked, or touched liquor."
Charged with bank robbery, both suspects were taken to Cassville to await trial. When their cases came up, both men pleaded guilty. Both were sentenced to forty years at the big house, but they were paroled in 1930 after serving a little over twenty.