Forsyth Bank Robbery

   About noon on Monday, February 15, 1932, two "shabbily dressed," unmasked men walked into the Taney County Bank at Forsyth and, flourishing revolvers, herded the cashier, the bookkeeper, and one customer into the vault. Unable to open the safe, which was on a time lock, the robbers turned their attention to the tills in the front part of the bank. One gathered up about $350 while the other stood guard near the door.
   As the bandits fled, the cashier picked up a revolver that had been secreted in the vault for just such an emergency. He stepped outside the vault, which had not been locked, and fired two shots at the fleeing robbers. They fired three shots in return, narrowing missing the occupants of the bank.
   Out on the sidewalk, the two bandits ran about a half block to where two accomplices waited in a getaway car. The robbers jumped in, and the car took off toward Douglas County. Taney County officers gave chase but lost track of the vehicle near Brown Branch close to the Douglas county line.
   In late February, Collins Rippee, about 22 years old, was arrested at Wichita, Kansas, as a suspect in the robbery. Although he was now living in Wichita, he was originally from the Mansfield area of Wright County, Missouri, and had been visiting relatives at the time of the holdup. He was identified after an automobile believed to have been used in the crime was traced to the relatives.
   Collins confessed to his part in the robbery, and he implicated four other young men: Ralph Newton, 24; Chester Huffman, 25; Wade Rippee, about 33; and Percy Rippee, about 27; all from the Mansfield area. Wade and Percy Rippee were both cousins of Collins Rippee. Huffman and the two older Rippees had all been in trouble previously on less serious charges.
   The four other suspects were soon rounded up, but Wade and Percy Rippee both escaped shortly after their arrests. Meanwhile, all three of the suspects still in custody pleaded guilty to bank robbery. Huffman and Collins Rippee were given 12-year prison sentences, and Newton was given 5 years. Huffman was the man who fired the shots at the bank cashier, and Collins was presumably his sidekick. Wade and Percy Rippee were apparently the men who waited in the getaway car, while Newton's role as an accomplice is not clear.
   Percy Rippee went on the lam for over two and a half years, traveling throughout the United States, before returning home in the fall of 1934 when he got sick with malaria. He was taken into custody a few days after he came back to Wright County. He pleaded guilty to bank robbery and was sentenced to five years in prison.
   Collins Rippee died in prison in 1936, and Percy Collins was paroled around the first of September 1937. Wade Rippee was finally recaptured about the same time Percy was paroled. At the time of his arrest, Wade was also facing federal charges in connection with a recent bank robbery at Mountain Grove, but Taney County officials refused to turn him over to federal authorities. He pleaded guilty in the Forsyth case and was given two years at Jeff City.
   Meanwhile, Percy Rippee wasted little time getting into trouble again after his parole. Arrested on a drunk driving charge, he was doing time at the Wright County Jail in Hartville when he dug his way out of the calaboose in mid-October 1937 and took off for parts unknown. Officially he was never heard from again, although a grandson of his, Curtis Ashlock, recently contacted me and put me on the trail of this story. According to Curtis, Percy changed his name, got married, and lived out the rest of his days as a peaceful citizen. Curtis remembers Percy (although that is not the name by which Curtis knew him) talking about his days as a "hobo" traveling around the country, but not until he was an old man did Percy mention his criminal past to his grandson.

Hot June Weather

   The days here lately in the Ozarks have been unusually hot for mid-June. Here in Joplin, where I live, for instance, the temperature has reached into the 90s each of the past ten days and the mid-90s each of the past four days. That's considerably hotter than usual, since the average daily high temperature for the entire month of June in Joplin is between 85 and 86 degrees. We're supposed to get a break from the heat within the next couple of days, but, even if we do, this month is likely to be one of the hotter Junes on record.
   I'm not sure, though, whether this year is an aberration or a part of a trend--a reflection of a changing climate--because it seems summer has been coming earlier in recent years than it normally does. If memory serves, it seems we've had several unusually hot Junes in recent years and several unusually cool Augusts. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I don't think I'm entirely off the mark with that observation.
   In either case, the hot weather of late got me to thinking about other hot summers I've experienced in the Ozarks. When I was an elementary school kid growing up in Fair Grove in the early 1950s, the Ozarks had some of the hottest summers on record. The heat we've had in recent days pales in comparison to June of 1953. That year, the temperature in Joplin reached 102 degrees or better for five consecutive days from June 11 through June 15, and the average high for the whole month was over 97 degrees, compared to an average high of 85.6 degrees during a typical year. Of course, I didn't live in Joplin then, but the Springfield area also recorded a very hot June that year, with the thermometer reaching 100 at least a time or two and the daily high for the entire month averaging over 92 degrees, compared to 81 during a typical year.
   June of 1953 was also very dry. In fact, 1953 still stands, I believe, as the driest year on record in Missouri with a statewide average rainfall of 25.5 inches compared to 41 inches in a typical year. In 1953, the Ozarks region (and much of the whole nation) was in the grip of long drought that started in the fall of 1952 and continued until about 1956.
   And then, of course, there was July of 1954, when the mercury topped 100 degrees in about half of the days of the month. It still stands as the hottest month on record in the Ozarks, but I've already written about July 1954 in a blog post a few years ago. So, I'll let it go at that. Suffice it to say that, compared to the early 1950s, maybe the temperatures we've been having lately aren't so bad after all.
   There's no denying, however, that average temperatures worldwide are on the rise. You can argue about how much human activity is contributing to the rise, but the fact that it's getting hotter on average is a matter of record.

Anna McMahan and the Prettiest Boy in the World

   About 4:30 Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1902, four shots rang out in an upstairs room of the Watson building at the corner of Walnut and Campbell streets in Springfield. Immediately afterward, nineteen-year-old William Pittman raced down the stairs and ran a half block north on Campbell to the Waddle Hotel, yelling for someone to summon a doctor. Pittman was seriously injured with a gunshot wound to the head, but he was conscious and talked freely to those on the scene. He said a young woman named Anna McMahan had shot him without provocation as he stood before a mirror and that she then turned the gun on herself. Investigators hurried to the Watson building and found the twenty-three-year-old Miss McMahan dead in her room, but the circumstantial evidence they discovered was at direct odds with the story Pittman had told.
   The woman had been shot twice, once in the back of the head and once directly between the shoulder blades, making it virtually impossible for her have fired the shots herself. Also, the path of the bullet through Pittman’s head suggested a self-inflicted wound. Investigators theorized that Pittman had killed Miss McMahan and then turned the gun on himself in a failed suicide attempt. They thought Pittman had been infatuated with Anna, learned she'd been with another man during the weekend, and committed the crime in a jealous rage.
   Pittman, who lived outside Springfield with his parents, had come to town on or about Monday, December 1, and taken a room at the Waddle Hotel, because he had been summoned to testify before a grand jury during the coming week. Pittman promptly made the acquaintance of Anna McMahan, who worked at the hotel as a dining room girl, and by Thursday she started entertaining him in her room at the Watson building. The pair spent much of their time together over the next couple of days until Pittman left on Saturday to return home for his brother’s birthday.
   He came back late the next day and, according to the prosecution theory, discovered tell-tale signs of Anna’s betrayal. He immediately confronted her, and now he was under arrest for her murder.
   The day after the shooting, a coroner’s jury, refusing to buy Pittman’s farfetched story, concluded that “Anna McMahan came to her death as the result of a pistol shot fired by William Pittman.” Pittman’s serious condition postponed his preliminary hearing until early 1903, when he was indicted for first-degree murder and bound over for trial in Greene County Criminal Court. At the trial in early April, Coroner Matthews was one of the main prosecution witnesses. He said that it was impossible for the young woman to have fired both shots he’d dug out of her body, that she had no powder burns around her wounds as she would have if she’d been shot at close range, and that the pistol had blood smears on it but Anna had no bloodstains on her hands.
   When Pittman got a chance to tell his side of the story, it differed considerable from the tale he’d first told. He still said Anna had shot him first, but he now claimed he wrested the gun from her and shot her in retaliation. He admitted it happened during a jealous quarrel, but he said Anna was the jealous one, not him.
   He claimed Anna had told him he was “the prettiest boy in the world” and had declared her love for him. She’d suggested they run away to get married, and she’d become very upset when he balked at the proposition. When he came back to Springfield on Sunday, he told her that he “wouldn’t marry you or any woman like you.”
   “Then you will die right here,” Anna declared, as Pittman stood in front of the mirror, and before he could turn around, she fired. Seriously injured but still on his feet, he turned and grabbed the gun away from Anna, who was standing very close to him. Hurt and angry, he “fired just as fast as (he) could,” and then dropped the gun and ran down the stairs to the street.
   The prosecution subjected Pittman to a grueling cross-examination, forcing him to deny statements that, according to other witnesses, he’d made in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
   The defense called two female co-workers of Miss McMahan to corroborate the defendant’s testimony that Anna was the aggressor in their relationship. The defense also offered to show that Anna McMahan’s reputation for chastity was not good, but the judge sustained the prosecution’s objection to such testimony. Whether Anna was, indeed, a woman of easy virtue is in doubt, because other evidence suggests that she had a good reputation.
   The trial ended with the jury split 11-1 in favor of conviction. Not wanting to take a chance on a second trial after such a close call, Pittman threw himself on the mercy of the court and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Despite his pleas for leniency, the judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison.
   Pittman found a more sympathetic listener in Missouri governor Alexander Dockery. The prisoner arrived in Jefferson City on May 6, 1903, to serve his fifty-year sentence, but he was pardoned on September 10, 1904, after only a year and a third.
   This blog entry is condensed from my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

Pitched Gun Battle on the Streets of Thayer

   At Thayer (MO) about 6:00 a.m. on the morning of Friday, August 12, 1927, local constable Barney McCourtney parked his car on the town's main street across from Tony Gaw's White Kitchen Cafe. The lawman got out and was standing beside his automobile talking to another man when Gaw emerged from his place of business and came across the street to confront McCourtney, demanding that the two men needed to settle their differences. Exactly what led up to the confrontation is not altogether clear. 

   At least one report said the feud between McCourtney and Gaw dated back at least several months when Gaw had opposed McCourtney's election as township constable, while another traced the dispute to McCourtney's arrest of Gaw some time previously. Regardless of how longstanding the feud was, the best evidence indicates that the immediate cause of the confrontation was an incident that happened the night before. Gaw and the Thayer city marshal spent Thursday night corralling drunks and keeping the peace. Late in the evening, they went to Gaw's cafe, where a disturbance had broken out. Gaw, who himself held a commission as an Oregon County deputy, apparently resented the intervention of the marshal and especially the constable. He drew a pistol on McCourtney and told him to leave. The city marshal promptly forced Gaw to put away his weapon did not arrest him. 

    Exactly what happened after Gaw confronted McCourtney the next morning is also not completely clear. An initial report said that Gaw made threats toward McCourtney, even declaring that he was going to kill him. The constable told Gaw to go away and leave him alone, and when Gaw persisted with his remonstrances, McCourtney slapped him. Both men then drew their pistols about the same time but with Gaw going for his gun first. A later report said it was the other way around--that Gaw slapped McCourtney and that the constable went for his gun first. In any case, all reports seem to agree that the two men drew at close to the same time.  

   Both men started firing, with McCourtney taking cover behind his car. In all, about ten shots were fired before the shooting ceased. The constable was not seriously injured in the melee, and it appeared at first that neither was Gaw, as he began walking back across the street to his cafe, When he reached the cafe, however, he collapsed from a bullet wound near his heart and died five hours later. 

   McCourtney turned himself in, and he was charged with second-degree murder. Freed on $3,500 bond to await trial, he was found not guilty during the November 1927 term of court.