Bank of Washburn 's Second Robbery

About noon on October 17, 1921, three young men, who were unmasked, wearing overalls, and otherwise "roughly attired," approached the Bank of Washburn (Mo.) on foot. One of them stood guard outside while the other two entered the bank and covered assistant cashier Graley Wines with revolvers. They rifled through the tills, the vault, and the safe, taking about $1,900 in cash and currency. (This was the second time the Bank of Washburn had been robbed in less than two years. See last week's blog entry.)
Just as they were getting ready to herd Wines into the vault, cashier Walter Jones returned from lunch. The guard spotted Jones as he started to enter the bank and fired a shot at him. Jones hurried into the bank, where he was met by the other two bandits, and both Jones and Wines were quickly forced into the vault. The robbers closed the door on the two bank employees and made their escape.
One of the captives sounded an alarm that was located inside the vault, and townspeople promptly arrived to set the two men free. A posse formed and pursued the three bandits, as they fled on foot. At a thicket of woods about two miles west of town, the posse briefly made contact with the robbers, and Bob Wines (father of the assistant cashier) fired his shotgun at the fugitives as they climbed over a fence. The robbers returned fire as they ducked into the woods. More men gathered to surround the woods, but when the posse advanced to try to flush the bandits out of the woods, they were nowhere to be found, having already somehow made their escape. It was thought they had split up, as a young man who was thought to be one of the robbers was spotted by a witness not far from the scene.
In the aftermath of the robbery, it was revealed that the three robbers had been hanging around Washburn for several days before the crime and had camped just outside town. One man who happened on the camp while squirrel hunting a day or two before the robbery reported that the three young men had ordered him to "move on." Also, during their flight, the robbers had been forced to abandon some of their gear, including some shoes and hats, and  part of the stuff was identified as having been stolen from a store in Exeter the previous week.
Rewards totaling about $1950 were raised for the capture of the robbers, but they were not immediately apprehended. A man was killed in early December during a bank robbery attempt at Cardin, Oklahoma, and he was tentatively identified as one of the Washburn robbers, since he closely matched the description. Another suspect was taken into custody near Rogers, Arkansas, in mid-December. He was identified as Brownie Long (aka Elmer Brown), but he was released in early January 1922 for lack of evidence. As far as I've been able to ascertain, no one else was arrested in connection with the second Washburn bank robbery, at least not during the first few months after the crime.

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.