12. Banks hid money to keep it from robbers
In February 1933, bank robberies had become so common in some parts of Texas that private banker R. P. Henry, who with his sons ran a bank in Lancaster, Texas, took to hiding cash in file cabinets, rather than keeping it in the vault safe, in expectation of a visit from criminals. On the morning of February 27, Henry and his sons were at work in the bank when two men – Clyde Barrow and Red Hamilton – entered the building. Barrow was armed with a sawed-off shotgun. The bank’s customers were shoved aside and gathered with the employees, all of them forced to lie on the floor while Barrow watched over them with the shotgun and Hamilton filled a sack with the cash from the drawers. It was later determined that Hamilton left over $300 in quarters and half-dollars in the cash drawers.
The robbers left with $6,700 in cash, unwittingly leaving behind another $9,000 safely hidden in file cabinets. The robbers escaped in a car to a nearby town, where Bonnie Parker awaited them in another car, though in transferring between vehicles some of the money was dropped. It was one of the more successful bank robberies for Bonnie and Clyde, who preferred to rob grocery stores, gas stations, and other less lucrative targets. During their exceedingly violent career together the pair probably robbed less than a dozen banks, and in several cases the robbery was interrupted by law enforcement, forcing the thieves to flee before securing all of the cash, often in a hail of bullets from Clyde Barrow’s weapon of choice, the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). The two were killed in an ambush in Louisiana on May 23, 1934, and the murderous Clyde Barrow and blithe Bonnie Parker remain romanticized in the twenty-first century.