17. Vicious bank robberies didn’t end in the 1930s
In 1984, the First National Bank of Chattanooga in Geronimo, Oklahoma, was the site of one of the most vicious bank robberies in American history on December 14 of that year. Early in the afternoon a man entered the bank, took the staff he found there into the back, forced them to lie on the floor, and then stabbed them to death. Seventy-five stab wounds were inflicted on the three employees, and the stabbings only ended when they were interrupted by the entry of three customers, who were taken to the back at gunpoint and shot in the head. Two of them survived, as did a fourteen-month-old child, who was not shot because the robber’s ammunition ran out.
The murderers and thieves, Jay Wesley Neill, who did the killings, and Robert Grady Johnson, were arrested on December 17 in a San Francisco hotel, traced there by the trail of marked bills which had paid for their transit. They were both convicted of the crimes in 1985 and sentenced to death for capital murder and several other crimes in connection with the robbery. When those convictions were overturned (they had been tried together) they have tried again, in separate trials, and again both were convicted. Johnson was sentenced to four life sentences and Neill was again given the death penalty. He was executed at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 2002, by lethal injection.