Brothers, Big Time Robbers
The Newton family had eleven kids, four of whom would become some of history’s most successful bank and train robbers. As sharecroppers the family moved around, scratching out a living in the cotton fields of Texas. The boys’ mother read outlaw stories to her sons with such success that Willis, the eventual leader of the […]
Flapper Bandit
Just before Christmas in 1926, Rebecca Bradley, a twenty-one-year old student at the University of Texas in Austin, decided to rob banks to pay her college tuition. First, she set fire to a vacant house in downtown Round Rock and rushed into the nearby bank thinking the employees would be distracted by the blaze. When […]
The Newton Boys
The Newton family had eleven kids, four of whom would become history’s most successful bank and train robbers. As sharecroppers the family moved around, scratching out a living in the cotton fields of Texas. The boys’ mother Janetta Pecos Anderson Newton regaled the boys with outlaw stories with such success that Willis, the eventual leader […]
Bonnie Parker, Dead at Twenty-three
She was an honor student and loved poetry, but she dropped out of school, married Roy Thornton before her sixteenth birthday, and had “Roy and Bonnie” tattooed on her right knee to celebrate the union. After a stormy two years, Thornton went to prison; Bonnie never divorced him and died five years later, still wearing […]
Flapper Bandit
Just before Christmas in 1926, Rebecca Bradley, a twenty-one-year old student at the University of Texas in Austin, decided to rob banks to pay her college tuition. First, she set fire to a vacant house near downtown Round Rock and rushed into the nearby bank thinking the employees would be distracted by the blaze. When […]