Hello All
Here is a treasure legend dating back to the ganster days of the late 1920's. The Fleagle Gang was a group of bank robbers and murderers. They were found and executed or killed after robbing the First National Bank in Lamar, Colorado.They were also suspected to have committed a series of previous bank robberies over a 10-year period. How much money they amssed is unknown?
On May 23, 1928, Ralph Fleagle, his brother Jake, George J. Abshier, and Howard Royston, came in to Lamar, Colorado. They planned to rob the First National Bank. Like many professional robbers of that time, the Fleagles, together with Abshier, had carefully scouted the bank on several occasions before the day came to actually hold it up.
The gang had maps of the roads of Prowers County, Colorado, and the brothers had been inside the bank building and knew its layout. Abshier said they had weighed the “possibilities” and decided that it was a job for no less than four men, so they recruited Royston. When they left Kansas on May 23. The men had false license plates to throw any witnesses off their track. Each man went heavily armed.The plan required them to wait until the afternoon to commit the robbery. Finally, about 1 p.m., it was time to move.
A one-armed teller at the bank by the name of Lundgren was waiting on a customer when he saw the men come into the bank. In the noise and confusion of the moment, Bank President A.N. Parrish ran into his office and pulled out an .45 and fired a shot at the closest bank robber from the door to his office hitting Royston in the jaw, and then by all hell broke loose.
The bank cashier, William Garrett and Miss Vivian Potter, another bank employee, said later two of the gunmen struggled with customers and most of the gang members were shouting to their victims to either lie down or put their hands up. During the struggle, the bank president, A.N. Parrish,who shot Royston in the jaw and was subsequently shot and killed himself. Jaddo Parrish, the son of the president, was also killed in the shoot out.
The bandits loaded their treasure about 230000 dollars worth into pillow cases and grabbed two hostages. The original plan had called for the gang to take Jaddo Parrish as hostage, because they felt that his father would not pursue them and risk his son’s life, but when Jaddo was killed, the gunmen opted to take others.
The gang, along with hostages Edward A. Lundgren and a teller named Everett Kesinger, headed out to the car by a back door and roared out of town. After fending off the sheriff in a car chase that ended at a crossing on Sand Creek northeast of Lamar, where the robbers used rifles to disable the sheriff's car, the gang made good its escape.
During the car chase the gang released the one-arm teller Lundgren. Kesinger pleaded that he had a wife and new baby, and asked to be let go, but the bandits refused, forcing Kesinger to ride on the floor of the back seat of the car while Royston used a pillow case to catch the blood from his wound in the front seat.
The gang arrived back in Kansas by nightfall. Royston, who had been shot by the dead bank president, needed medical attention, so the gang tricked a local doctor into coming out from his Dighton, Kansas home at night by telling him that a young boy’s foot had been crushed by a tractor.
When Dr. W.W. Weinenger arrived at the ranch, he discovered the ruse but obviously treated Royston’s wounds. After he finished, the gang bound him up and blindfolded him, took him out of the ranch and shot him in the back of the head with a shotgun and rolled his body and his Buick into a ravine north of Scott City, Kansas. The car and doctor's body were spotted from the air by a Colorado National Guard airplane that had been brought from Denver to aid in the search. Dozens of citizen posses crisscrossed the counties along the Colorado border in search of the getaway car.
The Fleagle brothers took Kesinger to a shack near Liberal, Kansas and shot him. The body was discovered about three weeks after the bank robbery.
The gang divided the loot and separated, with Abshire driving Royston to Minneapolis, Minnesota to be seen by a dental surgeon. After reaching Minneapolis each man went to a different area of the country with Abshire going to Grand Junction, Colorado, Royston to San Andreas, California and Ralph to San Francisco, California.
Police took about a year to track down the owner of the single fingerprint left on the window of Dr. Weinenger’s car. When Jake was arrested in Stockton, California in March 1929 his fingerprints were sent to the Bureau of Investigation (later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation) in Washington DC, where they were identified as Jake Fleagle and connected to the Lamar bank robbery.
Ralph was arrested first in Kankakee, Illinois and after flying back to Kansas and being booked in Lamar he was taken to Colorado Springs where he eventually confessed. Ralph agreed to provide authorities with information about the rest of the gang in exchange for the release of his two brothers Fred and Walt Fleagle. A nationwide manhunt for Jake resulted in his death in a shootout on a train in Branson, Missouri, in October 1930 after his brother had been hung in Colorado. Royston was captured at his home in San Andreas, California, and Abshire was arrested in Grand Junction, Colorado. The three were tried first in Lamar, Colorado, and in a sensational series of trials in October and November 1929, and all of them were sentenced to hang.
The men were executed over a two-week period in mid-July 1930. This was the very first time a single fingerprint had been used to convict someone of a crime, and was a major success for the FBI at the time.
Today treasure hunters scour the west looking for the caches of loot supposedly buried by skinflint Ralph Fleagle. Credible rumors, but with little proof, abound about unrecovered loot buried in California, Kansas and possibly Missouri. There is evidence to suggest that Ralph invested much of his money, and possibly owned an apartment building in San Francisco? He had been living before being arrested in Kankakee, Illinois. Ralph's wife Margaret was sent packing by the Fleagle family shortly after Ralph was hung in Colorado, but there is no evidence of where she went. after the execution.
However a careful search through sensus records might uncover where she might of lived in her laters years which might identify a property once belonging to Ralph which might still today have a possible hidden cache worth looking for?
Hardluck
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