Texas is known for its lawmen to its outlaws, from Sam Bass to Bonnie and Clyde.
But the most successful bank and train robbers of them all were members of the Newton Gang.
In Hondo, Texas, the gang hit two banks the same night after discovering the first vault door open.
“I think that attitude colors the people of Texas they’re they’re revolutionaries for one thing and for another they’re out on the edge of the frontier for a reason, they want to be left alone.
Mavericks I guess you’d say,at the time with a disdain for law enforcement agencies banks insurance companies railroads and big business area is a large part of the Texas attitude.”
Raised on outlaw stories by their mother, Willis- future leader and mastermind, followed the contemporary exploits of outlaw Harry Tracy in the purple press (picture books for kids) of the time, as a newsboy.
He says he cried when he heard the news of Tracy’s suicide in Oct 1902.
A local jury reportedly convicted Willis on slim evidence and he was sentenced to a year in the brutal Texas State Prison system, where he was forced to pick more cotton.
His attitude hardened quickly in the face of the inhuman conditions and his perception of the injustice of it all.
Doc soon joined him, entering the prison system soon after, possibly for robbing a Post Office of stamps.
From 1909 until 1918/20 the 2 brothers were in and out of the Texas penal system due to their many escape attempts, which led to further sentences and a deeper hardening of attitudes.
That’s when they performed the last Old West-style train robbery in Texas.
It was strange. It started off as a joke and ended up with a trip to mom’s house.
In his mid-20s, Willis Newton, a good ol’ boy from the Uvalde area, was a few years away from forming the famed Newton Gang with his 3 brothers.
As he told the story some 60 years later (published as The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang), Willis had nearly spent all the money he had earned picking cotton.
In December 1914, he jokingly told his buddy Red, “Let’s go down to South Texas and rob a train.”
The pair headed toward Willis’s old stomping grounds, armed with a cheap pistol and two stolen Winchesters.
Just before Christmas, they missed their chance to rob a train near Cline.
On December 30, 1914, their target pulled in at the Cline freight house at around 2:30 a.m.
Wearing masks made from the linings of their overcoats, the two climbed onto the rear car and began robbing the passengers as the train rolled out of the station.
The first man they stuck up was the Southern Pacific’s superintendent.
The bandits got only $40 from him.
They left single women alone, but everybody else was fair game.
Many passengers were asleep; some were in Pullman berths shielded by privacy curtains.
Not understanding that people were behind those curtains (Willis thought they were privies), the outlaws missed out on an estimated thousands of dollars.
After the pair had gone car to car, they pulled the cord, stopped the train near Spofford and began their escape to Willis’s mother’s home in Crystal City, which, over the prickly pear flats, was about 50 miles southeast.
They didn’t cover their tracks.
In fact, the boys killed and cooked a steer en route—even though the fire or the smell could have given them away.
About two days later, they got to Momma Newton’s home.
They split the $4,700 (equivalent to $117,562 in 2019) —the most money either of them had ever seen.
When they didn’t get caught, the take tasted even sweeter.
Willis Newton speaking of then said, “I read in the papers that the banks with were all insured by insurance companies.
Insurance companies with all the biggest leaves in the country were squeezing the money out of the little people and seat them, only giving back to them, when they are cured.
Why should it be a problem, if it’s just one thief stealing from another?”
Then in 1916 Willis robs a bank in Boswell, Oklahoma in the company of a gang he joins in Durant, Oklahoma, taking just over $10,000 (equivalent to $230,245 in 2018) and escaping on horseback.
In 1917, the boys find themselves back in prison for burglary, Willis eventually forges letters to secure a pardon.
Upon release Willis, serves an apprenticeship of sorts with a crew of bank burglars with a rotating lineup due to accidental death and reckless behavior.
As a full-time bank robber with different ex-convict partners, he begins a string of bank heists in Texas.
However, in the Midwest but as he learns the ropes of the trade he becomes more and more disillusioned with his accomplices, get drunk and tell stories. They aren’t reliable.
Willis is a perfectionist with a low tolerance for amateurs during a robbery in 1919 one of Willis’s partners leaves the bank in Kansas without taking all the money.
Pride and intelligence led Willis to decide to form his own crew and eschew the wilder elements of his previous partners in crime.
Joining forces with a more experienced safecracker and hits a turning point, Willis is convinced, he needs a team that he can trust without question.
Willis recruits his own brothers, the first one is 19-year old Joe, the youngest brother, already an exceptional cowboy who is one of the best bronc riders in the state.
Everybody loves Joe, he didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, wasn’t a heavy drinker, and he was the good side of the family.
In 1919 the “Honest Bill” and “Lucky Bill” Combined Shows had an eighty-foot big top tent and a couple of side show tents, eighteen acts, forty head of draft stock and twenty-two ponies.
In 1920 the Newton’s acquired even more stock in the show: “Honest Bill stopped over at W. P. Hall’s, Lancaster, Mo., purchasing an elephant.
He then left for Kansas City, visiting Mr. Horne, of the Horne Zoological Arena, and purchased a couple of elk.
Mrs. Newton joined Honest Bill in Kansas City, and from there they went to the 101 Ranch, at Bliss, Ok., and Honest Bill purchased two buffaloes, two ostriches and Mr. Miller’s favorite high school horse, Prince, the bridle-less wonder.
In 1921, the Caddo area newspaper’s note
Have headquarters Here
Through P. H. Boxley, a deal was completed whereby W. M. Newton became the owner of 150 acres of the Everett Pitchlyn farm just west of town.
Mr. Newton is the owner of a large Wild West Show which is now wintering at Ada , Oklahoma, but hereafter he plans to have his headquarters at Caddo and will use this land as a wintering place.
He plans to acquire other land, as he can for the same purpose.
This show will start out soon on its regular circuit and will be here sometime in March.
However, in early 1920 Willis sent Joe to $20, for train tickets to bring him from Texas to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He tells Joe, he has a good job waiting for him.
Reporter Margaret Foster remembers, Joe Newton.
Later in life, Joe told her about the moment his life changed. He said.
“ I took my saddle, because I was a bronc buster.
When I got off the train and Willis met me, and looked at my saddle in the gunnysack. He said, ‘what in the hell are you doing, with that?‘ “
Joe said, “you told me you had work for me” Willis said. ‘you’re not gonna bust Bronx you’re gonna rob banks!‘”
“The next to come on board, is Doc and then Jess, the happy-go-lucky member of the family.
Every Saturday night Jess whether he was broke or rolling in dough, was out at the bright lights… you know having a good time it’s a testament to his good nature that he was able to have a good time whether he was rich or poor in jail or out.”
Doc’s successful 1920 escape from prison in Texas (his 5th) enabled him to join his brothers soon after, and with this quintet as a nucleus, the crew had a good run, robbing banks across Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, North Dakota, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Canada.
Other suspected robberies in Oregon and Washington state have not been confirmed, as being their work.
From the start, Willis insists the gang must conduct itself in a professional manner, he approaches bank robbery with a keen eye toward detail and precision.
In 1920, operating out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Willis Newton formed what others eventually called “the Newton Boys,” along with Brentwood “Brent” Glasscock, a safe cracker and expert in high explosives, convincing his cowboy brothers Joe and later Jess to join his outfit.
Leaving nothing to chance, Willis plans every escape route meticulously.
He would studies the whole terrain and has maps of the counties around where the bank was.
He checks all kinds of landmarks.
If this old red barn, brick house, or something , he would track it right down to the tenth of a mile.
Prior to entering the banks, Willis usually shinnied up a pole outside the telephone office and cut the phone lines at a strategic point- in effect that cut that town off for hours, maybe for several days, thereby insuring a clean getaway once the county line had been reached.
The second part of the equation is, the boys almost always target small country banks.
They case banks in the summer and pull heists in fall or winter.
The Newton’s use darkness and cold weather to their advantage. They rob banks at night, for less of a chance for gun battles, hostages situations.
In modern terms, he would say he was a systems analyst, he analyzed the way towns were organized, what time banks opened, what time they closed, what kind of safes they had, what kind of people were apt to come and go, even down to the barking dogs, when he scouted and reckens the formula for robbery.
The majority of banks the Newton’s were going after, were in small towns with outdated security systems.
Maybe just one night watchman, maybe no night watchman, and it’s this way the risk was less and the money still green.
The plans he comes up with complicated, but effective banks, with square safes, become prime targets.
The square safes are generally less sophisticated, than newer round safes and have a distinct advantage.
These older safes have doors that do not fit tightly which allows nitroglycerin to be poured into the cracks around the door.
The resulting explosions were messy and loud but the gang liked to operate in the dead of winter in small farm towns where everyone would be in bed – and more inclined to stay in bed, even if they heard noises or two men armed with shotguns could keep the few townspeople, at bay, while the money was hustled out to waiting cars – Studebaker and Cadillac being the preferred makes.
The Newton’s become pioneers of a sort, as automobile bandits.
Cars are replacing the horse, as a Western outlaws favorite getaway car, when in Texas they preferred model T’s, this was a poor state at the time and the best way to avoid suspicion was to look like everyone else.
From 1920 on the Newton boys robbed banks across the West. In the Midwest and their take is staggering $40,000 in Spencer Texas, $104,000 in New Braunfels,Texas, $30,000 in Illinois and the list continues to grow each time the operation is performed with military accuracy.
In Hondo, Texas, the gang hit two banks the same night, after discovering the first vault door open.
In other robberies the patrons and bank employees often described them as being extremely polite, going out of their way to make sure everyone was comfortable, etc.
Occasionally the tactics would change, and the crew planned daytime robberies, like in New Braunfels, Texas, a simple bank hold-up on March 9, 1922, or the daring and overly ambitious multiple attack on pedestrian bank messengers in Toronto, Ontario.
After a heist in New Braunfels ,Texas- law enforcement surprises the boys with a new piece of crime busting equipment-the airplane!
Gunfire was exchanged eventually, and two messengers were wounded by Willis in the struggle and subsequent getaway.
Two bags netted the gang some C$84,000 Canadian dollars, but spoiled their reputed non-violent record.
The take from most bank jobs was not large, often less than $10,000 in combined cash and negotiable bonds. Liberty Bonds and Victory Bonds often formed the bulk of the take, stolen from individual deposit boxes.
Various bonds and other securities were fenced through underworld connections in Chicago, where Willis and Glasscock cultivated contacts.
Methodical to the last, Willis insisted on carrying out even the coins from the banks.
“We never get enough. When I go in to get anything, I want a get it all,” he liked to brag.
Ambitious, Willis invested a great deal of his money into oil wells in Smackover, Arkansas, and Mineral Wells, Texas, hoping to make it big during the boom times for the industry, when millionaires were being made overnight.
Doc and Jess enjoyed the good life, visiting the Kentucky Derby and the Indianapolis 500 several times, and enjoying the night life in Kansas City, Chicago and the like between jobs, eating in the finest restaurants and staying in the nicest hotels, thereby avoiding suspicion.
Willis persuaded Joe to invest with him in various oil wells, all of which failed to produce.
Born into poverty, the brothers did not save much.
Joe joked, “Why didn’t you invest that money in something that makes it grow? Why, I said, who wants a better job what we already got? That’s what we thought then. I need any money, go out and rob another bank.”
Interstate crime was difficult to police in those years.
Anonymous and fast moving, the Newton Gang received very little attention from law enforcement, despite the large number of robberies they’d committed.
However, that would change when they robbed their 6th train, a postal train on June 12, 1924.
The gang had teamed up with two Chicago gangsters, two racketeers, and a corrupt postal inspector named William J. Fahy and, using inside information to rob a postal train originating in Chicago.
They headed north and west and carrying large amounts of currency from the Federal Reserve commissioned for banks along the route.
Boarding the train secretly in Chicago, Willis and Jess climbed into the engine and stopped the train at a remote crossing in Rondout, Illinois.
The robbery netted them more than $3 million in one take. It was the largest train robbery in history.
Willis wanted the engineer to stop the train right on his order so that the baggage car would be right at the crossing where their cars were parked.
However, during the robbery, the engineer had overshot the crossing in his nervousness, and had to back the train up, causing some of the robbers to move out of position.
This small glitch, proves fatal the other gang members run after the train and gets separated on both sides of the cars – in the commotion the gang is split up, but Willis goes ahead with his plan.
When the male car attendants won’t open the door, Willis throws a formaldehyde laced smoke bomb.
It created f fumes partly choking the men, so the door flung open and out to Willis.
In the confusion, Wylie “Doc” Newton was wounded 5 times with a .45 caliber pistol fired by Brent Glasscock, who mistook him for an armed postal worker in the dark.
The gang took the money, loaded Doc into a vehicle, and left the scene.
While loading into the vehicle, a bystander supposedly heard one of the robbers say the name “Willie”, which was later testified to at trial.
Joe remembers, “On the other side of the train, disaster strikes Doc. Brent Glasscock separated from the group, when the train overshot its mark, they accidentally surprised each other.”
Glasscock, possibly not recognizing Doc, he opens fire and shoots Docs five times. He told Willis, ‘I shot a Hoosier! I shot a Hoosier!’ Nowdays a Hoosier is a word used in the Midwest to mean a farmer or country fellow, but the way they used the word then, Hoosier it meant a hick!
Here’s still a question after years later, whether Glasscock either got panicky and didn’t realize it was doc, Or having shot doc once, he realized it was Doc, and he went ahead and fired the other shots to kill him, because he might have had thought this is one less person to divide the money up with… the heist continues on the other side of the train, but once Willis finds out about Doc being hurt – the operation falls apart, one of the bullets go in his [Docs] heart and another broke both arms, and it shot right under one ear and it come out onto there…
(Amazingly Doc is still alive, but the success of the biggest train robbery in American history is on the line and so is Willis’s determination -When Willis found his brother and saw how bad he was wounded, he knew he’d come to a tough point – he’d finally pulled off the job he’d wanted to pull all his life a million-dollar robbery and he knew he had a choice: he could try to get his brother medical attention and probably risk losing everything, or he could leave with the money at great risk.
Willis decides to do both the gang grabs all the money they can and then flees to seek medical attention for Doc.)
On the way back to Chicago, they stashed the money and then begin a desperate search for a physician willing to treat a gunshot victim.
They risk revealing the entire crime, finally after over 20 hours since the shooting, they find a physician through criminal contacts who can fix Doc up.
Chicago and the nation are stunned by the robbery an estimated $3 million missing.
The police are obsessed with finding the criminals the manhunt was rather merciless.
People were being picked up right and left, and squeezed for information at this time.
Doc and Joe were arrested first, in a Chicago tenement after police were tipped about an underworld doctor’s visit to aid the wounded man.
Willis was arrested when he returned to the room the next day but very nearly bribed his way out, offering $20,000 cash to the arresting officers, who wanted to take it but were double-crossed by a supervisor after the money changed hands.
With Doc, Willis, and Joe Newton captured, Glasscock hid the bulk of the money and Jess Newton evaded capture and headed for Mexico, but makes a stop along the way in San Antonio.
There he proceeds to get roaring drunk and in the middle of the night, he goes out and buries $35,000 on the outskirts of town.
The next morning he goes looking for the money, but because he was so drunk when he buried it – he can’t find it. Soon the law catches up with him, and take him back in Chicago.
Facing stiff sentences, the gang members agreed to testify against Fahy and the racketeers, and the prosecution played up the affair as a success for the law, having made an example of the crooked postal inspector and his mob connections.
The exact amount stolen and recovered was impossible to determine, as some insurance claims were not filed, and various deals were cut behind closed doors.
Glasscock very likely kept a low to mid six-figure sum of loose diamonds, untraceable bonds, etc., having eluded the law for the longest period.
Having pleaded guilty, and supplied key testimony in convicting others (Glasscock took the witness stand in place of Willis, partially as repayment for his accidental shooting of Doc) the gang received relatively light sentences, due to no one being injured but their own gang member, and the majority of the money having been returned.
Chicago newspapers portrayed the “Newton Boys” as colorful cowboys due to the fact that Jess was brought to Chicago wearing rodeo clothes, having been tricked across the border into Del Rio, Texas, on a barroom bet involving a bronc ride at an independence day rodeo.
The arresting officer was Texas Ranger Harrison Hamer, a brother of Frank Hamer.
The admitted missing sum of $100,000 was never recovered. Jess Newton had buried some of it northwest of San Antonio, but being drunk when he did so, he could never remember exactly where.
Jess and Joe, lacking criminal records, received the lightest sentences, and these two brothers returned to Uvalde, Texas, where they led respectable lives, for the most part.
Willis and Doc spent years in Leavenworth, and on release Willis returned to Tulsa where he ran a series of gas stations and nightclubs and seems to have maintained criminal connections.
He rarely spoke about these years in much detail, but he was involved in local “nightclub wars” and was the victim of an assassination attempt at one point, being shot through his bathroom window while shaving.
He survived and prominent episodes of nightclub arson were reported in the same time period.
After the April 6, 1934 murder of Constable Cal Campbell by Clyde Barrow and Henry Methvin in Commerce, Oklahoma, Joe and Willis Newton allowed the Barrow Gang to hide out in a house they owned in Tulsa.
The famous fan letter to Henry Ford purportedly from Clyde Barrow was mailed from Tulsa on April 10, 1933; it may have been written at the Newton house.
Willis Newton’s personal opinion of Bonnie and Clyde was quite low.
He called them “silly kids” who only robbed filling stations and indiscriminately killed people.
In 1934, both Willis and Joe were sentenced to nearly 10 yr sentences in Oklahoma for a bank robbery they did not commit, based on specious testimony.
They served at least 7yrs each. Joe returned to Uvalde, having already renounced crime, in 1924.
Willis returned to Tulsa and the night club life but in the early 1950s also moved back to Uvalde, where he managed to stay out of prison and the limelight for the most part.
Though, they are constantly teased about having a fortune buried somewhere in the desert.
Jess Newton died on March 4, 1960, having lived out the remainder of his life as a cowboy in Uvalde. A veteran of the Texas Brigade of World War One, he died in a VA hospital.
He never was able to remember where the buried money was, and often complained about the country being taken off the gold standard since he apparently lost a great deal of money when stolen bonds were left unredeemed.
Doc Newton was again arrested for bank robbery in 1968, in Rowena, Texas, but due to his old age the charges were dropped.
Doc was hospitalized after a rough beating during his last arrest, and never fully recovered, although he lived until 1974, dying at the age of 83.
Willis Newton was implicated in another bank robbery in 1973, in the town of Brackettville, Texas, but there was insufficient evidence to arrest him.
Willis lived to age 90, fierce and unrepentant to the end according to friends.
Willis lived in the town of Uvalde, owner of a cafe and other small businesses, an avid horseman into his 80s, died of old age on August 22, 1979.
