Santa Claus Bank Robbery
As they planned the crime in Wichita Falls, the safe-cracker came down with the flu, and the trio pulled in Davis, a relative of Helms and a family man in need, promising a large return for his participation.
As the group entered Cisco, Ratliff donned the Santa Claus beard and suit and instructed the gang to drop him off a few blocks from the bank and get the car in position.
[7] Once inside, Ratliff saw four men: two bank employees (Alex Spears and Mr. Jewell Poe) and two customers (Marion Olson and Oscar Cliett).
He received a pleasant greeting of "Hello, Santa," but he did not respond, distracted by two fourth-grade girls entering the lobby from the bookkeeping room (Emma Mae Robinson and Laverne Comer).
"Santa" ordered the teller to open the safe, and began stuffing money and bonds into a sack he had hidden beneath his costume.
When the bandits realized the bank was surrounded, they gathered their hostages and entered the back room with the alleyway door, where they found two bookkeepers (Vance Littleton and Freda Stroebel).
As the four robbers began their getaway, traveling south on Avenue D with their hostages, they tossed out roofing nails in an effort to puncture the tires of the posse's machines.
The growth became so heavy that further progress was impossible, and the robbers abandoned their bullet-riddled car and the two hostages several miles from town and continued on foot.
Sheriff John Hart and his deputies of Eastland, the county seat, had been called by long distance and given the news of the bank robbery; they piled into automobiles and sped to the spot where the bandits had abandoned the car.
Many members of the posse were on horseback or on foot as they beat their way through clumps of trees, searched high grass in the bottoms of ravines and peered around boulders in canyons.
[15] The evening of Christmas Day, the three remaining bandits successfully commandeered a vehicle driven by Carl Wylie, a young driller, forcing him as their hostage to drive.
[16] After hiding out all night with nothing to eat but oranges, which they did not offer to the injured young hostage, Helms, Hill, and Ratliff stole another car and released Wylie and his vehicle.
[17] The next morning, as they tried to cross the Brazos River in the little town of South Bend in Young County, officers spotted the single-seated machine with three occupants approaching.
Ratliff was hit and fell to the ground while Helms and Hill, although wounded, escaped into the woods by the Brazos River, which offered ideal concealment.
Controversy surrounded the "Dead Bank Robber" reward from the start, most publicly from legendary Ranger Frank Hamer, who called it "the bankers' murder machine."
Attorneys for Ratliff and Helms used the mixed public opinion in their defense, claiming it forced the bandits to take desperate measures to save themselves.
He followed the lead of Harry Leahy, a former lawyer condemned for the brutal torture and killing of a physician, who had unsuccessfully attempted this ploy in July 1929.
[32] He was executed as scheduled on September 6, 1929, and his family did not claim the body, leaving it to the state to bury it in the prison cemetery that convicts derisively called "Peckerwood Hill.
"[33] Ratliff began acting insane on the day of Helms's execution, and his mother, Rilla Carter, filed for a lunacy hearing in Huntsville.
A judge ordered Ratliff be extradited to Eastland County jail, writing a bench warrant for armed robbery of the Harris' Oldsmobile.
The second time, however, they used a stronger rope and were successful at ending the life of the man who had robbed the Cisco bank dressed as Santa almost two years earlier.
As his body was transferred to the hearse for transport to the burial at Olivet Cemetery, a Santa Claus leading a Christmas parade happened to pass by to promote a store's holiday sales.
[39] A reporter for the Associated Press covering Robert Hill's 1928 trial referred to him as "the Jean Valjean of the Santa Claus robbery.
In The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery, Thomas Goodman speculated that the decision was the result of both Hill's personal reform and society's need for laborers in factories and farms while so many American men were overseas during the Second World War.
"[53] In 1972, Abilene journalist A.C. Greene published a book mixed with fact and fiction called The Santa Claus Bank Robbery.
[54] In the 1990s, when the screenwriter and director, John Lee Hancock, was starting out in the film business, he wrote a screenplay about the bank robbery and the lynching, but it was not picked up by a studio.
[55] In 2005, playwright Billy Smith wrote and directed a musical called The Great Santa Claus Bank Robbery, which was performed in a Cisco, Texas, dinner theater.
In 2019, Tui Snider released a 152-page book through Amazon called Santa Claus Bank Robbery: A True Crime Saga in Texas.
[59] In her report, following Billy Smith's dinner theater play, Snider suggested that the robbery included a blonde woman accomplice.
In 2023, Thomas Goodman released The Last Man: A Novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery, taking the known details about Robert Hill and speculating on what led to his reform.
