Cold Case Files: They blamed the Newton Boys, but nobody really knows who robbed the State Bank of Kinta in 1919
I
n the still hours after Christmas 1919, while Kinta slept under a late December sky, someone walked into the State Bank of Kinta in Haskell County and tore the vault apart with dynamite.
the State bank of Kinta in 1919the State Bank of Kinta
By Friday morning, December 26, bank officials found one entire side of the vault blown away and $10,000 in Liberty Bonds missing. The 2026 equivalent of that haul would be about $190,000.
They reported the loss the next day to Eugene P. Gum, secretary of the Oklahoma Bankers Association in Oklahoma City. Searchers found no tracks, no tools, and no description of the men who did it. The Sunday Tulsa Daily World put the story on its front page on December 28 with the blunt notice that no clue had been found.
Kinta was a small railroad town of a few hundred people on Beaver Creek, built after the Fort Smith and Western line bypassed the older Choctaw settlement at Sans Bois. George W. Scott, a prominent local merchant and son-in-law of Greenwood McCurtain, the last principal chief of the Choctaw Nation before statehood, had helped put the place on the map.
By 1911, the town supported a bank, a cotton gin, stores, a hotel, and a lumberyard. The State Bank of Kinta held the savings and wartime bonds of farmers, timber workers, and coal-country families in southwestern Haskell County.
Liberty Bonds issued to finance the Great War were a common target. Many were unregistered. To a thief they spent like cash.
The timing was typical of the professional safe crackers who worked the small-town circuit after the war. They preferred the hours when the streets were empty. They packed dynamite or nitroglycerin, blew the vault, grabbed the loose paper, and vanished before daylight. One side of the Kinta vault was completely torn away, which tells how much explosive they used and how little they cared about leaving the bank usable the next morning.
Officials discovered the ruin on Friday and waited until Saturday to notify the bankers association. That delay was ordinary. Rural banks often handled their own first look before calling in outside help.
During the years 1918–1920 the Midwest--especially Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas--was plagued by nighttime raids on banks, stores, and railroad offices. Itinerant yeggmen used nitroglycerin to blow square-door safes after cutting telephone wires and working under cover of darkness.
Several crews were known to operate in the region: John “Jink” Starling and his rotating partners, who had already left a trail of exploded vaults across Arkansas and Oklahoma; the Burchfield Gang, which struck the Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, bank in September 1920; Al Spencer and his early associates, then still more burglars than headline bank robbers; and countless unnamed outfits that drifted from town to town. Authorities collected descriptions, recovered tools, and chased posses across state lines, yet they could rarely attach a specific name to any single job.
Despite intensive investigations, lawmen found it almost impossible to place firm blame on any one group. Witnesses were scarce because the jobs occurred after midnight, the crews changed members from one robbery to the next, and the same basic technique--nitroglycerin soap-packed into door cracks, a muffled blast, a quick grab of cash and bonds--appeared everywhere. Starling’s men, the Burchfields, Spencer’s circle, and anonymous explosion experts all used variations of that method, so overlapping evidence never pointed conclusively at a single outfit.
The one exception was the Newton Gang. Willis Newton, his brothers, and explosives expert Brentwood Glasscock had begun their systematic campaign of nighttime safe-blowings around 1919, often working out of Tulsa and ranging into Kansas and Oklahoma. Their signature--careful casing of older square-door vaults, precise use of nitroglycerin, and a preference for vanishing before anyone stirred--matched the unsolved jobs more closely than any other crew. Investigators therefore regarded the Newtons as the most likely suspects even when they could not produce courtroom-proof identification for every raid.
Those jobs used similar methods: explosives, speed, and a quick fade into country that still had few telephones and fewer good roads. Whether the Kinta crew belonged to one of those loose associations or simply passed through on their own cannot be said from surviving records. Fingerprints were not yet routine in small-county investigations. Witnesses were scarce after midnight on Christmas night.
Eugene P. Gum collected the report in Oklahoma City and added it to the growing list of nighttime bank jobs that worried the association. In later years Gum would become known for offering rewards and urging bankers to treat captured robbers as dead men walking. In December 1919 that harder line had not yet taken hold. The association’s role was still mainly to share information and press for better vaults.
The Kinta vault had failed that test.
Court records and later newspaper files do not show arrests, indictments, or trials tied to the Kinta job. The $10,000 in bonds disappeared into the same gray market that absorbed other wartime paper stolen from small banks across the Midwest.
Some bonds were later redeemed at distant banks by men who claimed to have bought them in good faith. Others simply vanished. The State Bank of Kinta repaired what it could and kept operating. The town’s population stood at 393 in the 1920 census and then began a long decline after the railroad faded in the 1930s.
The robbery sits in a short, violent stretch of Oklahoma history when the last of the old outlaw patterns met the new paper wealth of Liberty Bonds. It produced no famous names, no courtroom drama, and no recovered loot that made the papers.
In the end, a Christmas-night explosion that opened a vault in a little Haskell County town left searchers with nothing but a ruined steel box and an empty list of suspects.
