Cold Case: Killed in a hail of bullets in 1923, Al Spencer left a string of unsolved bank robberies in his wake

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Al Spencer

in the summer of 1922, northeast Oklahoma was gripped by a string of brazen bank robberies, all pointing to one man: Al Spencer, the escaped convict who had become known as the “Phantom Terror.”

Spencer, born around 1887 in the hardscrabble Okesa country, had already served time for horse theft and cattle rustling when he scaled the walls of McAlester State Penitentiary in January of that year.

Once free, he disappeared into the rugged Osage Hills and began assembling a loose crew of experienced criminals—men like Frank “Jelly” Nash, Dick Gregg, Grover Durrill, and others who drifted in and out of the gang depending on the job

.Unlike the old-time outlaws who relied on horses, Spencer’s group embraced the automobile age. They rolled into small towns in powerful Hudsons and Buicks, struck quickly in broad daylight, and vanished down back roads before posses could organize.

Between July and September 1922, they hit bank after bank in the region: Lenapah in Nowata County on July 26, Afton in Ottawa County on August 4, Quapaw a couple of weeks later, and then, on September 9, the First State Bank in the quiet Craig County town of Centralia.

That afternoon, a seven-passenger Buick pulled up in front of the bank. Four men stepped out—two stayed with the car while the others walked inside, guns in hand but faces uncovered. They ordered cashier Clell Farbro and two teenage customers, Blaine Delquest and Glenn Corlette, to the back, cleaned out about $3,500 in cash and Liberty Bonds, and drove off toward the Cedar Creek Hills.

Witnesses later said one of the robbers strongly resembled Al Spencer himself.

Lawmen from several counties chased leads for weeks. A break came on September 15 when officers raiding an illegal liquor operation killed Ralph Carter, a Cherokee man identified as one of the Centralia holdup men. More arrests followed—Dick Gregg, Lloyd Cox, J.C. Majors—but most suspects were either released for lack of evidence or slipped away in a daring jailbreak from Vinita the next month.

The gang kept going through the fall of 1922 and into 1923, pulling off more bank jobs and even staging Oklahoma’s last old-fashioned train robbery on the Katy Limited near Okesa in August 1923.

Bounties on Spencer and his top lieutenants climbed to $2,000 each, dead or alive. Finally, on the night of September 15, 1923, a posse led by U.S. Marshal Alva McDonald and Postal Inspector Jack Adamson cornered Spencer near Bartlesville as he tried to fence bonds from the train holdup.

According to the official account, Spencer fired first and was cut down in a hail of return fire, nine bullets ending his run. He died with $10,000 in stolen bonds still on him.

Years later, however, a different story surfaced from inside the gang. Associate Henry Wells claimed Spencer had been betrayed abd lured to a remote spot by Stanley Snyder, shot in the back during a supposed meeting, and only then riddled with additional bullets by the arriving posse to make it look like a fair fight.

Snyder walked free on pending charges shortly afterward and was himself killed by his wife in 1924

.With Spencer dead, the gang scattered and the major robberies stopped. The Centralia job, like many others attributed to the group, was never fully unraveled...who exactly took part, where the money went, and whether Spencer himself stood inside that small Craig County bank on that September afternoon all remain unanswered.

Most of the stolen cash and bonds were never recovered, and the conflicting accounts of Spencer’s final moments have lingered for a century. In the end, the Phantom Terror took at least some of his secrets with him.