True Crime Chronicles: One of the robbers of the Newton County Bank in 1927 had ties to Fort Smith
It was a quiet Tuesday morning on March 29, 1927, when three armed men walked into the Newton County Bank in Jasper,. . Cashier J. W. Moore, assistant cashier S. L. Nance, and bookkeeper Hazel Brasel were preparing for the day when the robbers drew revolvers and forced them into the vault.
The bandits cleaned out the tills of roughly $6,500, then ran to a waiting car and sped east. Sheriff Will Jones quickly assembled a posse of about forty men and set out after them.
The first capture came that afternoon when authorities stopped the getaway car and arrested Ed Foreman.
He told them he was from Fort Smith and that the car had been stolen from a banker at the First National Bank there. He named accomplices as Blackie Monroe and Joe Martin of Kansas City and Sandy McGeehee of Joplin, but those names proved false.
His real partners had left the car near Pleasant Hill and headed north toward Missouri on foot.
Foreman’s Fort Smith connection was not invented for the moment. The previous year he had been indicted in the Western District of Arkansas at Fort Smith, along with Pearl Williams Foreman, Sherman Raney, and John Wilson, for conspiring to possess, transport, and sell liquor in violation of the National Prohibition Act and to sell it as unlicensed retail dealers.
He was convicted, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed the conviction in Foreman v. United States on October 22, 1928. Local Fort Smith lawyers Ben and Fadjo Cravens represented him on the appea. lHe was out on appeal for that crime when he hemlped committ the jaspe hesit.
The remaining three men involved at Jasper were spotted the next evening in a hollow near Western Grove. Roughly a hundred posse members surrounded the area, but darkness and heavy rain let them slip away. Fresh sightings near Wayton, where a horse was reported stolen, brought another posse on April 4.
On April 7 the Arkansas Bankers Association offered a $1,000 reward for each man captured and convicted. Posses continued to search the country around Western Grove and Wayton.
On April 10, Harold Wilson was arrested in Joplin, Missouri. He confessed to the Newton County Bank robbery and named his partners as L. A. Wilson, Anderson Daugherty, and Ed Foreman, all already in custody.
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The next day he guided officers to a mine dump where part of the stolen money was recovered. Contemporary accounts described Harold Wilson as a Newton County man and Anderson Daugherty as a Tulsa Indian. Some old Spiro,
Oklahoma, newspaper reports later suggested that Foreman and the man identified as Indian may have had early associations with Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd in the Cookson Hills country, though those claims remain local lore rather than documented fact in surviving court records.
Anderson Daugherty, L. A. Wilson, and Harold Wilson pleaded guilty. Harold turned state’s witness against Foreman, who was tried in Jasper in May. The jury found Foreman guilty and sentenced him to twenty-one years for robbery, seven years for burglary, and five years for grand larceny, all to run concurrently, plus a $500 fine for disturbing the peace.
The three who pleaded guilty each received five years for robbery, five years for burglary, and five years for grand larceny, likewise concurrent. The sentences closed the case.
The recovered money and the swift convictions ended the short-lived crew’s operation. No later records show any of them reappearing in major regional robberies, and the thin trail of personal histories is typical of many smaller holdup bands that worked the Ozark border country in the mid-1920s before the more organized Depression-era gangs drew sustained attention.
