Rebecca Bradley Rogers was a 21-year-old graduate student at the University of Texas and a stenographer in the office of the attorney general in December 1926 when she ran out of tuition money.
Rogers had taken a second job working for a professor who handled business affairs for the Texas State Historical Association, but she mismanaged the funds while the professor was on summer vacation and ended up owing $1,200 (more than $21,000 in today’s money) to TSHA. To make matters worse, Rogers’ mother, who had been fired from her job in Fort Worth, moved in with her and was spending Rogers’ paychecks freely.
Deep in debt, Rogers decided she had one option to solve her financial woes: rob a bank.
Her first attempt, which involved setting fire to a house in Round Rock, north of Austin, as a distraction and then hustling into the nearby bank and yelling “fire!” failed. None of the bank’s employees raced outside so she could grab cash in the chaos.
She had better success at Farmers National Bank in Buda, south of the capital, the very next day.
A pretty, petite young lady dressed in the distinctive fashion of the Roaring ’20s, Rogers posed as a newspaper reporter in the bank lobby, asking questions of customers and recording their responses. Then she asked to use a typewriter in the tellers’ cage and, once inside, pulled out a pistol. She locked two male employees in the safe at gunpoint after grabbing $1,000 in new $5 bills, but first she asked politely if they would have enough air to survive for 30 minutes inside the vault.
Alas, someone wrote down Rogers’ license number as she drove away with the cash in her Ford Model T. On the way back to Austin, her car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out by a passing dairyman and a team of horses. She took the Ford to be washed upon her return to Austin, and when she came back to get it, the sheriff was waiting for her.
Rogers was arrested and thrown in the clink. She was supposedly still wearing her muddy satin slippers.
Secretly married for over a year to Amarillo lawyer Otis Rogers, Rebecca at first denied that she was married but had to fess up when her husband arrived to help with her defense. The Flapper Bandit or Girl Bandit, as newspapers nationwide labeled her, pleaded insanity, but the prosecutor replied, “Insanity is a disease that criminals get when they are caught.”
Otis had his wife examined by three psychologists who testified that she suffered from dementia praecox, which makes a patient unable to determine right from wrong. Today dementia praecox is known as schizophrenia. Many sympathized with the pretty young thief, and it was difficult to find jurors willing to participate in her trials.
Her armed robbery and arson trials both ultimately ended in hung juries—after a successful appeal overturned a robbery conviction and then an insanity plea won over enough jurors. After seven years of litigation, Rogers got off scot-free.
She and her husband moved to Fort Worth, where the fame Otis gained during his wife’s trials led to a lucrative criminal defense practice. Rebecca, despite her shady dealings with the law, served as his legal secretary.
