The Woman at the Counter
On Saturday, December 11, 1926, a well-dressed young woman walked into Farmers National Bank in Buda, Texas, a town some 15 miles (24 km) south of Austin. She told the cashier, identified in different accounts as Frank Jamison or B.E. Jamison, that she was a reporter for the Beaumont Enterprise researching small-town banking. Within minutes she had a .32 automatic pistol out, ordering him and bookkeeper Wayman Howe into the vault. She locked the door, took about $1,000 in five-dollar bills, an estimated $17,000 or more today, and left. No shots were fired, no one was hurt, and the tellers later called her courteous the whole time.
The Debt Behind the Disguise
The woman was Rebecca Bradley, 21, pursuing what most accounts call a master’s degree in American history at the University of Texas at Austin (one source describes it as undergraduate study). For about three years she had also collected membership dues for the Texas State Historical Association, quietly covering shortfalls from her own pocket rather than report them. By 1926 that habit had put her somewhere between $1,200 and $2,000 in debt, depending on the source. She also worked as a stenographer in the office of the Texas Attorney General and had taken in her mother, who was out of work.
The night before, on December 10, 1926, she tried a version of the same plan in Round Rock, Texas, about 30 miles (48 km) away, setting fire to a vacant house across from the Farmers’ State Bank there in hopes of drawing the tellers outside. It failed. She left Round Rock empty-handed and drove on to Buda the next morning.
Mud, Milk, and a Chocolate Box
Leaving Buda, her car got stuck in mud on the road back to Austin. A milkman named Frank stopped and helped free it. Back in the city, she hid the pistol and about $910 of the stolen cash inside a chocolate box, mailed it to herself at her University of Texas address, then took her car to be cleaned. A Buda resident had already written down her license plate, and that evening, while she was picking the car up, she was arrested. Sheriff George M. Allen later testified that on the way to jail she told him she had “a whole lot to live down,” but less than the men who let “a little girl hold them up with an empty gun.” Her employer reportedly posted bail the next morning, though that detail rests on a single account. Four days later, on December 15, she was arrested again, this time on arson charges from Round Rock.
Naming Her “Flapper”
Within hours of the robbery, the Austin American-Statesman ran the headline “Flapper, 17, Takes $2,000 in Currency at Gun Point.” Both numbers were wrong: Bradley was 21, not 17, and the cash she took was $1,000, not $2,000. The label stuck anyway. “Flapper” was 1920s slang for a young woman who bobbed her hair, wore rouge, and rejected her mother’s generation’s manners, and Bradley reportedly fit almost none of it. She had been known in high school as “Miss Modesty” and was said never to wear rouge or lipstick or smoke a cigarette.
She was not the only woman handed a label she did not earn. In 1924, a Brooklyn laundress named Celia Cooney began robbing drugstores with her husband and was branded the “Bobbed Haired Bandit” by the New York press. Stephen Duncombe, an NYU professor who co-wrote a book on the Cooney case, argues that most so-called flapper bandits of the decade were not flappers at all, just ordinary women pulled into crime and then remade in print as glamorous and dangerous because that sold papers. The label said more about what unsettled readers, and editors, about women acting on their own than it said about the women themselves.
Seven Years in Court
The case took nearly seven years to close. Bradley’s defense argued she suffered from dementia praecox, the era’s term for what would later be called schizophrenia, citing testimony from psychologists who had examined her. The prosecutor dismissed the plea outright, calling insanity “a disease that criminals get when they are caught.” According to Linda Coker, chair of the Hays County Historical Commission, at least one judge involved in the case attributed Bradley’s actions not to any diagnosis but to her menstrual cycle and her looks. Both the robbery and arson cases went through repeated trials and hung juries, and one robbery conviction was later overturned on appeal. On October 24, 1933, Hays County officials dismissed the robbery charges and Williamson County authorities quashed the arson charges, one day before Bradley gave birth to her first child.
What the Record Doesn’t Say
What happened to the money afterward is not in the record. No source says whether Bradley ever repaid the $1,200 to $2,000 she owed the Texas State Historical Association, or whether Farmers National Bank recovered the $1,000 taken from its vault. Whether the pistol was actually loaded is unclear too; the only evidence either way is her own remark about an “empty gun.” And whether the dementia praecox diagnosis reflected a genuine break with reality or a defense built to survive four trials is a question the surviving court and newspaper records do not settle. Michelle Haas, chairman of Texas History Trust, and other historians working from those records treat several of these gaps as likely permanent, not for lack of looking, but because what was written down in 1926, and for seven years after, was never meant to answer them.