On Nov. 1, 1927, teller Chester Griffin was sitting at the counter of First National Bank in Texas City when two men walked in waving guns. One of the men ordered Griffin and bookkeeper Elizabeth Lege to stand against the back wall while the other ran into the vault and started sweeping stacks of bills into a bag. The robbers locked Griffin and Lege in the vault before speeding away in a Buick sedan.

They made off with about $6,000—the equivalent of almost $83,000 today.

Police brought Griffin in to look through photographs of criminals, and he picked one well-known robber out of the lineup. W.S. “Shiloh” Scrivnor, then 32 years old, had already had an illustrious career that included several spectacular heists and a stint in prison. Texas City Police Chief A.E. Addison assured Griffin that Scrivnor was a very bad man.

Two weeks after the Texas City robbery, police knocked on the door of Scrivnor’s Houston home just before midnight. He was in his pajamas, just about to turn in for the night. The officers brought him to Galveston, where Griffin identified him in person. The other well-known robber identified in the photo lineup, Johnny Martin, could not be located.

Scrivnor—who swore he was trying to go straight—proclaimed his innocence. And so began one of the longest legal battles in Galveston County history.

Newspaper reports detailing Scrivnor’s exploits described him as debonair, and his early life gave no indication of his future criminal enterprise. He grew up “in the shadow of the Capitol dome” in Austin, according to his Galveston attorney, L.M. Kenyon. He even spent some time as a page in the Texas House of Representatives. He briefly considered going into the ministry but evidently found robbing banks more appealing than preaching.

While still in his teens, Scrivnor was convicted in Dallas for the Sanger Bros. payroll robbery. The jury gave him a 50-year sentence. But he escaped after two years and managed to evade being recaptured until he joined the gang that robbed the Jackson Street post office in 1917. Dallas police caught him with $1 million in securities, still in their mail sacks, when the car he was in crashed into a telephone pole. The driver died on impact, and Scrivnor woke up in the hospital, surrounded by police officers. During the 36 months he spent in a Dallas jail, Scrivnor was convicted of robbing First State Bank in Oak Cliff. But he was pardoned in exchange for his testimony in the post office case.

After gaining his freedom, Scrivnor moved to Houston and sold newspaper advertising—until Texas City police arrested him.

Scrivnor stood trial in Galveston a month after the Texas City robbery. Jurors convicted and sentenced him to 99 years in prison. But Scrivnor’s attorneys demanded a new trial after they learned one of the jurors claimed he was coerced into voting to convict. His attorneys also claimed the indictment unfairly referenced the previous conviction for which Scrivnor was pardoned. Judge C.G. Dibrell denied the motion for a new trial, but five months later the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin overturned the verdict. Galveston prosecutors fought the decision, and it would take another 15 months for the appeals court to uphold its decision.

While Scrivnor fought for a new trial, police captured Martin in Texarkana, where he had fled to escape police in Birmingham after robbing a hotel there. He agreed to go back to Galveston but said he would fight extradition to Alabama. A Galveston jury convicted Martin for the Texas City robbery and gave him a 25-year sentence in July 1929.

Scrivnor went back to court on Nov. 15, 1929, for a bond hearing. The Galveston Tribune reporter covering the trial described him as “dressed in a natty and freshly pressed sand-colored suit, with a necktie embellished with a glittering diamond stickpin.” Five Dallas residents had agreed to put up a $10,000 bond to get Scrivnor out of jail during the trial. The sheriff refused to accept it until Dibrell ruled he couldn’t deny Scrivnor his freedom.

The second trial didn’t begin until July 1, 1930. The defense team presented an impressive parade of witnesses who claimed to have seen or talked to Scrivnor in Houston on the day of the robbery. A Houston police detective working as a mounted traffic officer even testified to seeing Scrivnor outside a store where he purchased some insecticide to kill the sand fleas plaguing his back yard. Scrivnor’s wife, who was about three months pregnant, staunchly defended her husband and said the police had constantly hounded him, even though he was trying to live honestly.

The state’s star witness was an ex-convict who’d known Scrivnor in prison. M.M. McDaniel claimed Scrivnor and Martin visited him in Galveston several days before the robbery and asked about Texas City police patrols and escape routes. Scrivnor denied having anything to do with McDaniel, whom he described as a “dope” addict.

“Since I got out of trouble, I’ve been trying to live honest,” Scrivnor said on the stand. “It wouldn’t be right for my wife if I were associated with a drug addict. I wouldn’t be in the habit of seeking out ex-convicts because I’m trying to make an honest living.”

Jurors deliberated for 32 hours before declaring themselves hopelessly deadlocked. Eight men voted to acquit Scrivnor and four voted to convict—on every ballot the group took from the beginning of its deliberations.

After another year of freedom, Scrivnor returned to Galveston in May 1931 for a third trial. This time, the jury convicted him and gave him a 10-year sentence. His attorneys again appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeals, alleging gross jury misconduct. While awaiting the outcome of his appeal, Scrivnor was arrested in Des Moines, Iowa, after his partner died in a gun battle with police. Houston prosecutors returned him to Texas to stand trial for the murder of C.A. “Keggy” Jones and his wife, Jane, who were shot in their Montrose apartment in retaliation for killing one of Scrivnor’s associates.

While he was jailed in Houston, prosecutors in Tennessee indicted Scrivnor for robbing a Memphis bank. He also faced a murder charge for killing a well-known cattleman in a Hot Springs, Ark., hotel—until prosecutors there realized he was behind bars at the time of the shooting. A Houston jury acquitted Scrivnor of killing Jane Jones, and prosecutors gave up on trying him for the husband’s murder. Instead, they sent him back to Galveston to begin serving his 10-year bank robbery sentence.

Galveston sheriff’s deputies escorted Scrivnor to Huntsville in June 1932. Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, a well-known friend to prisoners, granted Scrivnor a short furlough in 1934, extending it when Dallas investigators picked him up to talk about another post office robbery. He spent three more years in prison, getting out on May 7, 1937, after serving just shy of half his sentence. When prison officials set him free, Scrivnor had a statement prepared for the press.

“I am anxious to go straight,” he said. “I know the feathers of a jail bird are poor apparel in which to seek recognition of one’s real worth. This attitude of men is the greatest barrier to the men discharged from prison. What will I do? I don’t know yet. I simply want to make good. I want to live my past down. I hope you will let me.”

Scrivnor managed to stay out of trouble until February 1941, when police arrested him on weapons charges. Houston detectives spotted Scrivnor and Vernon Hancock, another ex-con, sitting in a parked car. In the truck the officers found two guns, which were illegal for the men to have since they had previous violent crime convictions. The detectives also found a pair of bolt cutters, a heavy sledge hammer, three steel punches, a pair of cutting pliers, two pinch bars, two files, and a 20-foot rope ladder.

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