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Bobby Randell Wilcoxson
spent a couple of cold December weeks
watching the Lafayette National Bank at 4930 Kings Highway,
Brooklyn, New York. The one-eyed bandit was planning his next
hold-up.
Henry Kraus, the bank's 52 year old guard,
was known as a loving husband and father. He
wore a civilian winter coat over his crisp uniform whenever he left the
bank. Coming and going from the branch, Kraus looked more like the bank's
manager than its armed guard. The first time
Wilcoxson entered the bank to case the layout, he was surprised to
see the guard armed with a loaded .38 service revolver.
Kraus took his meals in a small diner within view of the bank.
Wilcoxson sat at the counter next to Kraus one morning while the
guard was having breakfast. Kraus, ever diligent, stood in the doorway of the restaurant
watching while a station wagon made a cash delivery to
Lafayette National Bank.
As Kraus stood there, ready with his hand on his gun, Wilcoxson struck up a
conversation.
"What would you do if I tried to rob your bank?" Wilcoxson asked
Kraus,
giving him a sly smile. Kraus looked Wilcoxson dead in the eye.
"I'd shoot you, or you'd shoot me," answered Kraus without
the slightest
hesitation.
Dark haired and leather skinned, 32-year-old Wilcoxson was already a
serial bank robber. The veteran outlaw’s criminal life began in his
youth. Wilcoxson’s short, violent temper led to mostly assault and
battery charges, until buying a car with a bad check and taking it
across state lines led to a stay at the Federal Reformatory at
Chillicothe, Ohio.
Wilcoxson was born in July, 1929, at East Duke, Oklahoma, a tiny
farming town midway between the Texas pan-handle and Oklahoma City.
His mother separated from his father when he was an infant, moved to
Salinas, California, and married. One day, Bill Hurley, Wilcoxson's
stepfather, was working a piece of metal with a hammer when an
errant shard took out the young boy's right eye.
Later, the FBI publicity machine would dub the bandit "One Eye"
Bobby Wilcoxson.
Kraus told Wilcoxson he would shoot any bank robber. Wilcoxson didn't know the bank
guard was an expert marksman who practiced sharp shooting once a week
at a nearby pistol club. Kraus's bravado was surely the product of
his confidence with his weapon.
Wilcoxson reported his conversation with Kraus to his crime
partners, Al Nussbaum and Peter Curry.
"We've got a real Wyatt Earp to contend with," Wilcoxson said of
Kraus. The bank could only be robbed if Henry Kraus was taken down.
Unknown to Wilcoxson, "Wyatt Earp" was Kraus’s nickname.
Wilcoxson volunteered to handle Kraus during the robbery, seeing the
guard with the swagger as some kind of personal challenge.
On Friday morning, December 15, 1961, shortly after opening,
employees and customers were going about their normal business
inside the Lafayette National Bank. Al Nussbaum, sitting in a
station wagon parked in the bank parking lot, was on the look out, monitoring police
radio channels and communicating by walkie-talkie with Wilcoxson who
listened through an earphone. Peter Columbus Curry, brandishing two
.45 caliber revolvers, walked into the bank through a foyer of two
sets of thick glass doors. A second or two
later, Wilcoxson entered through the bank's back entrance and walked
straight to the guard's desk.
Wilcoxson wore an overcoat - his left arm through the left sleeve
the ordinary way. He pointed a .45 revolver with his left hand. The
right side of the coat was draped oddly over his shoulder,
concealing a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun swinging from a
shoulder sling. Wilcoxson leveled the machine gun as he stopped in
front of Kraus's desk. Kraus looked up from his paperwork and looked
down the blue steel barrel of Wilcoxson's Tommy Gun.
"Well, here I am with a gun," Wilcoxson announced.
As promised, Kraus made a move to stand up as he reached to draw his .38
special. Wilcoxson's machine gun was set for single fire action - one
pull of the trigger, one round. The machine gun barked. The first
round hit the center of the guard's chest while he sat in his chair.
Fatally wounded, Kraus stood up. Wilcoxson pumped a second shot into
his chest.
"Oh," was the last word witnesses heard Kraus utter as he fell to
the ground. For good measure, Wilcoxson snapped two more machinegun bursts into the
guard as he lay dying on the floor.
"I shot one. I'll shoot two," Wilcoxson screamed at the frightened
bank employees and customers.
Curry, momentarily startled and distracted by the unexpected gunfire, didn't
notice one of the bank customers run out the bank's front door. 200
yards away, the bank patron stopped his car at an intersection where
rookie police patrolman Salvatore Accardi was directing traffic.
Accardi jumped into the patron's car, ordering the driver to
make a u-turn and drive back
to the bank.
Regaining some of his composure, Curry went nervously to work scooping
$32,000 into a canvas bag. Nussbaum warned Wilcoxson by
walkie-talkie that patrolman Accardi was approaching the front
entrance of the bank.
Switching the machine gun from his right hand to his left, Wilcoxson
faced the foyer of the bank's front entrance He crouched low. Accardi entered the
bank vestibule and, seeing the armed Wilcoxson, fired his .38 Special at
the crouching bandit. The shots
from Accardi's police revolver did little damage to the thick door glass. Wilcoxson answered with a few rounds from
his Tommy Gun, blowing holes in
the door glass, striking Accardi in the badge and knocking the cop
out of the foyer and onto the sidewalk. The thick door glass, the police
shield and Accardi's heavy wool coat slowed the machine gun bullet enough that it
lodged in Accardi's badge. The patrolman fell to
the sidewalk, bruised and
cut from the rain of glass - but alive.
Ninety seconds after Curry and Wilcoxson entered the bank, they ran
out with $32,000, overlooking $10,000 Curry dropped on the floor.
The two bandits drove away in a stolen Oldsmobile they'd taken
earlier that day from the parking lot of a nearby train station. Nussbaum
followed in his station wagon, which he'd equipped with a military
anti-tank machine gun mounted on a tripod facing the back window. If police
gave chase, Nussbaum would stop and mow them down in a hail of
machine gun fire.
At Curry's bank robbery and murder trial, Wilcoxson testified.
"Do you realize you probably killed two cops?" Curry asked Wilcoxson.
"Curry, I don't care who I killed," Wilcoxson replied, staring
coldly at his accomplice.
After a massive FBI manhunt spanning 11 months, Wilcoxson was the last of
the gang arrested at his rented home in Baltimore, Maryland. The 33
year old fugitive disguised himself, shaving the top of his head to
imitate baldness and dying his remaining hair gray. He wore thick
glasses he didn't need and dressed like an old man. In a strange
twist of fate, his rented house was directly across the street from
the home of an FBI agent who never recognized his elderly neighbor as the most
wanted criminal in the country.
Wilcoxson, the last bandit of the trio caught, was the first to be convicted. He
pled guilty,
admitting murdering Kraus and stealing nearly $250,000 from eight robberies of seven
banks. In 1964, Wilcoxson was
sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole after 15
years.
Nussbaum later pled guilty to the killing of Kraus and seven bank
robberies. Curry went to trial and was convicted by a jury of murder
and bank robbery.
Peter Columbus Curry, Jr. eventually died in prison of natural
causes. Nussbaum, eventually paroled from prison, turned from a life
of crime to life as an accomplished fiction writer. Nussbaum died in
1996.
In 1982, Bobby Randell Wilcoxson was paroled from Leavenworth
Penitentiary, Kansas, into the Chattanooga, Tennessee area. Before
the year's end, Wilcoxson would murder again.
Robert Mosher of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, a swank country club suburb of
Chattanooga, was a chemical engineer with the Dupont company.
According to court records, his
second
wife, Evelyn Faye Mosher, developed a very expensive drug addiction
that nearly bankrupted the Mosher family. Already connected by drug
dealers to the seedy underbelly of the Chattanooga criminal network,
Evelyn Mosher put the word out - she would pay anyone who would
murder her husband and make it look like an accident. Robert
Mosher's life
insurance paid double for accidents.
One of Wilcoxson's fellow
ex-cons from Leavenworth mentioned Evelyn Mosher's need to Wilcoxson.
"If she hires me," Wilcoxson told the con, "she's getting the
meanest son-of-a-bitch she's ever seen in her life."
In December, 1982, Evelyn Mosher gave Wilcoxson a key to the Mosher
family house. Wilcoxson and an accomplice went to the Mosher's
Signal Mountain home before Robert Mosher was due from work. They
ransacked the place to give the illusion of a burglary, then they
waited for Robert Mosher to arrive.
The intruders captured Mosher in
his garage, duct tapped his hands behind his back and took him into
the kitchen. There, Wilcoxson and his accomplice stood Mosher on a
step ladder and pushed him off, hoping the fall to the floor would
break his neck. They repeated this several times - resulting in a
good beating of Mosher but no broken neck.
Frustrated, Wilcoxson
took a piece of plastic tarp and rammed it down Mosher's throat
using ten inches of a mop handle.
The local police could not solve the crime and Evelyn Mosher would
not talk to them. She collected $209,000 of insurance benefits but
never paid Wilcoxson. In 1985, she came under the surveillance of
the local police for her drug activity.
The ex-con who originally
brought Evelyn Mosher and Wilcoxson together was arrested sometime
later for an
unrelated crime. The con cut a deal, giving up Mosher and Wilcoxson in exchange
for a favorable resolution of his own problem. The
con set up a meeting with Wilcoxson under the guise of referring him
to another murder for hire. The meeting was held at a local bar. The con brought along a
"friend" who was a drug agency cop wearing a wire.
After a couple of
drinks, the con apologized to Wilcoxson for Mrs. Mosher's welshing
on the payment for the killing of her husband. Wilcoxson said Mosher
wouldn't pay because it looked more like a murder than an
accident so the insurance did not pay double. Then Wilcoxson told the con
and the undercover cop in great detail how the murder went down. All
the time, the cop's tape recorder was running.
Wilcoxson went to trial. He was convicted by a jury for Mosher's
murder and sentenced in February, 1987 to death by electrocution.
Evelyn Mosher was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in
prison.
James Brenner, a corporate lawyer from Detroit, works pro bono to
reverse
selective death sentences where he believes a death
sentence is inappropriate. Brenner battled the State of Tennessee
on Wilcoxson's behalf for 16 years, winning the reversal of
Wilcoxson's death sentence in 1999.
Brenner argued Wilcoxson's original defense
attorneys knew Wilcoxson was clinically diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic
complicated by a bipolar disorder. The original legal team had not argued Wilcoxson's mental disorders as
a defense against a death sentence during the penalty phase of
Wilcoxson's 1987 trial. Failure to argue Wilcoxson's mental conditions
amounted to defective counsel, said the Supreme Court of Tennessee.
The punishment of death by electrocution was reversed.
Bobby Randell Wilcoxson died of natural causes on December 9, 2006
in the custody of the State of Tennessee Prison system while awaiting an
appeal on his conviction for the murder of Robert Mosher.
The ballad of "One Eye" Bobby Wilcoxson is not a story about a hero.
It is a collection of stories about people. Ordinary people, touched
in extraordinary ways, by the life of a terribly bad man. |
