09/04/2026
The 1st Beloit bank robbery: seven bandits, six human shields, J. Edgar Hoover and 26 years at Alcatraz
On August 18, 1932, seven armed men entered the Second National Bank in downtown Beloit. By the time they escaped, two people had been struck, two laundry bags were filled with money and six women were clinging to the outside of a getaway car.
The robbers carried pistols and two submachine guns. When bank president B. P. Eldred resisted their demand to open the vault, he was struck over the head, and a customer was also attacked.
Reports at the time estimated the haul at between $40,000 and $55,000. The FBI later placed it at approximately $50,000, a fortune during the darkest years of the Great Depression.
Getting into the bank was only the first part of the plan. Getting away required something far more frightening.
As police descended on the building, the robbers forced six young women outside. Five reportedly worked at the bank. The women were placed on the running boards of a large Studebaker sedan, deliberately positioned between the gunmen and the officers gathering in the street.
The police chief and other officers stood with pistols drawn, but they could not safely fire. The robbers had turned the women into moving human shields.
For three blocks, the automobile traveled through the busy downtown streets while the women clung to its sides. The robbers then forced them to jump from the car while it was still moving and sped away.
There was nothing glamorous about the escape. The women were placed where one shot from police could have killed them, and the plan worked exactly as the robbers intended.
Newspaper accounts described it as the first bank robbery in Beloit’s history. Soon afterward, crowds gathered outside the bank, creating the remarkable photograph that survives today.
The crime was attributed to the Barker-Karpis gang, led by Fred Barker and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. The two men had met while serving time in the Kansas State Penitentiary and built one of the country’s most organized and violent criminal gangs.
The Beloit robbery came early in their rise. In 1933, gang members kidnapped brewery president William Hamm Jr. and collected more than $100,000 in ransom. The following year, they abducted banker Edward Bremer, held him for 21 days and demanded $200,000 for his release.
Those kidnappings put the gang squarely in the sights of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Fingerprints discovered on the Hamm ransom notes and on a discarded gasoline can helped investigators connect gang members to the crimes.
By January 1935, Arthur “Doc” Barker had been arrested. Fred Barker and his mother, Kate “Ma” Barker, were killed eight days later during a gun battle with federal agents in Florida.
Karpis remained on the run until May 1, 1936, when Hoover joined an FBI arrest team waiting for him in New Orleans. As Karpis entered a Plymouth coupe, Hoover signaled the agents to close in.
The arrest produced one unexpectedly human detail. Nobody had brought handcuffs, so according to the FBI’s account, an agent removed his necktie and used it to secure Karpis’s hands.
Karpis pleaded guilty in the Hamm kidnapping and received a life sentence. He spent 26 years at Alcatraz, longer than any other inmate housed there.
The bank survived the robbery, but the building did not survive downtown redevelopment. Second National became First National Bank and Trust in 1961 and later moved across East Grand Avenue into a modern headquarters.
The old Parker Block, where the bank had opened in 1882 and where the 1932 robbery occurred, was demolished during the early 1970s. Its former site is now the parking lot across from the bank building at 345 East Grand Avenue.
The robbery itself was over within minutes, but its trail stretches from a vanished Beloit bank to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and one of the most famous prisons in the world.
Had you ever heard this chapter of Beloit history?
