The Great Culver Bank Robbery of 1933
Culver State Exchange Bank, undated.
Edited by Sue Irwin
On May 29, 1933, at 9:05 a.m., the Culver State Exchange Bank was robbed. Seven men pulled up in front of the bank in a large Chrysler, later reported as being stolen. Six of the men got out of the Chrysler wearing masks and brandishing sawed-off shotguns and a machine gun. Five of them entered the bank, while another stayed outside as a lookout, and the seventh kept the car running.
Someone in the bank pressed the burglar alarm while a man across the street, seeing the action unfolding, leaned out of his second-floor window to alert all within earshot that the bank was being robbed. Col. H.C. Glascock, an officer at Culver Military Academy, was in town and alerted military personnel at CMA through the switchboard operator. Within minutes, Col. Robert Rossow, commandant of the academy, had an armed posse in two automobiles racing into town.
Oliver Shilling, the son of the bank president at the time, realized what was happening and took aim from a filling station across the street and fired two shots into the car, mortally wounding the driver. As the other five men and the lookout exited the bank a minute later, they took two bank employees to act as shields, shoved the dead driver aside and took off, forcing the hostages to ride on the running boards of the car until they reached the edge of town.
The hostages jumped off at the earliest opportunity, and the robbers headed west on Route 10, with a local doctor and another man giving chase. The driver of the Chrysler wasn’t familiar with the roads and didn’t get far before he wrecked the car. The pursuit car was forced to stop, and the robbers stole it, leaving the doctor and friend to tend to the dying driver. The robbers turned north, but again encountered trouble when the car got off the road and came to a stop in deep sand. They finally got the car moved only to get it wedged between two small trees, forcing them to leave the car and seek hiding places in the swamp and woods nearby to await darkness.
That didn’t work out, though, since the hastily gathered posse (including a couple of South Bend police officers who were in Culver attending a funeral) and the Culver Military personnel found the car and surrounded the area. Five bank robbers were apprehended – one of them was up a tree, two others lying on their backs in shallow water with just their noses sticking out and money floating all around them. One man claimed innocence, saying he was simply seining for minnows and had fallen in, startled by the commotion.
It took four and a half hours after the robbery to catch five of the six robbers. The sixth man was apprehended four months later in Chicago. The amount stolen was $12,645. Of that, $9,376 was recovered.
A few interesting details surfaced in the days and weeks following the robbery:
- Four telephone operators were kept very busy handling about 180 long-distance and local calls pertaining to the robbery.
- B. gun sales to young Culver boys rose considerably.
- A farmer from Starke County was observed among the crowd at the swamp with an old muzzle loader, ramrod and powder horn.
- Five U.S. Springfield rifles came up missing after the capture.
- The muddy wet money found in the swamp was dried, cleaned and put back into circulation.
- True Detective Magazine featured the story in the December 1933 edition.
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