Rebecca Bradley — The Texas “Flapper Bandit” Who Held Up a Bank With Charm and an Empty Gun

U I Team
Jun 14
5 min read

Vintage photo of a woman in a light dress and hat, and a portrait against a yellow-toned bank interior. Headline text: "Here's Rebecca Bradley."

On a crisp Saturday morning, 11 December 1926, the quiet farming community of Buda, Texas — some fifteen miles south of Austin — witnessed an event that would ripple far beyond its cotton fields. Into the Farmers National Bank walked a petite young woman with auburn hair, bright brown eyes and the composed bearing of a small-town teacher or librarian. Introducing herself as a newspaper correspondent for the Beaumont Enterprise, she charmed local customers and bank staff alike, questioning them about crop yields and community news, jotting notes with calm efficiency.

But within the hour, this same seemingly demure figure would be dubbed by newspapers as the “Flapper Bandit”, her story splashed across front pages and retold with lurid embellishment for years to come. Her real name was Rebecca Bradley, known in her schooldays, ironically, as “Miss Modesty”, and the truth behind her infamous moment of criminality is a more tangled tale of social pressures, hidden debts and the contradictions of the Roaring Twenties.

From “Miss Modesty” to Graduate Historian

Rebecca Bradley was born around 1905 in Texarkana, Arkansas, and spent her formative years in Fort Worth, Texas. Her mother, Grace Bradley, was an exceptional figure herself: a woman who had once served four years as a deputy sheriff in Fort Worth and later worked for the State Department of Insurance. Rebecca excelled academically, earning a BA in History by 1925 and continuing towards a Master’s degree in American history at the University of Texas at Austin. She needed only to submit her thesis to complete it.

By day, she served as a stenographer for Texas Attorney General Dan Moody, who would become Governor within weeks. She also assisted Professor Charles Ramsdell, handling dues and clerical work for the Texas State Historical Association. She was deeply involved in the Present Day Club, a women’s civic society committed to moral reform and Prohibition — a sharp contrast to the “flapper” image the press would thrust upon her.

Comic strip of a woman posing as a reporter, holding up bank staff, locking them in a vault, then driving away calmly. Caption: Buda Bank Holdup.

Rebecca’s life appeared typical, even exemplary. She had secretly married her high school sweetheart, Otis Rogers, at a courthouse in Georgetown in October 1925. Otis, then a law student, had since moved to Amarillo to establish his legal practice, leaving Rebecca in Austin to finish her degree while supporting her widowed mother. Unbeknownst to most, financial pressures were mounting. Trying to maintain the Historical Association’s accounts during her professor’s absence, she spent more than she collected, paying expenses out of her own pocket and sinking deeper into private debt.

Woman in light dress and cloche hat stands outdoors. Text above reads "Here's Rebecca Bradley.” Background is grassy and blurred.

An Audacious, Desperate Crime

In December 1926, Rebecca’s carefully managed life fell apart. Desperate to cover a debt approaching $2,000 (over $30,000 today), she hatched an improbable plan: to rob a bank under the guise of journalistic work.

Two days before Buda, she tested this method at the Farmers’ State Bank in Round Rock. Disguised as “Grace Lofton” from Waco, she loitered about, asking bank staff what they would do in the event of a fire. She then slipped into an abandoned house nearby with a can of kerosene and a box of matches. The house ignited, but the plan backfired — the bank employees, suspicious, stayed at their posts. Witnesses saw her leaving the burning house, and recorded her vehicle details.

Undeterred, she tried again. On 11 December in Buda, she played her part to perfection. She spoke kindly to customers and flirted lightly with the bank bookkeeper, Wayman Howe, exchanging gentle jokes about eligible bachelors in town. She borrowed the use of the bank’s typewriter to add realism. Then, in a moment that startled even her, she produced a .32 automatic pistol — blue steel, one round in the chamber but no magazine — and ordered Cashier F.A. Jamison and Howe into the vault.

She paused at the door. “Will you have enough air for thirty minutes?” she asked courteously, then locked them in and walked out with $1,000 in five-dollar bills.

The Getaway — And Its Collapse

Rebecca took back roads towards Austin but found herself mired in the mud a few miles out. A dairyman, Frank Hill, and his team helped extract her car. She rang her mother from Hill’s house, pretending innocence, and then drove on. Back home, she emptied the pistol’s magazine (but overlooked the chambered bullet), bundled the remaining $910 and the weapon into a chocolate box, and posted it to herself via University Station with a declared value of just five dollars.

At 5pm, she returned to the car wash to collect her vehicle — where Austin police were waiting, license plate in hand. According to Sheriff G.M. Allen, Rebecca met her arrest with a wry laugh:

“I have a whole lot to live down, but not as much as those men back there who let a little girl hold them up with an empty gun.”

“A Nice Little Girl”

Back in Buda, locals struggled to reconcile the polite Miss Bradley with the image of a bank robber. J.J. Lauderdale, a customer she had interviewed that morning, told reporters: “That was a nice little girl when I left her… She appeared to be 18 or 19, with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eyes.”

Jamison himself testified she seemed “very considerate” — and so she remained, polite even under arrest.

At her initial hearing, the courtroom brimmed with Austin society figures, students, friends and curious pressmen. John Cofer, a flamboyant young lawyer, led her defence alongside Otis, who dramatically revealed himself as Rebecca’s secret husband. Even her mother Grace, a seasoned law officer, was caught off guard by this revelation.

Black and white portrait of a man with glasses in a suit and tie. Text below reads "Otis Rogers." The image has a vintage feel.

Trials, Appeals and Public Sympathy

Rebecca’s tale unfolded over multiple trials and charges, including the arson attempt in Round Rock. Each hearing was as much theatre as law, with crowds packing courtrooms, jurors dismissed for prejudice, and psychologists testifying she suffered from “dementia praecox” — what we now call schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Prosecutors scoffed that it was merely “a disease criminals get when they’re caught”.

Despite a first conviction for bank robbery with a fourteen-year sentence, the verdict was overturned due to improper prosecutorial argument. A retrial ended in mistrial — jurors split 9-3 for acquittal. For years, the case hovered unresolved.

In 1933, on the eve of giving birth to her first child, the state quietly dismissed all charges. Texas had tired of the spectacle.

A Life After Notoriety

Rebecca Bradley, the so-called “Flapper Bandit”, quietly rejoined the respectable world as Mrs Becky Rogers. She supported Otis’s flourishing criminal defence practice in Fort Worth as his legal secretary, while raising three children: Mary Ellen, Virginia and Otis Jr.

She never again courted scandal. She died young, aged 45 in 1950; Otis, worn down by tuberculosis, followed a year later. Grace Bradley outlived them all, passing away in 1954, still staunch in her loyalty to her daughter’s memory.

Remarkably, none of Rebecca’s obituaries mentioned the robbery that once riveted Texas and fed the myth of the flapper outlaw. In death, as in life, she embodied the contradictions of a turbulent era — earnest scholar, dutiful daughter, and one-time bandit whose polite hold-up exposed deeper anxieties about modern womanhood.