Ho-Ho-Heist

 by Tom Goodman

On December 23, 1927, a brazen heist shook Texas. Marshall Ratliff — an ex-convict bent on easy money— enlisted three men to help him rob his hometown bank in Cisco--a town in Eastland County between Abilene and Fort Worth.  

To hide his identity from neighbors who would have recognized him, he pulled on a Santa Claus suit. Thus the Associated Press dubbed it “The Santa Claus Bank Robbery.” 

Ratliff had his men drop him several blocks from the bank. They parked the getaway car in the alley while their disguised leader strolled toward the bank, trailed by children begging for candy and last-minute wishes. He shooed them off and stepped inside. Moments later, his gang followed.

Once inside, the guns came out. Pistols raised, the men ordered the teller to fill a sack with cash and bonds. Customers and employees became hostages—including two fourth-grade girls.

The plan collapsed fast. Armed townspeople surrounded the building, and gunfire cut through the winter air. Using the hostages as shields, the gang fought its way through the alley, bundled the two girls into the car, and roared off. Cisco’s police chief and a deputy lay mortally wounded behind them.

The escape unraveled. Their car was damaged, the tank was nearly dry, and they tried to carjack another vehicle. In the scramble, they unintentionally left the loot behind — $12,400 in cash and $150,000 in securities. Once outside town, the gang ditched their car, leaving the girls unharmed, and fled into the countryside. A week-long manhunt — the largest in Texas history at the time — brought the fugitives in.

Ratliff landed on death row but found ways to keep stalling his execution, even feigning insanity to angle for a transfer to a state asylum. Before that hearing could take place, he tried to break out of the Eastland County Jail and killed a beloved deputy in the process. 

The citizens of Eastland County finally had enough of their ne’er-do-well neighbor. The next night — November 19, 1929 — a mob forced its way into the jail, dragged him out, and hanged him from a telephone pole guywire. 

For years, Eastland, Texas, carried the grim nickname “The Town that Hung Santa Claus.”

What became of the Santa Claus bandit's accomplices? Louis Davis was mortally wounded in the bank shootout and died of his wounds on Christmas Day 1927. Henry Helms went to the electric chair two months before Ratliff was lynched. Robert “Bobby” Hill, the youngest, received a life sentence and spent years attempting escapes from prison work farms.

Then something unexpected happened: Bobby Hill had a Christian conversion. 

His life change was noticeable. The governor granted him a conditional pardon in 1945, and Hill built a quiet, steady life. When Hill died in 1996 in his nineties, he had been a married, churchgoing model citizen for half a century.

In a tale packed with disguises, gunfire, and vigilante vengeance, Hill’s redemption remains the best plot twist of all!

(Thanks to Lightner Creative for the graphic that accompanies this post. It appeared in "From Christmas Robbery to Redemption," an article in the Southern Baptist Texan about my award-winning book based on the true crime.)

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