Thirty Minutes on the Katy

Trlewis48 · Sep 3, 2026

Thirty Minutes on the Katy©

The 1918 Miami County Train Robbery and the Outlaw Career That Outgrew It

T. R. Lewis

On the night of July 10, 1918, a gang of bandits stopped a Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad train on a siding three miles south of Paola, Kansas, wounded four people, and disappeared with a mail pouch and a small express safe.[1] It looked, at the time, like a fairly ordinary rural holdup: violent, briefly newsworthy, likely to end up as one more unsolved county story. It was not ordinary. The two men later named as its ringleaders, Frank Lewis and Dale Jones, turn out to have been partway through what one 1919 newspaper retrospective called eight years of “holdups to murder,” a run that had already stretched from Chicago to Colorado Springs and would end four months later in a gunfight outside Los Angeles that killed a second police officer and made the Miami County robbery, in hindsight, a minor chapter in someone else’s much bloodier story.[2] The real oddity here is that this is not simply an unsolved robbery. It is a documented outlaw-couple story, one usually remembered today under Jones’s and his wife’s later aliases, Charles Forbes and Marie Celano, that has almost entirely lost its Kansas chapter. What follows stitches the two halves back together mainly through matching names, a shared victim’s job title, and a scatter of dated newspaper headlines. The safe the gang buried near the tracks outside Paola has never been found. Neither has the rest of what Dale Jones reportedly buried in the hills above Los Angeles.

Koch Siding

The holdup took place where the Katy’s Osage Division line crossed a farm owned by Fred Haefele, at a passing track known locally as Koch siding, on the stretch of single track between

Paola and the Missouri state line.[3] A southbound passenger train had pulled onto the siding to let a northbound train pass when the gang boarded the locomotive and forced it under their control at gunpoint.[4] When the crew resisted, the robbers opened fire. Engineer Kreiger and fireman R. E. Carter were both wounded, and in the exchange a railroad auditor named E. C. Witcher and a passenger, Mrs. L. C. Williams of Oklahoma, were shot as well.[5] The bandits uncoupled the engine, mail car, and express car from the rest of the train, ran them a short distance down the line, and spent roughly half an hour going through the mail and express cars before the approach of a freight train forced them to break off. They escaped with one registered mail pouch and a small safe, still locked, which they had failed to crack open at the scene.[6]

Names, a Reward, and a Marriage

Investigators moved quickly. Within days, two names had surfaced as ringleaders: Frank Lewis and Dale Jones. A wider circle of associates was named in warrants soon after — Margie Dean, Bessie Clayton, Gertrude Rogers, Francis Rogers, Henry Layton, Lloyd Dean, and Gabe Prince — and a combined reward reported at $39,000 was posted, a considerable sum in 1918 and a measure of how seriously the railroad and federal postal authorities treated the loss of a registered mail shipment in wartime.[7] The first break came on July 25, when officers raided a house at 3715 Wyandotte Street in Kansas City that Lewis had rented under an alias. Lewis and Jones got out.ahead of the raid, but the two women identified as their partners, Bessie Clayton and Margie Dean, were arrested there along with roughly $400 in jewelry traced back to the stolen safe.

That “Margie Dean” was not a minor figure. Other, better-documented sources identify her as Margie Celano, reportedly born in Paris in 1896, who had already served time in Chicago’s Joliet prison for jewelry-store theft before she “took up with a gang of outlaws headed by Frank ‘Jumbo’ Lewis” and married a fellow gang member, Dale Jones, who used the alias Charles Forbes.[8] By this account Frank Lewis was not merely Jones’s partner in the Kansas robbery but the gang’s original leader, and Dean/Celano was one of its more operationally important members: she is credited with driving the getaway car, a genuinely new technique in American bank robbery at the time, one that would not become a national cliché for another decade and a half.[9]

Eight Years on the Road

Dale Jones’s own record, as later newspapers reconstructed it, went back well before 1918. Born in rural Missouri around 1897, he was reportedly stealing equipment off trains and reselling it by age twelve; Los Angeles authorities arrested him for robbery in 1915, examined him for the “root cause of his criminality,” and released him to the Probation Department because of his youth, whereupon he escaped and, in the words of one retrospective, “cut a wide swath of criminal activity through the Midwest and up into Colorado.”[10] A Portland, Oregon newspaper’s postmortem account in 1919 put the gang’s total take at roughly $100,000 accumulated over eight years of “holdups to murder and from Chicago to Colorado Springs,” of which some $30,000 was believed to be Jones’s personal, still-buried share.[11] The modern Colorado Springs Gazette credits the gang with killing at least nine police officers across at least four states between roughly 1913 and 1918.[12]

None of this appears anywhere in the Kansas retelling of the Miami County robbery, which treats Lewis and Jones as, essentially, two more train bandits.

Nevada Avenue

The Kansas case reconnects with this larger story on September 13, 1918, when John W. Rowan, chief of detectives for the Colorado Springs Police Department, was shot and killed at a filling station near Pikes Peak while attempting to arrest members of what Colorado police memorials still call “the Lewis-Jones Gang.”[13] By this account, Dale Jones himself fired the fatal shot, turning and shooting across the side of a car as Rowan approached; the gang then fled north on Nevada Avenue, setting off a manhunt that eventually involved hundreds of officers in Colorado Springs and Denver.[14] One retrospective refers to Rowan simply as “a sheriff,” which is not quite his title in either police memorial source; this paper leaves that inconsistency on the record rather than guessing which account is more precise.[15] Rowan’s death is what nationalized the case, and it is also the strongest evidence tying the Colorado shooting to the Kansas robbery four states away: the shared gang name, documented independently in Colorado police records and in the Miami County newspaper account, is not something either side of the story appears to have borrowed from the other.

A Filling Station in Arcadia

The gang’s run ended that November at a filling station in Arcadia, California, a Los Angeles suburb, in a joint operation involving Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and postal authorities. The Post Office Department’s presence made sense: a registered federal mail pouch was still unaccounted for from a robbery four months earlier and a thousand miles away.[16] Deputy Sheriff George (also recorded elsewhere as Michael) Van Vliet was fatally shot, by most accounts by Celano herself, before Deputy Sheriff William Anderson killed both Jones and Celano with a shotgun.[17] Exactly when this happened is oddly hard to pin down: a California peace-officer memorial gives November 19, 1918; a Riverside, California newspaper reported the gang “finally cleaned up” on November 20; an encyclopedia entry gives November 24; and the Portland retrospective gives November 11.[18] The sources agree on almost everything else about the shootout and disagree, unhelpfully, on the one fact that should be easiest to check, which says something about how casually this case has been handled by everyone who has told it since.

A second buried-treasure story grew out of Arcadia almost immediately. Jones’s reported $30,000 personal share was never recovered either, and a burned letter turned up afterward by a neighbor, described in the Oregon account as containing “supposedly valuable information,” reportedly touched off searches in the Santa Anita foothills that, so far as the sources here indicate, came to nothing.[19] Kansas and California, it turns out, each ended up with their own version of the same unfinished story: money the gang could not spend, buried on the way out of two different crimes, on two sides of the country, by the same two people.