ROTARY CLUB OF SAN MARCOS
A man dressed as Santa Claus, along with three accomplices, robbed a bank in Cisco just before Christmas in 1927. One of the men died during the getaway, one was subsequently dragged out of the jail by a mob and hung and one was executed in the electric chair. But Tom Goodman’s book, “The Last Man: A novel of the 1927 Santa Claus Bank Robbery,” focuses on the fourth man — the one who was an exemplary prisoner released after serving only 15 years of a life sentence, and who then turned his life around.
Goodman discussed his book at the Dec. 17 Rotary Club of San Marcos meeting.
Goodman set the scene by discussing the thennew Dead Bank Robber Award. Anyone would get $5,000, the equivalent of $85,000 today, for bringing in a dead bank robber.
“In the poster, it says, ‘And not one cent for a live one,’” Goodman said.
Due to the reward, an estimated 200 rounds of ammo were shot at the men as they tried to get away, so Goodman said they used bank customers and employees as human shields. They even used two fourth grade girls as shields, putting them in their laps in the getaway vehicle and driving off with them. The girls were later released unharmed.
“That began the largest manhunt in Texas up to the time,” Goodman said. “It took seven days to bring all these guys in, and, like I said, one guy was killed in a getaway. But the other three were put on trial at that point. It was a capital crime because the Chief of Police of Cisco was mortally wounded… and one of his deputies was mortally wounded… They died before these guys went on trial.”
One of the robbers, Tom Jones, attempted to break free from the Eastland County Jail, and killed one of the town’s beloved jailers in the process. About 20 people broke into the prison, dragged him out of the jail and lynched him in front of a crowd of approximately 1,000 people.
“This was illegal, obviously,” Goodman said. “The next day, the county prosecutor assembled a grand jury, got a bunch of witnesses to come forth, and not a one of them could remember anything, of the 1,000 people who were there, so nobody got prosecuted for this lynching.”
Goodman found that there were no accounts of the last man, the one left to live out his sentence.
“He turned his life around. Now, as a pastor, I love stories like this — redemption stories,” Goodman said. “His life changed so much that only 15 years into his life sentence, Governor Coke Stevenson accepted the parole board’s recommendation that he be given a shot in the outside world, and he was given a conditional pardon.”
The man got a job, met a woman who had a fiveyear old and got married.
“When he died in his 90s, in 1996, he’d been a model, church-going citizen for 50 years. Why isn’t that ever part of the story? It’s at least as fascinating to me as everything else I said,” Goodman said. “I guess I decided I’m going to have to tell the rest of the story. And I wrote a book called ‘The Last Man.’ I talk about the deaths of the three bandits, but I also talk about the life of the last man.”
The book was featured in the Christmas Eve edition of the Austin American- Statesman in 2023. It won a 2024 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and a 2024 Will Rogers Medallion Award. The book can be purchased through several online retailers and in stores.
