The Dead Robber Bounty

The odds were generally in your favor if you robbed a bank in 1920s Texas, especially if the bank was off the beaten path with only a constable or marshal patrolling a large territory. Cruise into town, seize the bank with a show of force, collect the money at gunpoint and speed away before law enforcement realizes anything is amiss. What could go wrong? Not much, as it turns out. Banks were getting robbed at a rate of three or four a day. Arrests and convictions lagged way behind that. 

The Texas Banker’s Association (TBA) responded with a Robbery Reward Program that promised $500 to any Texas citizen who killed a bank robber. To clear up any misunderstanding this might have caused, the association added that it would not pay a single penny for live robbers. 

The bankers eventually increased the bounty to $5,000, or about six figures in today’s dollars. The Dead Robber Bounty, as it came to be called, no doubt gave some would-be robbers second thoughts. But it gave others itchy trigger fingers. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the man who would later be key to making dead bank robbers of Bonnie and Clyde, despised the bankers’ reward program. He said it inspired a “murder ring” made up of  “grasping, dishonest men who are much worse than any of the bank robbers they profess to want to see die.” 

One of those people was Calvin Cidney “C.C.” Baze, a deputy sheriff in Glasscock County. Lee Smith of Wink, who Baze had hired to work on his farm, was another one. On Dec. 22, 1927, the two men picked up three Mexican laborers on the highway under the pretense of offering them work. They plied the men with whiskey while Smith and maybe Baze partook of same as they drove toward Stanton. 

When the truck they were in broke down just outside the city limits the five men walked and weaved the rest of the way into town. Baze and Smith instructed the laborers to wait in front of the Home State Bank for somebody to come along and take them to a job site. 

When a church across the street from the bank mysteriously caught fire, Baze and Smith returned to the bank, guns blazing. Two of the men, Norberto Diaz and Hilario Nunez, died on the scene. The third man, Victor Ramos, suffered five gunshot wounds but survived and told sheriff A.C. Frances how he and his friends happened to get shot so many times. Frances arrested Baze and Smith the next day and took them to jail. 

Baze wasted no time confessing that he and Smith had set the men up in order to collect the reward from the Texas Bankers Association. Smith denied it, saying he thought he was “in the law” when he killed the men since Baze was a deputy sheriff. Smith was sent to jail in Big Spring for safe keeping. Baze went to the Midland jail and stayed there until he and two other men escaped on March 18, 1928, by overpowering a deputy who brought sandwiches for their evening meal. The other two men were soon recaptured but Baze got clean away and was never heard from again, at least not in Texas. 

In Feb. of 1929, a jury in Callahan County sentenced Lee Smith  to life in prison. Governor R.S. Sterling later reduced the sentence to 20 years. On Decd 22, 1934 (one day shy of the seventh anniversary of the Stanton murders) Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson pardoned Smith as a reward for his role in stopping a prison break at the Retrieve Prison Farm in Angleton County. 

 In 1945, a jury in Cochise County, Arizona convicted the same Lee Smith of bludgeoning a hired hand on his farm with a hammer, slitting his throat and stuffing the body under a culvert. He was given the death sentence and died in the gas chamber in a Florence, Arizona prison on April 6, 1945.

Three years after leaving Texas without getting killed or caught, in 1931, C.C. Baze, now knowns as James Sydney Calvin, surfaced in Sacramento, California long enough to marry Eliza May Apedaille. The couple soon moved to Washington state ,where Calvin/Baze started his second family and even worked briefly as a deputy sheriff. Ada Eunice Baze, his Texas wife and the mother of his Texas children, took to telling people that her husband died in1928. For all the good he did her after that date, he might as well have. 

James Sydney Calvin, a.k.a. C.C. Baze, lived to be 83 years old, dying on April 5, 1966, in Yakima County, Washington. Just before he passed, he came clean to his Calvin family about the Baze family he had abandoned in Texas. The deathbed confession later led to what must have been a very unusual family reunion.