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America’s First Serial Killers and Many More Deadly Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2020 35 min

Train - Train robbery — History's first peacetime passenger train robbery. CBS News

21. A Deadly Outlaw

Jackson County, Indiana, in the nineteenth century. Pinterest

American outlaw Frank Reno (1837 – 1868) was raised in Jackson County, Indiana, by strictly religious parents. They saw to it that their children observed all the strictures, attended church regularly, and spent all day Sunday reading the Bible. It backfired with Frank and his younger brother, John, who rebelled and turned bad early on, and grew deadly before long.

By their early teens, the brothers were notorious delinquents, drinking, brawling, cheating travelers in crooked card games. They were also suspected of horse thefts and of committing a series of arsons around the county. To escape a backlash, their father was forced to flee, taking Frank and John and two other sons to live in Missouri for a few years.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.