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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

18. Robbing Courthouses

In 1867, Frank Reno and his gang demonstrated their disdain for the law by attacking and robbing a county courthouse in Missouri. His brother John was eventually arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for that outrage.

A vigilante group was formed to hunt down Frank’s gang, so in early 1868 they fled to Iowa. There, the Reno Gang attacked and robbed two-county treasuries on successive days. They were arrested, but broke out of jail and escaped to Indiana, where they resumed train robberies, one of which netted them $96,000, a princely sum that gained the Reno Gang worldwide fame.

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.