Wilbur underhill biography
- Early life and criminal career Wilbur Underhill Jr. was.
- Wilbur Underhill-the "Tri-State Terror"-is the Boogeyman of Depression-era outlaws in more ways than one.
- Born Wilber Underhill Jr. on March 16, 1901, this burglar, bank robber and prison escapee was one of the most wanted — and feared — bandits in Oklahoma during.
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‘The Tri-State Terror: The Life and Crimes of Wilbur Underhill’
How Wilbur Underhill failed to achieve the lasting notoriety of fellow outlaws John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and George “Machine Gun” Kelly is a mystery. Underhill, also known as “Mad Dog” and “The Tri-State Terror,” was a one-man crime wave of the Depression-era who exemplified the motto “live fast, love hard and die young.”
His exploits are documented by R.D. Morgan in “The Tri-State Terror: The Life and Crimes of Wilbur Underhill” (New Forums Press; $19.95 PB).
Underhill devoted almost half of his life to a career in crime, mostly in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. His siblings were criminals, too: Wilbur and his three brothers were imprisoned together in the Missouri state penitentiary in 1926.
His confederates over the years were themselves a tough crowd of desperadoes who included the Eno brothers, all five of whom were confined in various prisons across the nation at one time in the mid-1920s.
Underhill was caught burglarizing a home in his native Joplin, Mo., in early 1919 when he was not
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Faded Glory: Dusty Roads Of An FBI Era
SAC Colvin, (L kneeling) with agents & detectives. (see our photo gallery with this)The 1933 shootout with Wilbur Underhill and others at Shawnee, Oklahoma is one of the classic interaction cases of the FBI working, in this case, with Oklahoma local lawmen.
The report of Oklahoma SAC, Ralph Colvin, reveals he arrived at the hideout with: Deputies of the Sheriff's Office at Oklahoma City, lead by W. I. Eades in addition to Oklahoma City Detectives, Clarence Hurt, Micky Ryan, and Delf A. "Jelly" Bryce. (Hurt and Bryce joined the FBI the following year.)
Agents present with Colvin and others were: SA's Frank Smith, K. D. Deaderick, Paul Hansen, J. M. Edgar, T. M. Birch, and George H. Franklin.
Read about the shootout here
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The Tri-state Terror: The Life and Crimes of Wilbur Underhill
Wilbur Underhill-the "Tri-State Terror"-is the Boogeyman of Depression-era outlaws in more ways than one. For nearly a decade in the turbulent period of the 1920s and 30s, he was one of the most infamous and feared criminals in the Southwest. Convicted of one of his murders in Oklahoma he was sentenced to life and escaped, killing a cop and receiving another life term in Kansas, and then escaped again, leading ten others in a mass breakout. In the last months of his life, he rose to national notoriety as a prolific bank robber and suspect in the infamous Kansas City Massacre and became the first criminal ever shot down by agents of that fledgling agency which would soon become the FBI.