HANDSOME DEVILS
At age 2, Robert Edward Anderson lived on a Hopkins County farm with his parents and baby sister, Minnie Lee. A decade later, at age 12, he was the youngest prisoner living on cell block 6 in the Dallas County Jail, having involved himself with a band of youngsters who committed criminal acts, principally the theft of automobiles.
It was 1930. Hard times. The Anderson family had moved off the farm and into southern Dallas, gathering three generations into a rented house at 3515 Whittaker Street. Robert’s grandfather made shoes in a factory; his father worked as a carpenter. Robert’s younger siblings — Minnie, 11, and James, 9 — attended school.
In May 1936, 18-year-old Robert was caught in the act of stealing Ed Colbert’s car at 607 S. Beckley Street. Having managed to cut a hole in the top and hot-wire the vehicle, he had driven 30 feet when he was intercepted. He ran from police, then turned and reached into his coat. A detective in pursuit warned him not to draw a pistol, and the teenager surrendered. There was indeed a pistol inside Robert’s coat, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Heeding the detective’s warning likely saved his life. Unfortunately for Robert, the lesson didn’t stick.
The newspaper’s headline read: Fourth Member of Fagin Gang Gets Six Years. Fagin, a fictional character in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, led a group of children into criminal activity in exchange for sheltering them. Despite that artful association, Robert had aged out of juvenile crime and into the big leagues. He received a six-year sentence for “theft over $50” and entered the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville September 20, 1936.
The prison’s Convict Record Ledger paints a picture of Robert at 18: He was 5'8" tall, 135 pounds with a fair complexion, light brown eyes, brown hair, and he wore size-8 shoes. He could read and write, having attended school through the fifth grade. He smoked cigarettes, but did not drink alcohol. He was not married, nor did he embrace a religion.
By 1940, at age 21, Robert had been moved to Eastham Farm Camp in Houston County, a notoriously tough assignment in the Texas prison system. It was the site of Clyde Barrow’s first incarceration in 1931–32.
June 3, 1942 was the official expiration of Robert’s imprisonment, but he was back in Dallas, employed by his paternal grandfather, W. C. Anderson, in October 1940, according to his draft registration card. Grandpa Anderson, then 74 and a lodger in the home of a truck driver and his family of five, owned a shoe repair shop.
On June 22, 1941, Robert married Grayson “Gracie” Smith. The 1940 census shows the 15-year-old living in Hopkins County with her father, Joe, a construction worker, and older brother, a high-school junior. Unlike her brother, Gracie was not attending school. Their mother, Lois, had died four years earlier from a post-partum hemorrhage.
On her wedding day, Gracie exchanged vows with a 23-year-old ex-convict who had a 5th-grade education and a dozen arrests for burglary and auto theft. She undoubtedly saw a good-looking bad boy and happily said, “I do.” What she didn’t count on was becoming a widow at age 17.
That Robert’s outlaw life ended violently would not have surprised local officials: He and multiple family members were known in Texas courthouses and jails. In 1936, the year Robert stole Ed Colbert’s car in Oak Cliff, his father was in jail under three indictments, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Notably, sister Minnie Lee (aka Joan) and her husband, Cecil Roy Green, a Fort Worth crime boss, were arrested in New York City in 1941 as part of an investigation into loan-company robberies. Green died 14 years later in a hail of gangland bullets on the Jacksboro Highway.
And most significantly, James Edward, three years younger than Robert with a shared middle name, closely followed his big brother’s lead. Having left school at 15, he arrived at Gatesville State School for Boys in 1936. James graduated to Huntsville in 1939, and then to Eastham, sentenced to two years for auto theft. In November 1940, James received a conditional pardon from Gov. “Pappy” O’Daniel. He did not, however, give up crime.
In fact, brothers Robert and James became a criminal duo. In August 1941, the pair was in New York City, possibly to visit their parents, who had re-located from Dallas to East 87th Street. While there, the brothers attempted to steal a car on W. 92nd Street. Traffic cop Harold J. King intervened and, according to a news story, “a pistol battle followed.” Officer King was killed.
The Anderson brothers headed home to Dallas. Three months after the shooting of Officer King, Robert (and a companion presumed to be his brother) stole a 1941 black Buick from Joe C. Stephens, an oil man who lived at 6657 Lakewood Boulevard. The thieves made it as far as Arkansas when state police stopped them, according to the Dallas Morning News.
The pair took off, drove into a ditch, then fled into the woods on foot. After a 6-hour pursuit, a patrolman saw the men leave a “Negro grocery store” and called for them to stop. Instead, they kept running and attempted to hide in some weeds. Assistant Superintendent of State Police Clifford Atkinson fired into the weeds to flush them out…and struck a human target.
Robert, who had survived an encounter with police in 1936 by surrendering, failed to do so that day. He died November 9, 1941 in Brinkley, Arkansas from a gunshot wound inflicted by Atkinson. He was 23 years old.
He was buried in section 36 in Dallas’s Oakland Cemetery, in a plot purchased by his grandfather.
James Edward Anderson escaped capture in Arkansas, but he did not escape punishment for his role in the shooting of New York police officer Harold King three months earlier. Police tracked him down through fingerprints left on the car he and Robert had attempted to steal.
About a month after losing his brother in Arkansas, James was indicted for his role in the policeman’s death. Found guilty of attempted manslaughter, he entered Sing Sing Correctional Facility February 3, 1943. The prison’s “receiving blotter” shows he was eligible for parole December 22, 1948.
Upon his release, James returned to Dallas and moved in with his first cousin, Eva Nell Kouns and her husband, Everett, on Lamar at Lenway Street, according to an Anderson descendant.
The 1950 Dallas census shows a James Edward Anderson living in east Dallas with a wife and infant son named James Edward Anderson II. The name is a common one, of course, and this connection is uncertain. The James Edward Anderson in that census, however, shares a common aptitude with the subject of this story. When James entered Huntsville prison in 1939, he identified himself as a painter/paper hanger. And the James Edward Anderson living on Reiger Avenue in 1950 worked as a painter in an auto shop.
What is certain is that, in 1960, James belatedly followed his brother Robert’s lead once more…by getting shot by a policman while in the commission of a crime. Early on the morning of June 6, 1960, he and an accomplice broke into the K&P Corner store, a combination grocery/gas station in Crandall, and emerged with an “armload of loot,” according to a Dallas Morning News story.
The pair set off a burglar alarm in the owner’s home. The owner immediately called a family member, A.B. Gass, an off-duty policeman who lived nearby. Gass threw on his pants, grabbed his pistol, and intercepted James exiting the store. James called out, “The heat’s on!” and began running. His accomplice jumped into the getaway car, but not before Gass hit his target twice: once in his back and once in his shoulder. The pair was apprehended in Seagoville. James, 39, was taken to Parkland Hospital in critical condition.
James survived, however, and reached the age of 51, surpassing his big brother by 28 years. Unlike his brother, he wasn’t shot to death by a lawman; he died from complications of heart disease. His death certificate identifies arteriosclerotic heart disease and a myocardial infarction.
He died on August 24, 1972 in Parkland Hospital, Dallas. Instead of burial, his body was sent to the State Anatomical Board; that is, his cadaver was donated for scientific study.
