The Failed Heist of the First Bank of White Bluffs
After eighteen months in legal limbo, an attempted safe-cracker faces his sentence, while his two accomplices remain missing.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
County Attorney George O. Beardsley was in Olympia Monday to appear for the state in the argument before the Supreme Court on the appeal of John Potter, convicted of attempting to blow the safe in the First Bank of White Bluffs on March 15, 1922. The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal and Potter will be transferred to the penitentiary at Walla Walla from the Pasco jail, where he has been held for safe keeping pending the appeal, to begin serving his sentence. John Burke and John Morrison, the two men accused with Potter, who escaped from the Pasco jail a few days before the date of their trial, are still at large and the officers say they never have had any trace of them.
“John Burke and John Morrison, the two men accused with Potter, who escaped from the Pasco jail a few days before the date of their trial, are still at large.”
Bank robberies were once a mortal threat to the stability of frontier towns like White Bluffs. Today, the First Bank of White Bluffs—along with the rest of the old town—has been erased from the map, lost to the federal government's expansion of the Hanford site.
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