Frightened residents huddled behind locked doors as the gang knocked out the telephone service, patrolled the streets and shot when anyone turned on a light.
Bowersville was cut off from the world, according to a 1966 account from the Dayton Daily News.
The telephone operator
Susan Merle Thompson, known as Susan Arehart at the time, was closest to it all.
She was the town’s night telephone operator. The office was above the bank at the intersection of State Route 72 and Hussey Road.
Thompson would sometimes doze off at night when calls were rare. That night, she woke up to sounds from the bank downstairs
Startled, she looked out the window and saw a man on the utility pole outside destroying the phone cables, Bowersville’s only connection with the outside world.
Thompson raised the window and shouted, “Don’t you dare do that.”
A shot rang out and a slug splattered brick slivers just below her chin.
“Get your head in there,” ordered a gruff voice, “we don’t think anything about killing people.”
Thompson then dragged a mattress down the hallway to hide with her dog, Jiggs.
The robbers continued to attempt to break into the bank’s safe. Before the ordeal was over, the bandits had set off 16 blasts to open it.
Bank cashiers
Herbert Fisher was the bank’s cashier, and John Hite was the assistant cashier. The two met up, along with Fisher’s brother-in-law Robert Moon, after waking up to the noise of the heist.
Since the phones were out, the three men decided to go for help by car. They slipped past a patrolling gunman with the car lights out and drove slowly out of town while blasts were going off at the bank.
They finally reached a farmhouse with a working phone and called Greene County Sheriff John Baughn.
Unfortunately, help did not arrive in time.
Continued explosions at the bank
On the 14th blast, the building shook more noticeably than before. A a chair blew out of the building, and debris broke a store window across the street.
Around 5 a.m., Thompson heard a voice downstairs announce, “There, we’ve got it.”
“The doors were off the safe and mutilated papers were everywhere,” she said.
A short time later, the cars, the men and the terror had left.
About $1,000 in traveler’s checks from the bank were cashed coast to coast. The total loot was around $10,000.
Some said the gang was led by the notorious John Dillinger, but their identities were never discovered.
That was the end of the Bowersville bank. The directors operated it for a short time, then voluntarily liquidated it.
Old-timers said Bowersville never recovered from the night the town was held captive.
“It makes a difference when a bank leaves a community,” Hite said.
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