A TRUE STORY OF MY ENCOUNTER WITH THE CUNNINGHAM BROTHERS

By James Cavner

When I was a young man bout 19 or 20 years old, I had just finished high school and one year of study at a business college. I was living with my parents in their home on the edge of a town of about ten thousand population in Oklahoma. I was unable to find a job, since it was the beginning of the great depression of the 1930’s. I had a lot of leisure time, so I hung out at a service station about a block from where I lived on a highway leading out of town. I would help the service station manager on occasions, some time when he needed help or when he needed to go to town or bank or whatever.

Among the customers of the service station was four brothers, who lived with their parents on a farm a few miles out of town. Their last name was Cunningham, but I have forgotten their first names. They were young men ranging from 18 to 25 years of age or possible a little more. They were very nice and personable and always dressed real good. They were clean cut and drove a nice car. On several occasions they would come by early in the morning to fill up with gasoline on their way home. They would buy soft drinks and always took time for conversation. You could tell by their appearance that they had been out all night and had driven several miles. I became well acquainted with them, but never learned what they did to earn their money. I had supposed that they were gamblers, and good at it because they always had plenty of money. Since they did not talk about what they did, I never asked them about it.

Sometime later we learned to our surprise that they were bank robbers. They had robbed banks and other businesses all over the state, but never in their home town. We did not learn this until they were captured in a shoot out with police officers. One night they robbed a service station in a town about 30 miles away and got careless and casually took the main road home rather than some off road that was available. The police in the town of the robbery obtained a very good description of them and their car, and notified the local officers they were headed their way. So the county sheriff, his under sheriff, along with the Chief of Police and one of his officers got in their car and started out to intercept them. About seven miles out they met them and recognized them as the ones the officers from the other town had described, so they turned around and forced them off the road and made an attempt to arrest them. We learned later that they had taken a vow among them that they would never be captured alive. When the officers got out of their car, the boys opened fire on them and killed the Sheriff and shot up the Chief of Police - critically wounding him – however he recovered several months later and returned to work about a year later. The under sheriff had a machine gun and he opened fire on them, killing the oldest brother, and critically wounded the two middle brothers. The youngest brother ran and escaped in the dark, but was captured about a month later in Colorado. One of the wounded boys was paralyzed the rest of his life, but the other one recovered. All three of the living ones were sent to prison with life sentences.

The next morning my Dad and I went down town to learn more about the shooting and that is when we learned who they were, and that they were the same Cunningham brothers that we knew. We had no idea up to this time that they were criminals of this sort. We learned later that they had had some small run ins with our town’s officers on small offenses. Not even the officers knew the extent of their crimes. They had gotten away with their robberies without any suspicions of their crimes for several years. We also learned later that they were the same ones that had robbed a bank in another part of the state several years back near where we had lived when I was growing up and in school. This was about 90 miles from where we were living at the time of the capture of the gang. My Dad had been deputized and was with a posse that had tried to catch them. I have always been thankful that they did not find them after learning of their vow never to be captured alive. My Dad might have been killed if they had found them.

The young one that got away and was captured later also escaped from the prison some years later and was recaptured soon after the escape. The critically injured one died in prison a few years later and was still having to use a wheelchair to get around when he died.

I remember one of the middle brothers once told me of being robbed by a man once, and that he was afraid the man was going to accidentally shoot him because the man robbing him was so nervous. The oldest one was the leader of the bunch. He and the young one did not talk much, but the two middle ones were very friendly and talkative. I have often thought of how different they seemed to be than what hey really were. Things and people are not always what they seem to be.