Friday, April 24, 2009

Quick and Easy?

This one ought to be easy enough for someone living around Kansas City, MO. Yea right, a treasure that is easy? We all know better than that don’t we?

Back in the 1920’s an intrepid bank robber began his own little crime spree in the Kansas City area. His first bank robbery netted him $28,000 in cash. Apparently feeling this wasn’t enough, he quickly buried the twenty eight grand and headed out to rob a second bank. This is where his crime spree ended. Our daring robber got himself caught during the second robbery and was sentenced to twenty years in jail.

After being released from jail he made a bee-line to his cash deposit but as we know, things change over time and because of those changes he wasn’t able to relocate the cash.
No it’s up to some smart treasure hunter to find this one. Where is it? According to the robber himself he stuck the $28,000 in a fruit jar and buried it 100 feet east and north of a bridge that was located southeast of Swope Park. The park had expanded while the robber was in jail and he couldn’t figure out where his bridge was once he got out.

It is thought that the bridge in question is the one that goes over the current day Oldham Road in Swope Park.

I will warn you that this story has been around a long time and I’m sure more than one person in Kansas City has tried looking for this cache. Use your head on this one and try getting a copy of the city map for the early 1920’s and see just how big Swope Park was and how many bridges there were at the time. How hard can that be? City plats should be relatively easy to get a hold of.

As long as the city didn’t put a road or a four lane bridge over the cache it could still be there, waiting for someone with a metal detector to find it.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What source did this information come from? I'm interested, but need to verify story.
Jim

Ron said...

The source I used for this story was the US Treasure Atlas but the original story came from an old copy of the Kansas City Star

Anonymous said...

Is there a date of publication (Kansas City Star) mentioned?
Thanks
Jim

Ron said...

There wasn't a date for the Communist Star, I mean the KC Star but it shouldn't be too hard to find. You can probably find it with a search on newspaperarchive.com

You can e-mail directly at redrvr@aol.com if you want and maybe I can help you run it down.