The Tri-State Terror: The Life and Crimes of Wilbur Underhill
How Wilbur Underhill failed to achieve the lasting notoriety of fellow outlaws John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and George “Machine Gun” Kelly is a mystery. Underhill, also known as “Mad Dog” and “The Tri-State Terror,” was a one-man crime wave of the Depression-era who exemplified the motto “live fast, love hard and die young.”
His exploits are documented by R.D. Morgan in “The Tri-State Terror: The Life and Crimes of Wilbur Underhill” (New Forums Press; $19.95 PB).
Underhill devoted almost half of his life to a career in crime, mostly in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas. His siblings were criminals, too: Wilbur and his three brothers were imprisoned together in the Missouri state penitentiary in 1926.
His confederates over the years were themselves a tough crowd of desperadoes who included the Eno brothers, all five of whom were confined in various prisons across the nation at one time in the mid-1920s.
Underhill was caught burglarizing a home in his native Joplin, Mo., in early 1919 when he was not yet 18 years old and received a suspended sentence.
He launched his career as a bandit in the summer of 1920 when he committed a series of “lovers’ lane” robberies near Joplin; he was captured and convicted. After his release from the Missouri State Prison in December 1921, he and a band of thieves moved into the tri-state mining area, where they committed several burglaries in Picher, Hockerville, and Cardin; the gang also was suspected of looting the safe at a lumberyard in nearby Douthat and then burning the business to the ground.
Underhill robbed numerous individuals and businesses – including a drug store in Okmulgee on Christ-mas Day in 1926, during which a customer was killed; a movie theater in Picher in 1927; plus, a gas station and a movie theater, both in Kansas, in 1931.
At the time of his death, Underhill was a suspect in the armed robberies – all in 1933 – of banks in Clinton, Harrah, Coalgate, Kingfisher, Okmulgee, Haskell and Geary, Okla.; Baxter Springs, Galena, and Canton, Kan.; Frankfort, Ky.; and Stuttgart, Ark.
Underhill was convicted of two murders: the drug store customer in Oklahoma and a police officer in Kansas and was suspected of a third. In addition, he shot and wounded a 16-year-old boy in northeastern Oklahoma during one of a series of street muggings in 1926.
A bigamist as well as a habitual criminal, Underhill was frequently incarcerated but was slippery when confined. He dug a tunnel under the Missouri penitentiary in 1925, escaped from the Okmulgee County Jail in 1927 with a smuggled hacksaw, escaped from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1931, and led 10 other prisoners in a mass escape from the Kansas Penitentiary in 1933.
He was fatally wounded on Dec. 30, 1933, during a gunfight in Shawnee with federal agents, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies, and died a week later at the age of 32.
Underhill was the first underworld figure of the so-called “Midwest crime wave” of the early 1930s who was slain by federal agents. His death was reported in newspapers across the country.