456: Outlaws & Public Enemies Ben and Stella Mae Dickson w/ Matt Cecil

On August 25, 1938, twenty-five-year-old Ben Dickson and his fifteen-year-old wife Stella Mae robbed the Corn Exchange Bank in Elkton, South Dakota, making off with $2,187.64. Two months later they hit a bank in nearby Brookings for $17,593 - after waiting two hours for the vault’s time-lock to open while the bank's manager went on processing loans for customers. Unfortunately for these two small-time outlaws, the FBI was in short supply of public enemies at the time, and a newly minted Bonnie and Clyde was exactly what J. Edgar Hoover needed to stoke the agency's public relations machine. My guest is Matt Cecil, author of The Ballad of Ben and Stella Mae: Great Plains Outlaws Who Became FBI Public Enemies Nos. 1 and 2. He has been fascinated with the story of Ben and Stella Mae since he was a teenager, and shares his research with us on this latest episode of Most Notorious. The author's publisher page: https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700623242/ The author's Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Matthew-Cecil/author/B00I4BYFRQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices