Drama in Doyleston's Past Bank Robberies Too Much Special to the Sentinel

Doyleston, Wis. -- A bullet hole plugged with putty and a bank vault in a bedroom are relics here of tiny Doyleston's two memorable days of tragicomedy in the era of Dillinger and depression. At 10 a.m. Sept. 11, 1931, two men in a black model A Ford drove slowly past the Doyleston state bank. In the pickle factory near by, a man who belonged to the vigilantes turn to William Baw and said, "Wouldn't that he a note if they was bank robbers!" At 2 o'clock the car returned. Baw, standing outside a house listening to a ball game on the radio, saw one man get out of the car and draw a revolver. "I asked the lady of the house for a shotgun I knew was kept there," Baw remembers. "She couldn't find it, so I got a brick and thought I'd nail the fellow when he came out." Inside the bank, the cashier, W. J. Kirley, was shot in the back. "His son, Joe Kirley, came out the back door and said to me, "Look out!" The robber came out and shot me through the wrist." Baw continued. "Then they couldn't get their car started. One of them went out in the street to stop Alfred Deering, who was driving by in a pickup. Deering got a bullet right along the top of his scalp. "That killed the engine, and they ordered him to get out and crank it. Deering bent the choke wire so it wouldn't run right, and they hadn't gone five rods before it quit. "They looked around and found Bob Rouche's car with the keys in it. Bob had just gone in the store for some twine. He came running out, began to choke one of them and got shot in the stomach." The car as stopped by workman at a near-by railroad crossing and had to wait. A short distance away, it ran out of gas. the robbers sent a passing boy to get an canful, paid him politely and made a getaway. Eleven months later, the same pair intended to rob the bank at Wyocena but found the town filled with farmers. They remember Doylestown, 10 miles away, and drove there. In this robbery they shot Joe Kirley. Said Baw: "I saw him run across the lawn and fall dead. I said to my wife, They're robbing the bank again." Bob Roche heard of the robbery while campaigning for sheriff. His part in the first holdup had prompted the Democratic party to run him for a post Democrats hadn't won in Columbia County in 40 years. His wife smiled at the recollection. "That was the Roosevelt landslide of 1932," she said. Six months after taking office, Sheriff Roche became a hero in the robber's capture. Roche himself says the story was wrong. The arrest of Theodore Rogers, 30 was made by Deputy Harry Hibner and Hibner's son Lowell. Hibner's father-in-law at Wyocena had mentions seeing a car in a wooded area near-by. Hibner found the license plate repainted. Rogers struck him in the chest with a starting crank and was subdued. In the car was a supply of stolen license plates, including one used in the second Doylestown holdup 11 months before Rogers implicated that his brother Alfred, 26, who was arrested about midnight at Coloma, the brothers' home. Two days later, they were sentenced by Circuit Judge Clayton van Pelt to terms of 130 years in state prison. Theodore Rogers hanged himself in Waupan. Alfred is now in the prison mental ward. Rouche who still had the bullet in his back near the spine was shot in the stomach, a second time, May 22, 1934.."and Roosevelt wasn't running than," he noted. In 1936 he was elected to a term in the state assembly. At 72, he lives in retirement on the farmstead where, on a summer day in 1931, he set out for Doylestown to buy baling twine. The bank, which lost about $2,000 in the two holdups, was closed soon after the second. It is now the residence of the village president Tom Lynch, who shows visitors the vault in his bedroom and the hole said to have been made by the bullet which killed Joe Kirley, the cashiers son.   Contributed to this site by Judy Goll.

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