This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these

amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the

Cabinet of Curiosity's. It was Christmas time 1927, and the largest manhunt Texas had ever seen was underway.

A posse of 100 men was scouring the lone star state. Their target had many aliases, Chris Kringle,

old St. Nick, even Papa Noel. But no matter what

name he went by, the truth was the same. Santa Claus had robbed a bank. Just a few weeks earlier,

Marshall Ratliff took his first breath of free air after two long years. He had been in prison

for bank robbery in a tiny central Texas town called

Valera, but he walked free after the governor granted him a pardon. Immediately he began to

plot his next heist. It was a particularly dangerous time for bank robbers in Texas. Multiple

banks were being robbed every day, and the Texas Bankers Association put up a bounty of $5,000 for anyone

who killed a would-be thief. Today, that would be the equivalent of about 85,000, so lawmen and

vigilantes alike were eager to get their payout. Marshall knew to get away clean, he needed

the right team and the right approach, And so he staked out the first

national bank of Cisco, Texas, to make a plan. He recruited two other ex-cons, Henry Helms

and Robert Hill, and when their original Safecracker fell ill, they added Louis Davis,

Henry's relative to the team. And since Marshall himself was known to people in Cisco,

he decided the best way to pull off the heist would be in disguise. Luckily for him, the woman running the boarding house he

lived in, had just the thing, a homemade Santa Claus suit, complete with a beard. The plan was simple,

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