The Bob-Haired Raider

     The “bob-haired bandit squad” playing hide and seek in Brooklyn with a too enterprising young woman seems likely to have a permanent vocation, unless bobbed hair should go out of fashion.  For two months Mr. Enright’s men have pursued the will-of-the-wisp.  They have, indeed, collected an example or two of the species, but no sooner do they think they have tagged the real culprit then “Hands up!” and she helps herself to the contents of another till.

     Police Headquarters would doubtless like her to be a myth, a newspaper invention, but the sustained reality of her operations is annoying.  While 150 police reserves are drilling in the 13th Regiment Armory she holds up a drug store across the street.  That is simply her latest exploit.  The neighborhood seems to attract rather than repel her.

     The bob-haired bandit may be a syndicate.  She has appeared in Philadelphia and Chicago.  Her shorn locks are now brunet and now blond.  There may be a dozen or a score of her, some of them male masqueraders.  Her saucy notes to the guardians of the peace do not bear the unmistakable marks of an individual style.  The original bob-haired bandit could not expect to keep her novelty to herself.  Her piquant invention was not patented.  While she appeared at first an entertaining criminal variant, the joke is beginning to lose flavor, Brooklyn might brag of the distinction of possessing only one bob-haired gun girl.  A regiment of the breed is too much,  the most advanced feminist must admit.

[New York Tribune, March 7, 1924, editorial page.]