“I want a magazine with detective stories in it,” Celia Cooney told the reporters.  “The monotony is getting on my nerves. If you can’t get me one of those, get me one with real live stories in them – shooting and all the rest.” It was a long trip north from Jacksonville with nothing to do but look out the window at the rain and the crowds gathered along the tracks to catch a glimpse of them.  Sometimes she waved her free hand, but usually she pulled down the shade.

Detectives Casey and Gray were nice.  They hadn’t roughed her up when they smashed through the rooming house door two nights ago. Best of all: they didn’t give any lectures.  “That was pretty tough about your baby dying last Saturday,” one of the detectives said almost tenderly.  Celia’s usual quick smile and gay spirit disappeared whenever she thought about Katherine.

The Brooklyn detectives could afford to be nice. After all the press ridiculing the police department, it was they, Casey and Gray, who had finally pinched New York’s most famous gungirl.  On the train they took off her cuffs and she found some cards and they all played hearts.  They even let Celia order the Pullman porter around, “Mose, you make up that upper birth for me,” she told him.  Then they let her sleep.

Edward Cooney, Celia’s husband and partner in crime sat next to her, but he wasn’t saying much.  “Sullen” is what the newspapers would call him.  The detectives kept handcuffs on him, probably because he was a man, six feet tall and built like a pugilist.  Celia was small, just over five feet. She seemed bigger with her automatic.

It all seemed ages ago. Before the last botched hold-up, before the getaway, before getting caught. Now she and Ed were sitting in a Pullman car guarded by two armed detectives. Celia found something to smile about —here she was riding home in a private compartment on the Florida Limited like a debutante on her way back from Palm Beach.  The working girl saw the irony, “Us and all the rest of the swells come up from Florida together,” she said to an Evening Post reporter, “but we leave the swells at the station.  We go to jail.  No use whinin’ is there?  We’re caught and we’re goin’ to laugh about it.”

As the train pulled toward Pennsylvania Station Celia got serious. She looked at a glass set into the wall of the Pullman compartment and thought to herself that she “didn’t look so good. Hair all straggled and messy. No color. I looked a sight.” 

Answering a question from a New York American reporter she put on some powder and lipstick and combed her hair with a half a white pocket comb borrowed from Detective Casey: 

“Don’t ask me whether I’m afraid of pistols.  My mind is on my make-up now. In a few minutes I’m going to make my entrance in New York City.” 

Riotous Throngs Block Path of Bobbed Bandit
Fists Fly, Men Shout, and Women Scream

A crowd so dense and so determined that it almost crushed her to death greeted the bob-haired bandit when she returned to New York at 3 o’clock this afternoon from Florida….

Only drastic action stopped the crowd.  A score of policemen, charging like football players, smashed into the swaying crowd, some of whom were in danger of falling to the tracks.  Fists flew, men shouted and women screamed.  And the air became murky with magnesium powder from upset flashlight stands of photographers.

With the detectives grasping each of her arms a diminutive woman was shot through the press of humanity. All that could be seen of her was a little pink hat, pulled tightly around her head and a fur collar which completely hid her face….

Station attendants said they had never seen such a crush on the platform, adding that the arrival of President Coolidge this morning did not begin to cause such excitement as that of the bob-haired bandit this afternoon.

As she emerged upon the taxi platform, Mrs. Cooney, her hat lifted slightly back and her fur collar down, smiled broadly to the newspaper photographers and winked as a battery of flashlight “guns” exploded. 

-- New York Evening Post, April 22, 1924

It was the spring of 1924; New York City was aroused by the exploits of the Bobbed Haired Bandit, a smartly dressed woman armed with a “baby automatic.”   Since the first week of the New Year the gungirl’s stick-ups had captured newspaper headlines and New Yorker’s imaginations.  What hadn’t been captured was the bandit herself.  For three and a half months she and her male accomplice had eluded what was claimed to be the largest manhunt in New York City’s history, humiliating the police with daring crimes and taunting notes.  With each false clue and every fruitless roundup, the press roasted the police and their political bosses, using the Bobbed Haired Bandit as evidence that the administration of Mayor John Hylan was powerless to stop the lawlessness of Prohibition-era New York.  Their capture in Florida ended the chase, the Daily News reported “The spectacular career of the most-advertised woman desperado and her tall male companion was ended—they are through.”

As bandits they were finished, but as icons they were not. Mobs crowded the courtrooms and jails where the Bobbed Haired Bandit appeared, snatching up newspapers that claimed to have exposed the real woman behind the bandit’s mask.  Who was she?  Why did she turn to a life of crime?   Dozens of editorials were penned on the “gun miss,” while readers gushed, sympathized and raged in letter after letter to the editors.  True Detective magazine published a series of breathless articles, renowned writers such as Ring Lardner and Walter Lippmann posted copy, and gangsters and alienists were solicited for their expert opinions.  In a media coup, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American paid Celia $1000 to write her memoirs, serializing the “Bobbed-Hair Bandit’s Own Story: The strangest, weirdest, most dramatic, most tragic, human interest story ever written.” Hearst’s King Features Service distributed the story to papers across the nation. The gungirl was a celebrity.

Six months before, Celia Cooney was a laundress standing over a hot mangle in Brooklyn who saw no way up for a working girl.  Pregnant, she wanted to give her baby a better upbringing than she herself had been given.  She dreamed of adventure, celebrity, and the good life she saw all around her in movies, magazines and the shop windows of New York.  Banditry bought her the good life; she stuck her way up to more cash than she had ever seen.  As glamorous as a motion picture star and as romantic as the heroine in a detective serial, she became celebrity in her own right.  Infamous, she was “someone”– at least for the spring of 1924.  

Seventy five years later we found Celia in the pages of a New York City newspaper. As is often the case the discovery came by chance. Digging through yellowed clippings in a scrapbook at the New York State Library in Albany we came across a criminal with an intriguing moniker: The Bobbed Haired Bandit. With so much type set on her behalf she was hard to miss. What drew us to the story were the same things that grabbed readers and writers at the time. The Bobbed Haired Bandit was as thrilling as any heroine in True Story magazine.

Celia Cooney’s story entertained us, but what held our interest as historians and scholars of the media were the many ways in which the story was told. Seemingly everyone had their own tale to tell about her. To reporters, the gun girl was an assignment, a news item to bang out on deadline, adding a little zest here and there if it helped the story; to progressive newspaper editors, Celia Cooney was an example of what happens when a community does not protect its children; to conservatives, the flapper bandit was a symbol of a permissive society that coddled its criminals and gave too much freedom to the young, poor and female; to the writers of pulps and plays and popular song, the sassy, smart bandit was an anti-heroine come to life; to the Mayor, the Police Commissioner, and all their minions the story was dynamite. If handled well it could be parlayed into publicity and promotion, if told badly: humiliation. The Bobbed Haired Bandit was even a character to its own leading lady; with the attention of the mass media turned her way, Celia spun out her own breathless narrative.

We too are writing the story of the Bobbed Haired Bandit. Our story is a story of stories.

[….]