CRIME: For a Jury

• Share

What is a man without money to do when he must look at his only son lying in bed paralyzed from waist to feet? Quiet, hard-working John Edwin Byers of Chanute, Kans. found his own desperate answer. He put a hunting rifle in his battered Ford sedan, drove off and held up a bank. The $900 paid for sending his 13-year-old son, Albert, to Spears Clinic in Denver.

That was five years ago. His son got no better. John Byers, father of four daughters besides, held up another bank. Then, as time passed, another and another. He never got big money; his first five robberies netted only $4,500. But until early this month he was never suspected. Then he took $863 from the First National Bank of Le Roy, Kans. and his luck ran out. His car broke down on a mud road as he backtracked to shake off pursuit; a farmer who helped him repair it saw that it bore no license plates.

Kansas authorities began combing the countryside for a quiet man who drove a 1934 Ford sedan. When the trail led to John Byers, they found it hard to believe that he was a bank robber. He had lived frugally, worked hard, first as a pumping-station oiler, then as a fireman on the Sante For Railroad, during all his years of crime. But police found money sacks hidden in his garage. In bed in the Spears Clinic lay his son, still paralyzed, still getting expensive treatment. Last week John Byers confessed, was taken off to Fort Scott County Jail to await a jury's definition of justice.