This Kentucky town is home to a Bonnie and Clyde-style robbery you've never heard of

When the words "West Louisville" are mentioned, the first thought is of the vast collection of streets and neighborhoods that make up the area west of downtown Louisville — the state's largest city.

Sitting anonymously in the state of Kentucky is another West Louisville, a small town 14 miles southwest of Owensboro. The idyllic town doesn't look much like the urban west Louisville that thousands of people call home. Instead, it boasts massive family farms with gently rolling fields of corn and big skies the likes of a postcard.

“Be Kind” signs ambush passing motorists along the stretch of unincorporated Highway 56 that the community inhabits.

But it has its own dark stories to tell, ones that include multiple fires, two tornadoes and an infamous 1920s bank robbery à la “Bonnie and Clyde” that still drags up memories of a different time — of a different Kentucky. 

During the depth of the Great Depression, gangsters were looked on by the suffering masses as modern-day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and, well, you know. Al Capone ran a soup kitchen and Pretty Boy Floyd proclaimed, "If you ain't gonna help the little guy, Pretty Boy Floyd will."

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Before the legendary Bonnie and Clyde began their murderous crime spree as a young couple, Carl, 26, and Grace Browder, 23, made headlines doing the same thing in, of all places, West Louisville, Kentucky.

Legends about the couple are well-documented in articles published in the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer as well as "The History of Daviess County," Browder V. Commonwealth and Startling Detective Magazine. Here is what they report: 

A small and frail woman, Grace Browder stepped from a new Studebaker in the early afternoon of Jan. 9, 1929, onto the town's one street. Carl, packing a Thompson submachine gun, and Grace, dressed like a man and carrying a pistol, entered the Farmers Bank of West Louisville.

Opening the door Carl yelled, "I got something for you, mister," pointing the heater at bank cashier, J. Martin O'Bryan, who busily worked his adding machine. Grace then took charge of the machine gun saying, "Don't move a finger, or you get it," as she leveled it at O'Bryan, the Startling Detective Magazine reported.

The bandits cleaned the bank of its cash, stuffing $838 into a sock.

"If I ain't got all the cash money you got, you're sure going to get a shooting," Carl warned O'Bryan, the Startling Detective Magazine reported in its article "Tracking Kentucky's Girl Machine Gunner."

They marched the bank teller and his 14-year-old son, Henry, outside at gunpoint.

At that moment, two boys walked out of a nearby store and were warned by Carl to get back inside. When the stunned boys hesitated, he shot in their direction. Men of the town heard the commotion and ran to the bank. In response, Carl let loose with a volley of machine gun fire, spraying the town with bullets.

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Hays Bratcher, standing in a doorway of a garage, was hit in the side and seriously wounded in the shooting.

Many hours passed and the new Studebaker, stolen from the city of Louisville, was found stuck in the mud along the bottomland of the Green River. The Browders were captured four days later in Atlanta. They were greeted by a large crowd on their return to Owensboro, where they would stand trial.

Grace Browder became the first woman convicted of bank robbery in the state of Kentucky and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was there she meet Otis Grammer, who was serving a life sentence for murder, and Alma Williams, aka the "Blonde Bandit," who was serving 10 years for robbery,

The following year, Browder, Grammer and Williams slipped away from a line of women prisoners outside the reformatory gates. Their time on the lam wasn't long — the women were caught three days later.

Grace Browder was granted parole in 1935 by Gov. Ruby Laffoon and never made the news again. Her partner-in-crime, Carl Browder, died from gunshot wounds after attacking a prison guard with a mallet at the Eddyville State Penitentiary in 1931.

The town’s merchants are full of tall tales of those times. Today, though, their tales are mostly about the constant phone calls from Interstate 64 or Hurstbourne Lane they get from customers looking for a variety of stores in that "other" west Louisville.

"What's unique about the town is guys will call and say, 'I'm going to be swinging through Louisville' and I have to tell them 'we're two hours east of there,'" said Darrik Caraway, co-owner of Whittaker Guns, the largest gun store in the state.

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In the area of West Louisville, you can enjoy camping and fishing at the Diamond Lake Resort, cruise the fairways on a custom ride built by Tony's Golf Carts, or enjoy a cold beer at O’Bryan’s Bar and Grill. The old school building in town has been transformed into Preservation Station, an antique shop, restaurant and events venue.

The town is thought to have been named by James Sivers, who settled there and built the first grocery in 1854. "Someone asked him where he was, and he said 'I'm 125 miles west of Louisville' and the name just stuck," Jennifer Higdon, co-owner of the Preservation Station, told the Courier Journal.

Walking the streets of West Louisville today, there is no indication that anything graver than a cat stuck in a tree ever occurred there. The once vibrant hamlet has been washed by time and nature of the one infamous moment in the town's history.

If there are problems in West Louisville, they are the type that remain behind closed doors.

You’ll find no blight, no boarded-up homes, no bank robberies. 

Reach photographer Pat McDonogh at pmcdonogh@gannett.com.