Murder At The Handy Grocery Store Davenport Iowa 1913

Floyd Sheets

February 5, 1913. Davenport was half-frozen and half-drunk. Somewhere on Rockingham Road, a boy with a .38 in his pocket decided he’d had enough of being hungry.

The Handy Grocery was open late. Ernest Dalldorf, twenty, and Clyde Jager, seventeen, were closing up when a skinny shape shuffled through the snow and pressed his face to the glass.

 

Dalldorf felt sorry for him, and unlocked the door. “Come on in and warm up.”

 

The boy stepped inside, pulled a gun, and shouted, “Throw up your hands.”

 

That’s how fast life goes sideways.

 

He shoved them against the counter, grabbed what he could from their pockets. Then nodded at the cash register.

 

Dalldorf raised one hand, pretending to open it. He grabbed a bread case with the other and hurled it. The boy panicked. Three shots cracked through the store.

 

One bullet tore through Dalldorf’s shoulder. Another hit him dead in the heart. The third smashed into plaster.

 

The kid dropped the gun, or maybe he just bolted—no one ever said for sure.

 

Dalldorf’s father ran in from the back room, saw his son on the floor, and knew right away who had done it. He’d seen the boy hanging around. Floyd Sheets. Local punk. A thief in training.

 

By morning, the entire city knew. The papers screamed GROCERY CLERK SLAIN BY BANDIT BOY.

 

Packey Phelan

William Adams nearly choked over his breakfast toast when he read the morning paper. He knew Floyd. They’d gone to school together before Floyd went sour.

 

A week earlier, they’d met in a greasy cafe on the west end. Floyd had been talking wildly. “You read about that Schuetzen Park streetcar holdup?”

 

“Yeah,” Adams said.

 

“The fellow that did that had nerve,” Floyd said, grinning. “I was that fellow.”

 

Adams figured it was the booze talking. Then they met again at a Rock Island saloon. Floyd leaned close, eyes glassy. “You don’t believe I did that streetcar job, do you?”

 

“Not really,” Adams said. “You must be hitting the pipe.”

 

Floyd pulled out a tobacco pouch stuffed with .38 shells. “These are the tools I work with. Tonight, I’m hitting the Handy Store. If anyone resists, they get filled with lead. Watch tomorrow’s papers.”

 

Adams walked away, shaking his head. The next day, he stopped shaking.

 

He told his mother. She told him to talk to a lawyer. The lawyer told the county attorney. Now the fuse was lit.

 

Meanwhile, Floyd’s old man showed up at the station, hat in hand. His son hadn’t been home for a week, and then, last night, he found blood on the hay in the barn. Floyd had been mean lately—drinking, stealing, getting worse by the day.

 

He thought maybe his son had done the thing everyone was whispering about.

 

Detective Packey Phelan didn’t need much more. He crossed the river to Rock Island and started asking around. Before nightfall, he knew where Floyd was staying—the Schmidt Hotel, a rat trap on Seventeenth Street.

 

Detective Meehan spotted him the next morning, standing on the corner. When he saw the badge, Floyd ran. Meehan chased him down and dragged him to the station.

 

“I know what you want me for,” Floyd said. “It’s me for Anamosa or the rope, ain’t it?”

 

Phelan played dumb. “Why? What’d you do?”

 

“You can’t fool me,” Floyd said. “You got the goods.”

 

He was smiling when he confessed.

 

He told them the complete story on the ride back to Davenport—half brag, half blur. He’d  been drinking hard that night. He tied a handkerchief over his face and walked into the store thinking how easy it’d be.

 

When Dalldorf threw the bread case, it cut his hand. “That made me mad, so I fired to scare him.”

 

He didn’t remember the rest. “I guess I must’ve fired those shots,” he said. “I was drunk.”

 

He laughed when they asked about the money. “Got twenty bucks. Didn’t even know the man was dead till I saw it in the paper.”

 

He bragged about other jobs—the streetcar, the Volquardsen robbery, a few stickups in Chicago. “It was an easy game. Others were doing it. Why couldn’t I?”

 

The cops didn’t scare him. “They shot at me two, three times in Chicago. Never hit me. I made clean getaways every time.”

 

It sounded like Floyd thought he was living in a pulp magazine. He called it sport. Killing a man. For twenty dollars.

 

At the trial, he still looked cocky. “I had no intention of shooting anyone,” he said. “Dalldorf threw that case and cut my hand. Made me mad. I fired two shots to scare him. Then I thought, if he’s going to get me, I’ll get him first.”

 

“I made up my mind to kill him if I got the chance.”

 

That ended the discussion. Judge Theophilus gave him life at hard labor in Fort Madison.

 

He settled into prison the way some men settle into bars. Worked in the kitchen, then the tailor shop. He wrote letters to governors about conspiracies and crooked officials. Then, threatened to “reveal everything” unless they cut him loose.

 

He stayed locked up for thirty-nine years. Long enough for Davenport to forget him.

 

When Governor Beardsley commuted his sentence in 1952, Floyd walked out gray and fifty-seven. The parole board listed his terms like a joke: no booze, no bars, no dances, no marriage without permission.

 

Two years later, they cut him loose. No one noticed.

 

The Handy Grocery was long gone, the Dalldorfs dead and buried, the corner turned into another forgotten block.

 

But somewhere in the Iowa cold, the ghost of that boy still stands in the doorway, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping the gun that made him famous for a day.