Barbershop Shootout In Davenport's West End

John Hassman

Edward P. Cochran walked into John Hassman’s barbershop at 804 West Second Street like a man looking for work.

He walked out like a man looking for blood.

Cochran asked if Hassman needed another barber. Hassman looked him over, laughed, and said he didn’t look like a barber. The insult landed hard. Cochran slapped him across the face—then turned and walked away.

Hassman picked up a rock and hurled it after Cochran as he left.

That was the moment the morning turned deadly.
Cochran went to the Miller Hotel, ate breakfast, then went to his room and took a Savage Automatic pistol from its place. Ten shells. Nine in the magazine, one in the chamber. Loaded to the brim.

When he circled back toward the barbershop, he didn’t go in through the front. He came around the back, stopping near a sagging, four-foot-high board fence that separated him from Hassman’s shop.

Edward P. Cochran

“I was around the back when he came out,” Cochran told police. “He grabbed a brick and swore at me.”

The fence hid their bodies. All either man could see was the other’s head rising above the boards.

“I told him to stay where he was and not come any farther toward me with that brick,” said Cochran, “or I would shoot him.”

Hassman kept coming.

Cochran drew the gun and fired.

Four or five shots cracked through the quiet street. Hassman did not know Cochran was armed until the first round tore through the air. Cochran claimed Hassman fired first, but there was no evidence to prove he had a gun.

Cochran said he aimed low, trying to hit the legs.
The wounds told the truth.

Four bullets struck Hassman. One shattered his right thigh. One tore into his groin. One snapped his left arm below the elbow. The fourth passed through his lungs and ended his life.

John Hassman was fifty-four years old. He had lived in Davenport nine years and had run his barbershop on West Second Street for five. He was a thirty-year member of the Odd Fellows and had recently received his twenty-five-year veteran jewel from Prosperity Lodge No. 704.

He died against a fence.

Alex Petersen, a barber working inside the shop, said Cochran had stopped in earlier that morning asking for a job. When Hassman turned him down, Cochran threatened to “blow his brains out.” Hassman told him to go ahead. Cochran slapped him. Hassman threw the brick.

Fred Smeltzer, who lived upstairs next door, heard the shots and ran outside.

“I couldn’t see Hassman at first,” he said, “but then I saw him lying against the fence, bleeding terribly.”

He saw Cochran standing there with the gun still in his hand.

“He looked straight at me,” Smeltzer said. “I thought he was going to take a crack at me next.”
Ellen Smeltzer heard four shots from inside the house. She ran to the door in time to see Cochran fire one last round into Hassman’s body, then bolt up the alley.

Hassman's Barbershop at 804 West
Second Street in Davenport

Inside the shop, Petersen and Smeltzer dragged the wounded man through the door. Blood soaked the floor. When Smeltzer asked what had happened, Petersen said, “Oh, he shot off his mouth.”

It was never clear which man he meant.

Outside, Cochran was unraveling. He ran back and forth, waving his gun at the Wigger family, ordering them to keep quiet. He ducked into a barn, then panicked and ran back out. He screamed at the woman he collided with. He zigzagged along Western Avenue, raced up and down Third and Fourth Streets, and finally ditched the gun in a box behind Ehler’s Grocery Store.

Then he ran into the cellar.

Detective John Quinn and Officer William Cannole found him crouched in the dark and hauled him out. As the police wagon rolled toward the station, Cochran leaned back and started talking.
“I’ll tell you just how it all happened.”

Hassman called him names. Said he’d get him. Cochran said no one could get him. He went to his room, took the automatic from the dresser, loaded it full, and went gunning for Hassman.

“When he came out and opened on me,” Cochran said, “I stood there and pumped five or six shots right into him.”

“No man can run over me,” he said. “I was brought up a fighter.”

He told the police he’d been a prizefighter once. He’d served in the Philippines during the war, and knew how to shoot.

Fred Berg of Berg Brothers testified that Cochran bought the gun from him less than an hour before the shooting, handing over a check and saying, “I want that gun.” The contradiction—whether the pistol came from a dresser drawer or a gun counter—was never pressed.

The jury didn’t need it.

On December 9, 1911, Edward P. Cochran was convicted of second-degree murder. Judge Barker sentenced him to thirty-five years at the Fort Madison penitentiary.

He never served them. On September 7, 1915, Cochran died after complications from an emergency appendectomy inside the prison walls. He was twenty-nine years old.

The barbershop closed. The fence stayed standing. And a morning that began with a joke and a slap ended with four bullets, a dead man on the ground, and a killer who never made it past thirty. Life is funny that way.

Read about thirty more historic Iowa murders.