Nobody agrees on the number, but the official
count says seven. Seven shots cracked through the humid August night like the
city itself had snapped.
Policeman Ollie Thomas
August 21, 1925, near Fourth and Grand.
Some poor bastard heard the first few go off and
thought it was just a car backfiring. Then two shots boomed louder than the
rest, the kind that don’t lie about what they are. Gunfire always has a
signature. Anyone who’s heard it knows when the lie ends.
Moments later, a bareheaded man came flying out of
an alley and tore east down Grand Avenue like hell had suddenly remembered his
address. The witness said the build looked right. The speed looked right. The
panic looked right. Bootlegger energy, all of it.
By the time the echoes finished bouncing off brick
and glass, Patrolman Ollie Thomas lay dead.
They found him crumpled at the bottom of a
stairway landing, soaked in his own blood. Two bullets did the job. One through
the abdomen. One through the head. Both traveling downward. That detail stuck
with the detectives like a splinter in the brain.
 |
| William Osgood |
Thomas never even saw the second shot coming. He left behind a wife and two small children, who would grow up knowing their father only as a uniform in a photograph and a death that never quite made sense.
By morning, Des Moines was howling.
Under a loose board near Cesar’s Cafe, they found hidden liquor bottles. That kicked loose the first theory: a bootlegging drop. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong cop. Then they found the burglar’s toolkit—safe-crackers’ gear—abandoned near the Atlas Building like Thomas found them—and it was him or them.
Now the city had options. Too many options.
Bootleggers with booze to protect. Burglars with vaults on their minds. Somebody with a reason to shoot from a rooftop.
The city went feral. The police department, the booze squad, every spare badge in town went hunting. Officials stapled a $500 reward onto the mystery like bait on a trap. Big money in 1925. Big enough to make people sweat.
Still, nothing broke.
A month later, they grabbed two men, held them tight, then quietly let them go. No names. No charges. Just another set of shadows slipping back into the city.
By October, the pressure was bad enough to crack stone. They arrested Charles “Chuck” Gaston, 32 years old, at the Manhattan Hotel. A witness finally got brave enough—or desperate enough—to talk. He said Gaston was the man he’d seen running from the alley that night—with a revolver in his hand. Fear kept him silent until friends convinced him to talk.
Gaston was bad. He was a cab driver who had done time in reform school, been charged with vagrancy, and was waiting trial on a bootlegging charge. He wore the city’s paperwork like cheap cologne. But murder? Not his. He swore it. Had an alibi. No confession. No collapse.
January came. The grand jury shrugged and sent him back into the streets.
Arrested again in 1926. Same man. Same fog. Same nothing.
Two years passed like that—rumors, bad leads, false certainty. The case curdled into tavern talk and half-finished arguments. Officer Thomas became a ghost with a badge number.
Then December 1927 kicked the door in.
William Osgood was arrested at a logging camp in New Hampshire. This time, the confession came fast.
Osgood said he found Thomas inside a room on the top floor of the Grand Apartments under circumstances that turned his stomach cold. He feared for his wife’s safety. The chase spilled across the roof. Fear turned into fury. Fury turned into gunfire.
“In a fit of jealousy,” Osgood said, “I decided it was either Thomas or myself.”
That was the truth that made it to court—thin, raw, and ugly. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got a $100 fine and eight years at Fort Madison.
The case was closed. The city moved on. More killings would follow. They always did.
No comments:
Post a Comment