Tarrant County authorities on Saturday sorted out the mystery of the death of one of its sheriff’s deputies the night before.
Sgt. Keith Shepherd, a 19-year veteran of the department, in all likelihood died of a pulmonary embolism, the medical examiner concluded. He likely fell, causing trauma to his head, leading to initial beliefs that he had been shot.
Those reports brought back recollections of the department’s infamous confrontation with one of the 20th century’s most notorious and dangerous couples.
The sheriff’s department has two – at least two – notable affiliations with sports dignitaries.
Sully Montgomery, the Tarrant County sheriff from 1947-53, was a standout football player at Centre College in Danville, Ky., and played professionally for the Chicago Cardinals. His teammate at Fort Worth’s North Side and Centre was Matty Bell, the future head coach at TCU, Texas A&M, and SMU, where he coached Doak Walker in the mid-to-late 1940s.
Montgomery was on the 1920 Centre team that defeated TCU 63-7. Makes you wonder how he was ever elected here.
After football, Montgomery, a Golden Gloves competitor in his youth, turned to boxing as a professional. He worked his way into the top-ranked heavyweights in the country, rated as high as No. 7.
The future sheriff fought future heavyweight champion Jack Sharkey in a non-title bout in his opponent’s home of Boston. Sully lost in a decision at the Mechanics Building.
According to news reports, Sully won the first round, effectively deploying his heavy right, but for the next nine rounds our North Sider was “cleverly dazzled … with showers of left hooks and right jabs.”
You’ll see in many places that Sully squared off with Jack Dempsey. That is fake news or more likely urban legend.
He did have a fight with a man named Texas Tate, who once was involved in a two-hour wrestling match in Lawton, Okla., according to the Corsicana Semi-Weekly Light. Texas Tate also went on to a career in law enforcement that ended in tragedy. Tate was killed while serving a warrant as a police officer in Chickasha, Okla., in 1930.
Sully left the sheriff’s office once convicted in 1952 of income tax evasion, but he made a semi-triumphant return to law enforcement as a deputy in the constable’s office.
The most legendary of the legends of the department was Sheriff Lon Evans, the longest-serving chief jailhouse officer (1961-85) and football mahoff at TCU and All-Pro while with the Green Bay Packers, a career that ran for five years beginning in 1933.
Lon Evans also receives extra credit, at least from this writer, for the eponymous Lon Evans’ Famous Jailhouse Chili. Google it.
Just as Evans’ NFL career was taking off, authorities in Fort Worth, as well as a 20-state region, were on a manhunt for the notorious Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, wanted for the Jan. 6, 1933, murder of Tarrant County Sheriff’s Deputy Malcolm Davis, pictured below.
Bonnie and Clyde met in Texas three years earlier. Not long after that, Clyde was sent to jail on a burglary charge. He escaped but was recaptured and returned to prison.
In 1932, Clyde was paroled by Gov. Ross Sterling in what has to go down as one of the worse uses of a governor’s power to pardon and parole. Now an ex-con, Clyde came out a hardened criminal and a man who had lost all sense of empathy after two years in the pen.
The night of January 6 was an accident of fate.
Sheriff’s deputies Malcolm Davis, future sheriff Dusty Rhodes, Walter Evans and an investigator with the district attorney’s office, along with sheriff’s deputies from Dallas County and a member of the Texas Rangers surrounded a house in west Dallas, looking for Odell Chambless, wanted in the robbery of Home Bank of Grapevine.
The crew of law enforcement went to the house earlier in the evening. There, they found only 17-year-old Margie Farris and two children. So, they sat and waited in hiding.
Around midnight, a coupe stopped in front of the house. A man got out armed with a shotgun and pistol. At the officers’ command, Farris opened the door. She also was said to have yelled to Barrow that authorities were at the house. Davis and another deputy posted in the back of the house ran to the front as the gunman began to flee.
As Davis ordered him to stop, the gunman fired point-blank with the shotgun, striking Davis in the abdomen.
When he was finally apprehended, Chambless had an alibi for his whereabouts on Jan. 6. He was in jail in Los Angeles, a shield that authorities in California verified. (Chambless freely admitted to his participation in the robbery in Grapevine, with Les Stewart, and wanted to get whatever he owed to society over with so he could start a new life. He had had enough of the gangster life.)
“It is a certainty that my deputy was killed by a gunman-member of some gang of outlaws,” Sheriff J.R. “Red” Wright said. “All facts and circumstances bear out that theory.”
Sheriff Wright had an idea: He believed it could have been Barrow and Pretty Boy Floyd. Wright had theorized that Clyde had been taken in by the Floyd outfit to fill the vacancy created by the death of Cole Oglesby in Oklahoma several months before.
Clyde also had a history in Dallas and Fort Worth.
Police conducted a series of raids on outlying rooming houses, farms and tourist camps – anywhere known to be a hideout of the gang — in every surrounding city, town and county, from Itasca to Hillsboro to Denton to Dallas.
As it turned out, the other gangster with Bonnie and Clyde that night was William Daniel Jones.
W.D. Jones, only 17 at the time, had become good at the arts and sciences of legal offense. On Christmas Eve of 1932, Clyde came to see his childhood neighbor. He and Bonnie needed an assistant. Jones signed on.
In an interview with Playboy magazine more than 30 years after Davis’ death, Jones said he first met Clyde as a child under a bridge on Oak Cliff in Dallas. Both of their families were living there “because we had nowhere else.”
Of the character C.W. Moss in the movie Bonnie and Clyde, Jones said: “Moss was a dumb kid who run errands and done what Clyde told him. That was me, all right.”
According to documents maintained by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Jones “was cooperative but seems to have been unstable and maladjusted and to have had a poor family background (shown by conviction of one brother and early family breakdown.). He will probably adjust fairly satisfactorily to prison routine but a future prognosis is problematic.”
He was also practically illiterate, according to the documents.
Jones told authorities that he and Bonnie waited inside the car that night in Dallas waiting for Clyde to return. They were as surprised by the gunfire as anybody else, he said. Bonnie sped off with Jones in the car, and Clyde caught up with them down the block, somehow avoiding a hail of gunfire unleashed by the deputies.
Bonnie and Clyde met their end on May 23, 1934, shot to death by officers in an ambush near Sailes, La.
Sadly, it didn’t happen soon enough. By that time, the two had been indicted a second time, in Tarrant County, this time for the murder of two policemen in Grapevine on April 1, 1934. The officers believed they were coming to the aid of someone in a broken-down car.
Law enforcement authorities finally caught up to Jones in Houston in December 1933.
Much like Chambless, Jones said he had had enough of gang life. Well, at least gang life with Clyde Barrow, who, Jones said, he found to be too violent for his taste.
“But it wasn’t done yet. I had to pay,” Jones told Playboy. “A boy in Houston, where I was working for a vegetable peddler, knowed me and turned me in to the law. They tried me for killing a sheriff’s man at Dallas. Clyde done it, but I was glad to take the rap. Arkansas wanted to extradite me, and. I sure didn’t want to go to no Arkansas prison. I figure now that if Arkansas had got me, one of them skeletons they’ve dug up there might have been me.”
Under a plea agreement with the Dallas County district attorney’s office, Jones was convicted as an accessory to Davis’ murder and sentenced to two to 15 years in prison.
Jones wound up doing six years in Huntsville. He lived to age 58, dying in Houston of a shotgun wound in 1974. He had been caught in between an altercation between a girlfriend and someone else.
Forty years earlier, Malcolm Davis died a martyr to the cause of criminal justice against the Depression-era gangsters.