Written in Blood: The History of Fort Worth's Fallen Lawmen, Volume 2, 1910-1928

Introduction to Volume II

1 Introduction to Volume II THIS IS VOLUME II in the story of Fort Worth’s fallen lawmen. Volume I of Written in Blood (University of North Texas Press, 2010) covered the years 1861 through 1909, telling the stories of thirteen local peace officers killed in the line of duty. This volume takes the story from 1910 through 1928, covering another baker’s dozen of lawmen who died doing their job, and not just policemen but also constables, “special officers” who worked in the private sector, and even a police commissioner. The number of subjects in both volumes being thirteen is merely fortuitous; it is not for purposes of symmetry. One significant difference from Volume I: there are no sheriffs or sheriff’s deputies in this volume. That is because no sheriffs or sheriff’s deputies died in this era. One problem we had with Volume I was identifying all the officers who died in those long-ago days. Several had been virtually forgotten with the passage of time, not because their deaths were unimportant but because of poor recordkeeping and short collective memory. Old newspapers and court records, when they are not missing completely, get harder and harder to access as the years go by. Historical resources nowadays tend to either be put online or thrown out because it costs too much to archive them. Fort Worth and Tarrant County officials have periodically discarded huge volumes of old records over the years for lack of storage space. With the second batch of fallen officers in this volume, we discovered that their deaths were known; it was their stories that had fallen through the cracks. We made a decision in researching Volume I that we stuck to with this volume not to limit ourselves to a single group of lawmen , e.g., policemen or sheriffs and their deputies. We cast our net wide to include any local officer who wore a badge and carried a 2 Written in Blood commission, not letting the type of badge determine whether a man made the cut. We also did not limit our selections to those who died violently. One officer in this volume died in bed. We refused to let the prurient appeal of murder and mayhem drive our selection process. These thirteen stories are not scripts for a reality TV show; they are the stuff of history. Despite our broad standards, we had to draw the line somewhere. After much discussion and more than a little anguish we decided not to include one man in this era who died of old age, even though he had arguably worn himself out in service with the Fort Worth Police Department over a long lifetime. We also omitted another officer who was struck by a streetcar on the way home from work, a third officer who died in a motorcycle accident at the end of his shift, a fourth who was wearing his badge when he was gunned down by a cuckolded husband, and a fifth who carelessly shot himself, inflicting a fatal wound. None of them met even our liberal criteria for “dying in the line of duty.” In every case, we recognize these were arbitrary decisions which some might second-guess, but we will stand by our decisions on the thirteen we ended up with. The modern memorial movement served as an impetus to this book although we did not consider ourselves bound by the criteria of the three memorials to fallen Texas officers: the Texas Peace Officers’ Memorial in Austin; the Lost Lawman Memorial, also in Austin; and the Police and Firefighters Memorial in Fort Worth. The first includes all commissioned officers of the law, even jailers and posse members, neither of which group we chose to include. The second is exclusively for sheriffs and their deputies, which we lumped together with policemen, constables, and special officers. The Fort Worth memorial, for political reasons, includes firefighters along with city policemen as deserving “first responders,” a thoroughly modern concept that had no meaning in the old days. We have also broken ranks with similar memorial volumes published in recent years by not overromanticizing our victims or focusing exclusively on the victims’ stories. For nine of the officers Introduction toVolume II 3 who died in this era, their killers also have stories to tell. Those men’s stories either wound their way through the legal system or ended at the end of...