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

Chapter 3: Police Captain George Frank Coffey (June 26, 1915)

88 3 Police Captain George Frank Coffey (JUNE 26, 1915) “One of the best men in the service . . . a clean, Christian man” SOMETIMES WHAT INITIALLY SEEMS to be a line-of-duty death does not stand up to close scrutiny, usually because the officer himself provoked the fatal chain of events either in pursuit of a personal vendetta or out of simple belligerence. Afterwards, the true cause was buried with the officer, but in a few cases the embarrassing details came out in public proceedings. This is what happened in the case of Frank Coffey. Coffey was a captain with the Fort Worth Police Department working out of the North Fort Worth substation when he met his end. Fort Worth officers shared a two-story brick building on North Main with the North Fort Worth waterworks and cooperated with the tiny Niles City force in policing the area of the packing plants and stockyards. A very youthful-looking Officer Frank Coffey, about 1913, in old-fashioned bobby-style helmet with new-style (1912) badge bearing badge no. 15. (Kevin S. Foster’s collections) Police Captain George Frank Coffey (June 26, 1915) 89 At the time, North Fort Worth was a thriving little community connected with its big sister by a shared history and rickety iron bridge. After annexation in 1909 it became simply “the North Side.” Two years later, Niles City was created as a tax dodge by the big meatpackers, Swift and Armour. Most of the police officers from North Fort Worth’s days as an independent township moved over to the FWPD. Frank Coffey, who was transferred from the Fort Worth force, was treated as an outsider by the old-timers of the North Fort Worth force. The North Side itself was a reincarnation of frontier Fort Worth history when cattle were as much a way of life as a business , and men settled their differences with six-guns and fists. It was a rough area filled with honky-tonks and slaughtering operations . The nearby residential neighborhoods were occupied by the low end of the working class, many of whom were recent arrivals from Mexico and Eastern Europe. Flies outnumbered other living creature in North Fort Worth, and the stench of the stockyards and packing plants could be overwhelming. This was Captain Frank Coffey’s beat. Police work in those days was still a boys’ club with a lot of single males who spent most of their time both on- and off-duty with their fellow officers. Coffey was not single, nor did he spend his off-duty hours with the boys. He considered himself a family man first and a policeman second, perhaps because he was a latecomer to law enforcement. He did not start his law enforcement career until he was thirty-four, walking away from a successful career as a gospel preacher. George Frank Coffey was born in Denton County in 1879 to fifteen-year-old parents. Because he had been named for his father, George Coffey, Sr., he went by “Frank” to distinguish himself from his father while growing up, and after joining the police force, by “G. Frank.” In May 1903, he married a Denton girl, Fannie Card, and moved them into a house on Lake Avenue in Fort Worth. They started a family nine months later with the birth of a son, Marvin, 90 Written in Blood followed by three more children in the next decade, Frances, Milton , and Hallie. After the death of Frank’s mother, his father moved in with them, putting three generations under the same roof, which may explain why he moved the family into a larger house at 1005 West Fifteenth.1 He came to law enforcement in a roundabout way, after spending ten years on the circuit as a Methodist music minister and holding down a second job for part of that time. His first love was preaching, and he combined a fine voice with a passionate faith to win renown as “the singing evangelist,” partnering with Reverend M. S. Hotchkiss of Mineral Wells.2 But Frank found that gospel singing alone could not feed a growing family so he took the second job with one of the new meatpacking plants that had just opened in Fort Worth in 1903. Swift hired him as a butcher and put him on the slaughterhouse floor “bleeding” the carcasses of up to 400 beeves six days a...