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OUTLAWS GALORE

Two Close Calls
With Two Outlaws

Story Number One

One day when I worked in Broken Bow, Oklahoma for a large timber company I encountered some outlaws. I know not who they were.

My boss asked me to take his company car to the service station for service. This was in 1961 when all the service stations changed oil, greased cars, washed cars and many other services. My boss had a large Ford station wagon. The timber company had two way radios in their company cars. The antennas for these radios were usually mounted on the rear bumper. The frequency of the older radios caused it to be necessary for the antenna to be very long. Most people thought you were a police officer when they saw these antennas on your car.

Well when I pulled into the service station I noticed that one of the men, at a car fueling at the pumps, was watching me very closely. I didn’t think too much about it at first. He had two women and another man with him. They were also keeping an eye on me.

In talking to the station owner I walked over near the pumps at the rear of the car. It was a green Chevrolet 2 DR sedan. Although I had noticed them I was not alarmed by them even though they had an out of state tag on their car. They were dressed in clean and presentable clothing. Nothing about them looked out of place at first sight.

As I was standing near the rear of the car I suddenly noticed that the driver side quarter panel and rear fender had several bullet holes in them. I begin to wonder where they might have gotten them. It all kept coming back to me as an encounter with the police some- where.

The car pulled way from the station and drove east out of Broken Bow, Oklahoma. When he left I made the remark to the station owner that it appeared they had been involved in a shootout. He then told me that when he raised the hood to check the oil that he saw four guns attached in some manner to the bottom side of the hood. The owner told me they had been staying at the motel across the street for 3 or 4 days.

When I got back to De Queen that afternoon I was at the service station were I loafed around a lot. I said something about seeing the people and the car. The owner then pulled out some wanted poster that he had gotten that day. Two guys on the poster were the same two that I had seen. The station owner notified the police that they had been seen in the Oklahoma area. No one ever contacted me about seeing them, however they were captured a week later in the state of Florida.

Story Number Two

This story all begin because of a fox hunt on a Saturday night.

In 1958 we lived in a rural area about 5 miles north of De Queen, Arkansas. It was beautiful country. Since Dierks Forest owned 60 or 70% of the land in Sevier County they allowed hunters to hunt freely on the property. The road into this area was unpaved gravel road.

My father and I decided to go out to try and locate our foxhounds that hadn’t returned home from the hunt of the night before. It was a pretty sunny winter afternoon, in 1958, just cool enough to need a light coat. We had driven a couple of miles south of our home and stopped on the side of the road. We got our hunting horn from the car and blew it a few times so the dogs would hear it and come to the car.

We had been stopped for about 20 minutes. We heard one of the dogs howl about a half a mile to our west. I told my dad that I would walk over that way and see if I could get the dog to come to me. There was a little trail leading from the road which was a short cut to the road I would use to go toward the dog. It was down hill and woodsy for the first quarter of a mile.

When I got near the little road the trail made a little arc to the right. When I was going around the little arc in the trail I walked upon a green Buick automobile. I thought it was a friend of mine’s car. However I then noticed that it had a Mississippi license tag. Since this part of Arkansas was about 300 miles from Mississippi I decided to go passed the car with caution. It was in an unlikely location for a car from such a great distance.

I could see the license plate had been bent over slightly so that it would be hard to get much information from the tag. However I had good memory when I was younger and I memorized the tag number, the state and county. I went on passed the car and saw no one as I passed. I sill was suspicious about the car being so out of character. We were several miles out in a rural area and a person just passing through would not normally be in this
location.

However at this time I just let it slide. I didn’t think much more about it. Later though when I went back to my mother-in-laws house I learned more of the ongoing story.

I told my story to my family. I told about seeing the car and a person at the house told me she had seen a stranger that afternoon. She was driving up the road toward her home when a man run across the road in front of her car. I saw the woman pass in her car as I was standing on the road. She told me the man had run across the road abut two hundred yards south of me. This was also near where I had entered the forest. I told her the guy was running because of the way she drove.

Then my mother-in-law told me that when we put her story the other woman story with mine we had a good mystery.

She said a couple of guys had stopped by the house and ask for something to eat. They said they had been lost and without food for a day or two. She fixed them something to eat and they went on their way.

My father-in law took the tag number that I had memorized when he went to work. He worked the night shift so it was dark before he got into town. He went by the sheriffs office before he went to work.

When he gave them the tag number they told him they had been hunting the car and that they had an all points bulletin on them. The car had been stolen in Mississippi.

On Saturday afternoon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sillwell Avenue they had hit the rear of a car. The old gentleman got out and was looking at the damage. It was a small amount but he told them that since the sheriffs office was right beside them he would go in and get the sheriff to come out and make a report. The driver said that would be fine.

As soon as the old gentleman left the two men drove off at a high rate of speed. The sheriff began a search for the two suspects. They sent word to broken Bow, Oklahoma as to what had happened and ask them to be on the look out. Broken Bow was the first city on U. S. Highway 70 west of De Queen. They never showed up in Broken Bow.

As it turned out one of these men had lived in Broken Bow most of his life and had logged in the area near where the car was found. Therefore he had a little knowledge about the country. This accounted for the car being in this out of the way place.

The sheriff sent deputy Kirk Anderson to investigate the car. It was after dark when he got there. This was a scary thought since he was alone and had no idea who they were or what they had done.

He found very little in the car. He did however find a U. S. Mail bag. The two men had robbed a Post Office in New Orleans. This gave the police enough evidence to determine the identify of the two men. They were also wanted for several other robberies.

The two men split up shortly after they had eaten. One worked his way by hook or crook To Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he was captured without resistance. The other man caught a train and rode it to Kansas City where he was also captured without resisting. Both where captured within the week.

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To read about the shoot out at the ladd Bridge click here.

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