Police chief, state patrolman, ‘young tough' killed in 1932 chase
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[A routine police stop turned tragic one Friday night in the summer of 1932 leaving the city's young police chief, a highway patrolman and a "young tough" dead.
It was just after 7:30 p.m. when a call came from Leitch & Son's grocery store and service station at 709 E. Poplar St. that three men driving a 1932 Chevrolet coupe "would bear investigating."
Harrisburg Police Chief Dan Law was just up the street at the time in front of the Saline County Jail that stood where the parking lot of Morello's Grill is now located, talking with Deputy Sheriff Ralph Choisser and Illinois State Highway Patrolmen Grady Sutton and Ivan Green.
They watched the coupe drive by to the west and hailed it to stop about 75 feet east of the intersection of Vine Street next to the south side of the First Trust & Savings Bank.
Inside were Wesley Sheward, Eddie Brewer and Neal McGinley, three young hoodlums who bounced between Stiritiz, a small mining community northwest of Johnston City in Williamson County and Logan, likewise a small mining community in eastern Franklin County.
Sutton and Law questioned the men who showed them a bill of sale for the auto signed by a notary public from Eldorado the day before. The story seemed fishy as the car had an Oklahoma license plate and cracked windshield. The officers deemed more questioning in order and told the trio to drive the car around the block to the police station on the ground floor of City Hall.
Patrolman Sutton jumped on the left running board next to the driver and Chief Law jumped on the right running board. Choisser and Green followed in a county car.
It was about 7:45 p.m. when the car turned in front of the bank onto Vine Street then turned east a block later onto Locust Street and reached the front of City Hall. Then, instead of turning north onto Cherry Street as directed and one of the men inside started shooting, hitting Sutton in the right breast. As the car sped east down Locust toward the highway, Sutton dropped off the running board about 100 feet east of City Hall.
Chief Law fired repeatedly into the car from the passenger side hitting Sherrod. Return fire hit Law twice, a flesh wound in his side then a second bullet that "cut off the lobe of his left ear and buried itself in the temple, passing not entirely through the head."
The shot killed him instantly dropping him to the pavement as the car crossed the westernmost track of the railroad, now the bike trail behind Hardee's. It hit the highway, now U.S. Route 45, but then Illinois Route 1 and turned north.
Sutton survived his wound and was taken to Lightner Hospital, but died a few hours later at 11:40 p.m.
Hez Mofield, manager of the Joyland Ballroom, was driving immediately behind the car on Locust when he saw Sutton shot. He stopped to let his wife out of the vehicle and then joined the chase following Green and Choisser. The coupe outdistanced the pursuers and Choisser "left them at Muddy to begin calling ahead for officers to stop all cars."
A manhunt ensued extending as far north as Champaign. "The Daily Register" ran banner headlines and printed an extra while WEBQ announces read bulletins over the radio every 15 minutes.
At Muddy the men turned off the highway and headed north on a township road, but local residents gave bad information to the police: "Muddy people said the car went straight through and instead it turned off to the left," the newspaper reported.
About 6 miles north of Muddy the gunmen stopped to fix a flat tire.
By this time night had arrived. Jim Slow of Eldorado came by and shined his lights on the coupe. The men ran him off the road and fired a bullet through a passenger side window ordering him to get out of that section.
Not knowing about the shooting that had taken place earlier, he didn't report his incident to police until the next morning. The only good news for police was his description of the men. Not only did they match what they knew, he also told them one man had held a bloody handkerchief as if he was wounded.
That was most likely Wesley Sheward, who was about 23 at the time.
After Slow left and gunmen fixed their tire they drove west and hid their stolen car on the back side of Bethel Church, a rural baptist church between Raleigh and Galatia that was then located about a half mile north of the state highway and a half mile west of the Raleigh curve.
There Sheward's wounds would prove fatal. Brewer and McGinley ditched the car with their dying cohort and ran through a recently plowed field where they discarded a shirt, sweater and a pair of socks. About a mile and a half away they reached Illinois Route 143 (now Route 34) and followed it to Thompsonville where they stole a Model T Ford coupe around 2 a.m. Saturday morning.
Walter L. Moody, superintendent of the state police, arrived in Harrisburg later that morning with 50 officers to aid in the search led by local patrolman Sgt. Elmer J. Gibbons, a former Saline County Sheriff's Deputy who had once arrested Charlie Birger before joining the state police.
While police searched the roads Sheward died sometime around noon from a gunshot wound in the left breast above the heart. Police didn't find the car and body until about 8 p.m. The coroner estimated Sheward had been dead for six to eight hours as body didn't show times of rigor mortis.
Later that night police brought a man jailed during the manhunt to view the body. He was Tip Clark of Eldorado and an uncle of McGinley. He recognized Sheward's body and provided police with the names of his nephew and Brewer, another relative by marriage.
Meanwhile Brewer's mother, brother, sister-in-in-law and niece were stopped at the ferry at Shawneetown where they were on their way from their home in Drakesboro, Ky., to Johnston City to meet another relative (probably another of Brewer's brother or a possible stepfather) who worked at the mines there.
Police brought the mother over to Eldorado to identify the remains as well. She hadn't heard about the shooting but wasn't surprised. She told the state's attorney her son had been an outlaw since childhood. The 1930 census found him a 32-year-old prisoner at the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Frankfort.
Inside the car police found a loaf of bread, a can of sardines, a siphon hose and a can of fruit. More importantly they found the Chief Law's pistol which had been winched from his hands during the initial shootout. "All six cartridges in the cylinder had been fired," the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile Williamson County authorities had found the stolen Model T parked near the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad tracks (now the Burlington-Northern) just east of Herrin, and arrested two men who they initially thought were the two suspects. Instead, the men, Willie and Charlie Killerhair, turned out to be cousins to Brewer.
As police focused attention on the suspects' various relatives and sources in Kentucky they discovered the original coupe had been stolen from Drakesboro, Ky., and Brewer had replaced the plates from a similar car he had driven from Henrietta, Okla.
Later that week back in Harrisburg families buried Law and Sutton who were both survived by their wives and children. Their families buried the officers in adjoining lots in the then-new Gaskins Addition of Sunset Lawn Cemetery. Sheward was buried in the Potters Field near the county poor farm off Feazel Street.
After ditching their second stolen car outside of Herrin, Brewer and McGinley made their way to Eccles, W. Va., "where they remained for a time before going to Ohio and Michigan and from there to work in western wheat harvesting," the newspaper reported.
The pair made it as far west as Laurel, Mont., about 12 miles from Billings, Mont., where the two split and Brewer returned to the Eccles, W. Va., area.
There he was arrested in September. Officials brought him back to Harrisburg where he was tried and sentenced to 14 years at the Southern Illinois Penitentiary at Chester.
McGinley was eventually found in Wyoming a few months later and was held in the jail at Sheridan before Saline County officials extradited him.
He was found guilty in 1933 and sentenced to jail as well. The Illinois Supreme Court overturned his original verdict and the county re-tried him in 1935.
His defense attorney claimed McGinley was unarmed and did not take part in the fatal shootout. The jury disagreed and the court sentenced him to two concurrent sentences of 20 years for each murder.
The City of Harrisburg honored the two men with a plaque and their pictures in City Hall in 2000.
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