Shell Game (Kansas City, Missouri, 1912)

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The year was growing old, late October was approaching, and darkness blanketed Kansas City. People had become nothing more than silhouettes in the early morning hours of October 18, 1912.

Al Hatch, perhaps the best-known and certainly the most gregarious saloonkeeper in Kansas City, wobbled through the darkness toward his home when he noticed four shadows approaching. As they neared, he recognized them as young toughs Harry Davis, Harry Asher, and James Harper. He didn’t know the fourth kid, who stayed a few steps behind the others.

Hatch knew Davis well. The twenty-year-old came from a good family. Good-looking and affable, he always had a lady on his arm, whom he charmed with a majestic singing voice.

“Hold up your hands,” Davis barked.

Hatch smirked. “Quit your kidding,” he said.

Four pops, four pinpricks of light. Al Hatch fell face-first into the dirt.

After rifling through the fallen barkeep’s pockets, Davis and others bolted.

Despite the four bullets, Hatch pulled himself up and wobbled home, where he collapsed on the floorboards.

Hatch’s shooting shocked Kansas City. Most who knew the talkative barkeep couldn’t believe anyone would want to harm him. His saloon was the closest watering hole to the Grand Theater, so Hatch knew most of the actors and actresses on a first-name basis, which led newspaperman to dub him with the sensational title “the best bartender to the stars outside of New York City.”

Hatch didn’t keep his good pair of ears just for the dramatis personae. Known affectionately as “Dad,” Hatch always bent an ear to a needy customer crying in his beer.

But, the bartender to the stars also had a habit of carrying large sums of money on his person. It was rumored that the jewelry he wore contained over $1,500 in diamonds.

Police threw a dragnet over the city and managed to collar Asher and Harper. Both fingered Davis as the ringleader. Although Asher admitted to firing his pistol twice, the seventeen-year-old insisted it was Davis’ finger that fired the fatal round.

Davis, the alleged ringleader, was nowhere to be found. He had fled Kansas City just after the shooting. Kansas City Police offered $100 for “Highway Robbery and Assault with Intent to Kill,” printing wanted posters dated October 21—three days after the crime.

Five days later, Hatch died in the hospital. Davis and the others now faced murder. The Kansas City Police raised its reward to $1,500 (Hatch’s mother upped the ante by offering an additional $1,000) for his capture and printed additional wanted leaflets, but as the New Year approached, Davis’ trail had gone cold.

Meanwhile, Davis’ accomplices faced the music in court a few days before Christmas, 1912. The jury didn’t buy Asher’s finger-pointing. Found guilty of first degree murder, Harry Asher received a life sentence; twenty-year-old Harper, who didn’t fire a weapon, for twenty years for second degree murder.

Understanding that a moving target is harder to hit, Harry Davis kept in constant motion. His illicit odyssey took him from Kansas City to Memphis and from Memphis to New Orleans. He celebrated Christmas and brought in the New Year in Wichita before moving on to Fort Smith, Arkansas. Then Galveston, Oklahoma City, and Ponca City. A series of thinly-veiled aliases was just enough to keep the authorities from closing in. He was “Herman” Davis, “S.A.” Davis, and “Harry Sheppard” in various places.

Jefferson County Deputy Marshal Harry Hoffman followed Davis’ trail across the country, always arriving just hours after the wily fugitive had left town. By the spring of 1913, all Hoffman had to show for his efforts was a handful of receipts.

During his time on the lam, Davis (as “Herman” Davis) married twenty-year-old Berniece (“Bernie”) Nessley, a native of Wichita. Bernie corresponded with Davis’ sister, who on several occasions had sent money that helped the fugitives evade Hoffman and the long arm of Kansas City law.

Davis’ luck finally ended when he returned to Oklahoma City in August 1913. Detective Webb Jones recognized the suspect from his likeness on the wanted leaflet put out by Kansas authorities. When Davis went to the post office to collect mail under his alias “Harry Sheppard,” Jones slapped a pair of cuffs on the fugitive, and accompanied by Marshal Harry Hoffman, took him back to Kansas City in a Ford Model T.

Like Asher, Davis pled guilty, and like Asher, faced a jury for first degree murder. He hummed tunes and broke into song during breaks in the court action, but nonetheless, the jury decided to cage the Kansas City songbird for life.

A pardon ended Asher’s life sentence in 1917, but the pardon amounted to an elongated furlough. Convicted of a second, unrelated murder in 1921, Asher earned a second life sentence.

Harry Davis, whose singing often echoed throughout his cell block just before lights out, became deathly ill in prison. Authorities issued a mercy parole in 1916. He wanted to fall into Bernie’s arms, but he didn’t know that Bernie had fallen into the arms of a professional baseball player. She had managed to obtain a divorce and remarry without her first husband knowing—a fact seized on by the media.

Davis died shortly after his mercy parole; the fourth man in Davis’ “boy bandit” gang, was never identified.

 

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