On University Way, the Egyptian Theater featured The Mysterious Lady, a silent film starring Greta Garbo. A few doors down, the popular Manning’s Coffee offered their “luxury blend” in a hot cup of fresh brew, or as a bag of ground roast to take home. Further north, on the corner of The Way and 50th Street, the Jamieson Drug Company store was busy with late customers.
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| Officer Sherard. Family Archives. |
Sherard had seen combat in the Great War, but he cannot have expected the firefight that was about to erupt. As 9 o’clock approached, a lady rushed up to him. She and her husband thought that two men were robbing Jamieson’s. With no time to call for backup, the officer hurried by the store front. To enter there would put the victims, held in the back, in his possible line of fire. He continued around the corner, hoping to catch the robbers by surprise from a side entrance.
Sherard started inside, but the two bandits fled out the front. He dashed outside and around the corner. The crooks claimed the officer shot at them first, and Sherard may well have fired a warning round into the air. He also surely ordered them to “Halt.” They don’t mention that at all. In any case, the two, along with the driver of their getaway car, met Sherard with a hail of bullets. It’s unclear how many times, or even if, the patrolman fired at them before he went down from a bullet in the head.
Despite police efforts all around the city, the crooks actually managed to pull off several more robberies before they vanished. Meanwhile, the downed patrolman lay in a hospital, dying and unable to talk. Officer Sherard succumbed shortly after midnight, his wife at his side. Once again, Mary Frances – she usually went by just “Frances” – had lost a husband in the line of duty.
Mary Frances Vanderdasson was born in 1895 in Emmett, Idaho, about 23 miles northwest of Boise. She married 26-year-old William Henry Kuckku of Emmett on July 27, 1917. However, her new husband enlisted shortly after their marriage, and his infantry regiment departed for France on December 12 of that year. With him in “A” Company was his good buddy, Emery Sherard.
Sherard was born in Wyoming in 1887 and the family moved to Idaho while he was in his teens. When he registered for the draft in 1917, Emery had a farm about 25 miles north of Boise. (It’s unclear if he owned or leased the acreage.) He met Frances shortly before he and William shipped out. In late May 1918, they took part in the first major offensive operation for American forces in Europe, the Battle of Cantigny. Sadly, Will Kuckku was killed in action, making the ultimate sacrifice for his country. Sherard survived, as he did the later storied battles of the American army on the Western Front.
Mustered out and back in Idaho, Emery’s acquaintance with the widow blossomed into friendship and then love. They were married November 4, 1919, and moved to Seattle within a month or so. Emery worked as a mechanic for several years and spent a short period as a salesman. He joined the Seattle Police Department in November of 1926. Now he too had been killed in the line of duty. Frances was left alone to raise their three children: Dorothy, age 8, James, 5, and Theodore, 4.
The two bandits inside the drug store had both shown signs of being drunk, or at least tipsy. One had waved his gun around and boasted about shooting someone just to show they were serious. The victims provided police with reasonable descriptions of the two, and officers soon rounded up over sixty suspects.
Around noon on Monday, witnesses picked Knute Lindberg, a 22-year-old immigrant, out of a lineup based on his appearance and distinct accent. The Swede had entered the U.S. five years earlier. He listed his destination as Aberdeen, Washington, and claimed to be an orphan.
Under intense interrogation, Lindberg named his accomplices: 20-year-old Leo Burns and 21-year-old James McCourt. Born in Pierce County, Washington, Burns was known to the police and described as a “hard-boiled egg” in news reports. McCourt had been born in Kitsap County and worked briefly as a plumber. His police record was said to match that “of a hardened criminal of fifty years.”
Lindberg and Burns had indeed “fortified” themselves with a bottle of moonshine before going on their robbery spree. McCourt, the getaway driver, was apparently sober. Told that a .38-caliber slug had killed Sherard, Lindberg admitted that he might have fired it – he or McCourt. Burns had carried a .32-caliber automatic pistol. Police arrested Leo Burns within a day or so. His claim to have not fired at the officer was disproven by .32-caliber slugs collected at the crime scene. Meanwhile, McCourt had fled the area and would remain on the run for about four months.
Oddly enough, criminologist Luke S. May logged this case in mid-January 1929, just two days before the trials of Lindberg and Burns. The prosecuting attorney sent him a .38-caliber Colt double-action revolver and a .32-caliber Colt automatic pistol, plus several bullets. May’s files contain no information on when police had collected this evidence, but it’s highly likely that Luke had already inspected the exhibits. A full firearms and bullet assessment can be quite time-consuming, so this late interaction seems almost pro forma.
In court, May testified that, although many slugs from the two Colts had been collected at the crime scene, neither had been the murder weapon. Even so, for their participation in a felony where a death occurred, Lindberg and Burns were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Three weeks after they were sentenced, James McCourt was arrested for a robbery in Butte, Montana. Shown a “wanted” poster, he admitted that he had indeed participated in the drug store robbery. He seemed to recall firing his gun twice, but implied he’d only meant to make the patrolman duck while they made their escape. He had sold the weapon to a known bootlegger after his escape to Montana. McCourt waived extradition and was quickly returned to Seattle.
Police were unable to retrieve the suspected murder weapon. Yet authorities somehow learned a great deal about it. In his opening statement to the jury, the prosecutor said they knew enough “to convince you it was his gun that fired the fatal bullet.”
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| James McCourt. Montana Standard. |
Given that confident assertion, we must engage in a bit of conjecture. We first assume that Montana police grilled the gun buyer, who had perhaps re-sold it (or ditched it, but he’d probably not admit to that). He would have echoed McCourt’s description of the “.38 caliber long-barreled Colt revolver.” May had surely identified the make and model of the weapon that fired the fatal bullet. Thus, the buyer’s statement sealed that link, since McCourt had already admitted that he had fired that gun at Sherard.
We can, in fact, stretch our hypothesis a bit further. McCourt or the buyer would have almost certainly test fired the gun, just to prove that it was in good working order. Officers might have been able to recover a slug from whatever target they used, and that could have been compared to the death bullet. Unfortunately, May’s file for this old case only had the inventory of the first evidence received, not the reports. Whatever the exact sequence, newspapers noted that expert testimony stated “that the bullet which killed the officer came from McCourt’s gun.”
The jury issued a guilty verdict, and McCourt was sentenced to life in prison, joining his partners in crime. As it happened, Leo Burns died less than six months after he arrived at the state penitentiary. Cause of death was listed as tuberculosis, although he had shown no apparent symptoms through the period of his trial. McCourt and Lindberg were enumerated at the penitentiary for the 1940 census, but it is unknown what became of Lindberg after that.
McCourt was paroled in early 1943, apparently as part of a program to ease the strain on the under-funded and under-manned prison. He eventually moved to California, where records show he spent time in prison (San Quentin and then Folsom) for burglary. He died in San Francisco at the age of sixty.
Mary Frances Sherard never remarried. After her husband’s murder, groups in Seattle sponsored at least two benefit events to provide a “nest egg” for the family. She received small pensions from the U. S. government and from the city of Seattle, and added to that with occasional work cleaning homes.
For the 1940 Census, daughter Dorothy listed her occupation as Comptometer operator, a highly skilled position. (The Comptometer was a brand of mechanical calculator.) She perhaps married during the war because it is not possible to trace her after that.
James and Theodore went to work for Boeing Aircraft when they were old enough. Then, in the summer of 1943, Theodore enlisted in the army. One can imagine the mother’s fears, but he survived the war. Theodore married in 1947 and became a commercial artist. James stayed in the aircraft industry and eventually learned to fly himself. He moved to California and married there in 1950.
Mary Frances Sherard died in January 1954.
| References: H. W. Crocker III, The Yanks Are Coming!: A Military History of the United States in World War I, Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C. (2014). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| “[Sherard Murder: Background and Investigation],” Seattle Star, Seattle Times, Post-Intelligencer, Seattle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington; Emmett Index, Idaho (January 1919 – October 1928). |
| “[Sherard Murder: Trials and Afterwards],” Post-Intelligencer, Seattle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Olympian, Olympia, Bellingham Herald, Seattle Times, Spokane Chronicle, Washington; Montana Standard, Butte, Montana; The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon (January 14, 1929 – January 1943). |
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