To this day, the shooting death of Seattle police officer Fred Ivey on May 10, 1928 is described as an unsolved murder. Yet, eight months after his death, the probable killer was identified by a competent witness. The likely reasons for still calling it “unsolved” are instructive.
Fred Ivey was born March 13, 1879 in Missouri. When he was about twenty years old, the family moved to Granite Falls, Washington, a small town thirteen miles northeast of Everett. In 1909, he married Katherine Sybella Brown there. Four years later, they moved into Everett, where Fred worked as a power system operator and then served as town marshal for a couple years. Between 1911 and 1917, the couple had two sons and a daughter. In July 1917, Fred became an officer for the Seattle police department. He proved to be an effective and highly-respected patrolman.
Shortly after 10:00 p.m. on May 10th, a quick-witted citizen alerted Officer Ivey to the flight of an armed robber. The informant was Curtis E. “Jack” Howell, a (former?) private detective and deputy sheriff. Although the heads-up was justified, it would lead to tragedy.
Howell was born September 28, 1888 in New York City. He ran a detective agency for several years before catching the “flying bug.” He became proficient enough to open a flight training school in Richmond, California, backed by the [Glenn] Curtiss Aeroplane Company. Then a flying accident kept him out of the air for several months, so he moved to Fargo, North Dakota and started a new detective agency. When World War I began, Howell enlisted in the aero corp and was assigned to an aviation training base in Texas. However, he received a disability discharge in the spring of 1918. Records do not say whether or not he suffered another accident, or simply became ill.
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| Curtiss Biplance ca 1911. Library of Congress. |
Howell evidently spent the next several years in North Dakota and eastern Montana before moving to Seattle. He continued to promote aviation, but did not try to compete with freelance barnstormers, who now performed ever more dangerous stunts. Accounts show him in a wide variety of unrelated short-term jobs, a pattern that suggests he might have been working as an undercover private investigator. (For obvious reasons, he never said anything to confirm or deny this possibility.)
On the evening of May 10, Howell was in a drug store near downtown Seattle when a man we’ll call “Slippery Slim” entered. He barked, “Stick’um up!” and waved a pistol around. Howell had time to carefully note the robber’s appearance before he made off with about $50 from the cash register. After a momentary wait, Jack began to trail the crook. He persisted long enough for the fugitive to spot him and threaten him from a distance. Jack dropped back, then persuaded the driver of a passing car to help. Next, the thief boarded a streetcar headed north.
Luckily, Patrolman Ivey happened by just as Howell ran into a store to call for help. Flagged down by the driver, Ivey quickly joined the pursuit, which continued for several blocks. Frustrated, the officer had the driver pull alongside the streetcar so he could signal the conductor to pull up. For reasons that were never explained, the conductor ignored him and went on to his next scheduled stop. By then, the fugitive had noted the police uniform and hurried to the rear platform of the trolley. Ivey was fatally wounded in the ensuing exchange of gunfire. The shooter ran off into the darkness.
Despite a huge manhunt then and for days afterwards, the fugitive eluded capture. Between Howell and the other witnesses, “Slim” was described as: In his late twenties, about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, an estimated weight of 140 pounds, and a dark complexion. Police hired criminologist Luke S. May a few days after the shooting. He identified the murder weapon as a .38-caliber Colt automatic pistol. The trick, of course, would be to find it and its owner.
Sadly, armed robberies were all too common in Seattle at the time, although only those with special features made the newspapers. Thus, on July 15, a bandit shot it out with a pharmacist at a drug store about two miles west of the University of Washington. The crook hit the victim in the foot, but got away with just $30. The description of the shooter was said to be “identical” to that of the Ivey killer, Slippery Slim. His weapon was identified as a .38-caliber Colt automatic pistol, but the slug was apparently too distorted to try a specific match with the Ivey death missile. Still, the news article also noted that the same bandit had been implicated in a number of holdups around the city. In every case, Slippery Slim proved to have an uncanny ability to evade pursuit.
Over the next several months, police followed many possible leads, but none of them panned out. The shocking denouement came around noon on January 9, 1929. Two masked men tried to hold up the Barto Company, an insurance and small loans firm located near the southern edge of downtown Seattle. This proved to be a fatal miscalculation. The owner-operator, Thomas C. Barto, had lettered in baseball at the University of Washington (he graduated in 1914) and was an outstanding all-around athlete. He was also a highly skilled hunter, and known as a fine marksman with rifle, pistol, and shotgun.
Available records contain no systematic reconstruction of events in the office. We cannot even be sure when the shooting started. But most accounts agree that Barto and a male clerk retrieved weapons from desk drawers and scored multiple hits on the two crooks. There is also agreement that two female customers fled the scene and summoned police. An officer passing by on the street responded quickly enough to exchange shots with one bandit and block his escape. He was later commended for his swift action.
In any case, Barto ended up badly wounded and the clerk had been stunned by a blow to the head. The two would-be thieves, however, were both fatally wounded. There names were Robert Byrne and James M. Fare. Unlike Byrne, Fare had no known criminal record. More importantly, Jack Howell saw Byrne’s picture in the news, went to the funeral parlor, and positively identified him as the killer of Patrolman Ivey. The next day, officials conceded that Howell was probably right. They (and possibly Luke May) had perhaps traced some of Byrne’s underworld contacts and associates.
Robert Byrne was born in Chicago in 1899. His father died less than six months later. Around 1914, the mother moved the family to Seattle. Two years later, Robert was sent to reform school for robbing a grocery store. He displayed his slipperiness early, jumping from a moving train to escape. Authorities apparently didn’t bother to pursue him further.
At some point, Byrne returned to Chicago and lied about his age to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station. However, in the spring of 1918, postal inspectors tracked down Byrne and another youth as the robbers of a Chicago post office. Byrne was dishonorably discharged and turned over to civilian authorities. A judge sentenced him to six to ten years in Joliet Prison. He was back in Seattle by 1927 or 1928.
Byrne never regained consciousness after the Barto fiasco (neither did Fare). Thus, there was no way to verify, or disprove, that he really was Slippery Slim. Police did not ask Luke May to make any further bullet comparisons, so that too was a dead end. In fact, authorities chose not to incur the expense of further testing to see who was shot with what. (Some reports speculated that Barto might have been hit by a bullet from the clerk’s weapon.)
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| Robert Byrne. Seattle Times. |
In the months after Ivey’s murder, various organizations around Seattle had sponsored benefit events for the family: a play, dance, “smoker,” and even a boxing card. Katherine (Brown) Ivey also received what amounted to a lifetime job as a cleaning lady at the Seattle public library. She never remarried, retired around 1952, and passed away in 1968.
Her oldest son, Quentin, had a job as a typist at the King County jail while he attended the University of Washington. Later, he worked as a food company salesman, at least some of that time for the H.J. Heinz Company. The other son, Eugene, drove a truck for the Coca Cola Company, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Afterwards, Eugene joined the Seattle police department, retiring around 1976. Daughter Dolores worked as a beautician until her marriage to a shipyard craftsman in 1941.
Evidence suggests that Curtis “Jack” Howell continued to work as an undercover investigator. Although he appeared in various city directories, he listed no occupation for the 1940 U.S. Census, and called himself a “retired aviator” on his 1942 draft registration. He died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident in May 1944. His obituary mentioned only that he had once worked as a circus clown.
Thomas Barto recovered well enough from his wound to continue in the loan and insurance business for at least another thirty years. He died in May 1983 … at over ninety years old.
| References: “[Criminal Case Activity],” Seattle Times, Washington (May 11, 1928 – January 13, 1929). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| Officer Fred Ivey, Behind the Badge Foundation – https://behindthebadgefoundation.org/rollcall/ivey-officer-fred/ [Downloaded January 9, 2021.] |
| “[Participant Background],” Oakland Tribune, Santa Maria Times, California; Chicago Tribune, Illinois; Eugene Guard, Capital Journal, Salem, Oregon; Fargo Forum and Daily Republican, Williston Graphic, Ward County Independent, Minot, North Dakota; Seattle Times, Seattle Star, Washington (March1914 – February 1988). |
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