Louisiana deputies and the Oklahoma outlaw

When officer Plais Horn saw a man climb off a freight train in Opelousas in March 1917, he thought his sharp eye and good memory had helped catch a notorious bank robber.
The Opelousas Star-Progress called the arrest of the man, identified as Joe Davis alias Bill Butler, “probably the biggest capture in the history of local criminal authorities in recent years.”
According to the newspaper report, when the man arrived from Eunice on the freight train, “Horn … always alert, quickly remembered that he had Davis’ picture among the large number of criminals wanted in various sections of the United States.” He arrested him as a “suspicious character.”
When the officer looked up the poster he’d remembered, it showed that Davis was wanted in Oklahoma for train robbery and other crimes and that there was a thousand-dollar reward for him, “dead or alive.”
Davis was worth the big reward. A biographer claims that by age 24 he’d “established a record unsurpassed perhaps in the criminal annals of Oklahoma or any other state.” He didn’t need to rob banks. He came from a wealthy family. The bottom line, according to the biography, was that Davis robbed banks and trains “as much for the thrill as for the money.” (Jerry Thompson, Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls: Joe Lynch Davis and the Last of the Oklahoma Outlaws. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.)
Horn, who the Star-Progress called “one of the best detectives in the state,” was sure that the big reward would soon be his — but he counted his money too soon.
The problem with this bit of Horn’s detective work was that Davis was already in jail. Nobody’d sent out a new circular after he was arrested in Purcell, Oklahoma, three months earlier. The Norman Transcript said that arrest came after “a ceaseless search” by federal officers who knew where he was all along and kept him under observation until he led them to other members of his gang.
The outlaw was tried, convicted and sentenced to the federal prison at Leavenworth. Kansas, according to Oklahoma newspapers. The Louisiana papers don’t say what happened to the suspicious character arrested here. There’s no report of his being sent to Oklahoma or tried in Louisiana, but a story in the Lafayette Advertiser three years later may offer a clue as to what happened.
The real Davis escaped from his Leavenworth jailers in April 1919 and was on the run again when deputies in Lafayette spotted a man named Almond Cooley walking down Jefferson Street. They immediately arrested him “because he so closely resembles a convict wanted at the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth,” the newspaper reported.
Local authorities were sure they had the escapee after making “careful comparisons” to the description sent out by the prison. “The only difference between [Cooley] and the man wanted is that [Cooley] has [a] … scar above his left eye and the [prison] description states that the escaped convict has one under his left eye,” the newspaper said.
Local officials wired the warden at Leavenworth, and held the lookalike in jail until they got an answer. That answer, if there was one, was not reported, but deputies finally figured out that they’d got the wrong man, again.
From the beginning, Cooley maintained he wasn’t Davis. He said he was an itinerant umbrella repairman based in New Orleans, that Cooley was his real name, that he’d never been to Kansas, especially not to Leavenworth, and that he’d never heard of Joe Davis by that name or any of his aliases.
All of which turned out to be true.
Davis was eventually caught again, served out his prison sentence, then turned more or less legitimate. According to the biography, he refused for the rest of his life to talk about his outlaw past or time spent at Leavenworth. He died at age 86 on July 15, 1979, apparently having never set foot in Louisiana.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.