A federal indictment—attempting to rob the U.S. mail and assaulting mail clerk C.R. McEwen with a dangerous weapon—quickly followed, and the trial began in Tucson on April 4, 1901 (U.S. vs. William Downing, et al., case No. 1461a). It ended five days later with a guilty verdict and a sentence of 10 years confinement in the Arizona Territorial Prison. Inmate number 1733 was ushered through the Yuma prison sally port on April 11. Described as 5 feet 8 3⁄4 inches tall and 139 pounds with black hair and hazel eyes, the 40-year-old former cowboy had a number of years to reflect on his outlaw ways and the dire straits that faced his wife.

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Alone and destitute, Mrs. Downing got a job in the Tucson home of A.F. Franklin. Later, on April 17, 1902, Tucson civic leader and entrepreneur John Ivancovich hired her as a domestic. The next morning she was found dead in the servants’ quarters. That afternoon, a coroner’s jury determined that she had died of heart failure and attributed it to worry and nervousness brought on by the conviction and sentence of her husband.

With time off for good behavior, Bill Downing was released from the Yuma prison on October 8, 1907. Confinement had not improved his disposition. Bitter and mean, he returned to Willcox, opened the notorious Free and Easy Saloon at the corner of Maley Street and the Alley (a lane behind Railroad Avenue businesses that fronted a couple of receiving corrals and a number of the cribs) and willfully defied the law—“practically nothing from gambling to shooting up the town was barred,” according to the Arizona Daily Citizen. Constable Bud Snow, assisted by Arizona Ranger William Slaughter “Billy” Speed, arrested Downing on July 1, 1908, for serving women at the Free and Easy. He pled guilty and paid the $50 fine. The next day, Snow and Speed again arrested him, this time on a charge of assaulting a barber; Downing was fined $10.

Repeated offenses prompted a number of Willcox citizens to circulate a petition to have Downing’s license revoked, and Captain Harry C. Wheeler received two telegrams from Jasper C. Page, the Willcox justice of the peace, seeking the assistance of Arizona Rangers to protect the town from the “drunk and unruly” saloonkeeper. As resident ranger Billy Speed was off scouting at the time, Wheeler sent up Sergeant Rudolph Gunner and Private John McKittrick Redmond from Naco. According to one account, the ranger captain “had heard Downing’s threats to kill any officer who interfered with him and accordingly gave Sergeant Gunner specific orders to shoot him, Downing, at the first break he, Downing, might make of an offensive character.” The two rangers quickly reached Willcox, found that “Downing had quieted down and was as docile as could be,” and headed back to Naco.

When Speed returned to Willcox, Wheeler wrote him to keep an eye on doings at the Free and Easy. “As Downing is posing as a defier of the law and threatened to kill any officer who interferes with him in his lawlessness, and as he made his especial threats against you and Constable Snow to the effect that he will kill you both the first time you attempt to arrest him, I hereby direct you to prepare yourself to meet this man whenever a warrant is placed in your hands for his arrest, and upon his least or slightest attempt to do you harm, I want you to kill him, for I believe he will otherwise kill you. He is determined to kill someone, and it is a certainty he desires to murder several people in Willcox, and taking his character and his avowed intentions into consideration, I want you to take no chance with this man in any official dealing you may have with him. Of course I would desire a peaceful arrest, but if anyone must be hurt, it must not be yourself.” Speed took the captain’s instructions to heart.

On Monday, August 3, 1908, Downing complained to Constable Snow of repeated problems with Cuco Leal, a woman who lived at the Free and Easy. He wanted Leal out of the house but did not want any trouble. Snow later recounted that Downing had also insisted he did not want Speed around, and “if Speed ever stuck his head inside of the door, he would shoot [it] off, and if he does not come in, he would kill the son of a bitch anyway, when the time came.” Downing’s dislike of the ranger was deep-seated. While Speed had served on the 1899 coroner’s jury that had ruled Downing’s killing of Traynor self-defense, he had also been a prosecution witness two years later during Downing’s trial for train robbery.

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