Arriving quickly on the scene, Constable Snow removed a watch and chain, two rings, spectacles, two handkerchiefs and $212.55 from Downing’s body. There was no weapon. Had the drunken saloon owner forgotten he had left his revolver behind the bar of the Free and Easy? Jack White, the Cochise County sheriff, thought otherwise. At the time of Downing’s release from prison, White explained, “[he] was looking well and was full in the face. Not long afterward, he was thin, worried, despondent and was drinking hard all the time.” White believed that “Downing deliberately walked to his death at the time he was shot, and that he had made up his mind to that, with the intention of getting as many of his enemies as he could before he cashed in.”

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Whatever prompted Downing’s reckless action, a hastily gathered coroner’s jury, comprising several of Willcox’s leading citizens, found that “the shot was fired by said Speed in the performance of his duty as an officer and that he was perfectly justified in the act, and, therefore, we exonerate him from all blame in the matter.”

A petition quickly made the rounds in Willcox that, according to one account, had been “pretty generally signed by everyone to whom it was presented, requesting the board of supervisors to forever refuse a license for the sale of liquors in the saloon formerly run by W.F. Downing, deceased.” In few words, Arizona Ranger Captain Wheeler encapsulated the community’s reaction to Downing’s demise: “This is the first time I have known a dead man to be without a single friend and the first time that I have known a killing to meet absolute general rejoicing in all this town and precinct.”

The wife-and-husband team of Karen Holliday Tanner and John D. Tanner Jr. of Fallbrook, Calif., have co-authored many well-researched books and articles about the Wild West. Karen is also the author of a 1998 biography, Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait, about her famous relative. Suggested for further reading: The Odyssey of Burt Alvord: Lawman, Train Robber, Fugitive, by Don Chaput; The Arizona Rangers, by Bill O’Neal; and Log of an Arizona Trail Blazer, by John Alexander Rockfellow.

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