Part 3: The Ghost of Bates County and the West Coast Showdown

 

Part 3: The Ghost of Bates County and the West Coast Showdown

The iron gates of the Missouri State Penitentiary had slammed shut on the shooter, John Shead, but Dale Jones remained a ghost. He had orchestrated a bloody escape, mocked the law, and vanished into thin air. Yet, the lawmen of Bates County refused to let the file go cold. The memory of Constable Samuel Queen hung heavy over the department, a quiet vow that his killer’s mastermind would face justice.

The dragnet stretched across state lines, following the whispers of a multi-state auto theft ring. In late 1914, investigators finally caught a break. Jones was tracked down, captured, and dragged back to Missouri in heavy irons.

But Dale Jones was a slippery devil. On November 13, 1914, before he could stand trial for his role in the ambush, Jones executed a daring escape from the county jail, slipping into the night once more.

To survive on the run, Jones shed his real identity like a second skin. He knew every lawman from Kansas City to St. Louis was looking for "Dale Jones," so he buried that name in the dirt. He began floating through rural border towns using the name Fred Jones, and later, Charles J. Taylor. With a handful of forged papers and a rotating roster of aliases, he fled the Midwest entirely, heading for the sun-drenched coast of California.

By late 1915, detectives finally pierced his cover, located him in California, and brought him back to Missouri a second time. Yet, due to a stunning twist of legal maneuvering—and because John Shead stubbornly refused to testify against his boss—Jones eluded a murder conviction. He was sentenced to just two years on secondary charges.

It was a slap on the wrist. And it was a fatal mistake by the justice system.

The Spree Begins: Upon his release, the man once known as Dale Jones reinvented himself completely. He adopted his most permanent and dangerous alias: Charles Forbes. Partnering with his equally ruthless wife, Margie—who now went by Mrs. Charles Forbes—he launched a violent, desperate crime spree across the American Southwest that mirrored the future exploits of Bonnie and Clyde.

By 1918, "Charles Forbes" and his wife were terrorizing cities across the Rockies. They left a trail of empty bank vaults and stolen vehicles, running purely on adrenaline and stolen horsepower. When law enforcement tried to intervene, the response from the Forbes couple was instantaneous, lethal violence.

On September 13, 1918, Detective John W. Rowan of the Colorado Springs Police Department cornered the duo. Jones drew his weapon and shot the detective dead.

Less than twenty-four hours later, while fleeing through Denver, Policeman Luther Mahill attempted to stop the murderous couple. He, too, was shot down in cold blood.

The "Forbes" bandits were now the most wanted fugitives in America. With two fresh bodies in their wake, they pinned the accelerator to the floor and flew back toward Los Angeles, California, looking to lose themselves in the sprawling Pacific coast.

But they had run out of road.

On November 19, 1918, a heavily armed posse of Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies and local police surrounded the bungalow where the self-proclaimed Charles Forbes and his wife were holed up. There would be no handcuffs this time. There would be no arrogant taunts in a jail cell.

The quiet California neighborhood erupted into a warzone, echoing the tragic night at the Rich Hill depot five years earlier. Bullets ripped through walls and shattered windows. In the opening volleys of the fierce gun battle, Deputy Sheriff George W. Van Vliet was struck down and killed by the outlaw's frantic fire.

But the law would not retreat. Officers poured a relentless hail of gunfire into the hideout. When the smoke finally cleared and the ringing in the streets died down, both the mastermind and his wife lay dead on the floor, riddled with bullets.

When the authorities searched the bodies and ran the fingerprints of the dead gunman they called Charles Forbes, the trail led all the way back to a cold November night in Missouri.

Five years after he looked Samuel Queen in the eye and chillingly declared, "You'll never get me to Butler," Dale Jones’s violent prophecy had run its full, bloody course. He never did see the inside of the Butler jail—but the relentless ghost of the Bates County lawman had chased him through every fake name and every state line, all the way to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, where his criminal empire finally died in a rain of lead.