In the winter of 1941, a man named Frank Shelley, a male, found himself incarcerated in the local jail in Jamestown, North Dakota. The specific circumstances that led to his jailing are lost to time, as are most details of his life. What is known is that on January 1 of that year, while locked in a cell, his life came to a sudden and violent end. At the time, officials saw nothing amiss.
Shelley’s death was officially attributed to natural causes, a quiet and unremarkable event in the daily operations of the county jail. His case was closed, and he was seemingly forgotten.
For eight years, the official record stood. No one had any reason to suspect that Frank Shelley was the first known victim of a man who would go on to kill at least two more people across the American West. Shelley’s cellmate in the Jamestown jail had been a young man with a troubled history named Ray Dempsey Gardner. Born in Ohio in 1921, Gardner had a difficult upbringing; his father was killed in a shootout with police and his mother was sent to prison, leaving him to be raised in an orphanage. By 1941, he was already enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
After leaving that North Dakota jail cell, Gardner’s life continued its downward spiral of crime. He served time in various penitentiaries and his criminal record grew to include over 500 offenses. The violent act he had committed in Jamestown remained his secret, a hidden prelude to the brutal crimes he would commit in the summer of 1949. That year, his violence escalated dramatically, bringing his spree to a terrifying and public conclusion.
In July 1949, Gardner murdered 17-year-old Shirley Gretzinger in Ogden, Utah. He had lured the young woman from her home with the false promise of a babysitting job. When she resisted his advances, he raped and asphyxiated her, leaving her body in a remote gulch. Shortly after, he traveled to Montana, where he met 38-year-old Sue Ella Horne by answering a newspaper ad. He shot and killed her during a robbery attempt, burying her body in a shallow grave.
Gardner’s string of crimes came to an end not because of a murder investigation, but through a series of seemingly unrelated and reckless acts. On August 14, 1949, while driving a stolen car, he panicked upon seeing his employer’s son, ran a stop sign, and crashed into a trailer. His arrest for grand larceny, hit-and-run, and other charges put him back in police custody. During questioning, investigators became suspicious about his connection to the missing Sue Ella Horne.
Faced with a polygraph test, Ray Dempsey Gardner’s composure broke. He confessed not only to killing Horne and Gretzinger but also reached back eight years to the secret he kept from his time in North Dakota. He admitted to strangling his cellmate, Frank Shelley, in the Jamestown jail. For the first time, the truth of what happened on New Year's Day in 1941 was revealed. The cause of Shelley's death was finally reclassified from natural causes to homicide.
Although Gardner confessed to three murders, he only stood trial for the first-degree murder of Shirley Gretzinger in Utah. A jury found him guilty in just 58 minutes and, without a recommendation for mercy, the judge handed down a mandatory death sentence. Gardner’s appeals failed, and a strange request to be used as a "guinea pig" for science was denied.
On September 29, 1951, Ray Dempsey Gardner was executed by a firing squad at Utah State Prison. His last words were, "I'm ready to go. No one will miss me. My life has been worthless." His execution closed the book on a violent criminal career, but it did little to fill the void in the life story of Frank Shelley. He remains a quiet, early victim, a man whose murder was hidden for years, only to be uncovered by the subsequent, brutal acts of his killer.
