On May 26, 1927, Alexander A. Manley, a 35-year-old male Birmingham police officer, stepped into what should have been an ordinary street encounter and never came back from it. Online accounts agree that Manley was approaching a man whose car was illegally parked when the shooting happened. As he walked up to the vehicle, he was shot, and the routine act of enforcing a parking violation turned into a fatal ambush.
The loss rippled beyond the street itself, because reports note that he left behind a wife and five children, turning the killing from a public tragedy into a deeply private one as well.
The case did not remain a mystery in the sense of having no identified offender. Online sources indicate that the killer was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of Manley’s murder, though many of the readily accessible modern summaries do not preserve the full narrative of the investigation or the details of the arrest itself. The clearest name attached to the case in online execution records is Jeff Coleman, identified there as the man executed for the murder of A. A. Manley in Jefferson County. That means the case moved beyond suspicion and into a formal finding of guilt, with the criminal justice system of the time treating the shooting as murder rather than an unresolved street killing.
What survives online suggests a swift and severe end to the prosecution. Multiple sources state that the suspect was convicted and then executed in Alabama’s electric chair on December 16, 1927, less than seven months after Manley was killed. So while the surviving public record on the arrest, trial proceedings, and courtroom testimony is thin in the easily available online material, the broad outline is clear: Alexander A. Manley was shot to death while confronting an illegally parked motorist in Birmingham, the killer was identified and convicted, and the case ended with an execution before the year was out.
