Edward “Red” Phillips, a 38-year-old White male deputy sheriff, was drawn into a desperate manhunt that tore across southwest Wyoming on March 4, 1955, and ended with his death in Green River the next day. Public historical accounts describe the violence as part of a 16-hour crime spree by Charles Billings, a drifter who had already burglarized a business in Kemmerer, murdered auto dealer Albert Maffei, wounded Kemmerer Town Marshal Frank Kulinsky and station owner Don Wagner, then
kidnapped a teenage attendant in Evanston before reaching Green River. By late afternoon, Phillips and other officers were searching the Union Pacific rail yards when they encountered the fugitive. When Phillips ordered the man to stop, the suspect ran behind a railcar and opened fire. Phillips was hit under the arm, the bullet lodging near his spine, and he was rushed to Sweetwater County Memorial Hospital in Rock Springs, where he underwent two operations before dying in the early hours of March 5, 1955.
The killing unfolded with the speed and confusion of a nightmare. Accounts of the chase say Billings had released his kidnap victim near the Green River railyards, leaving officers to hunt for him among tracks, railcars, and industrial shadows. Deputy Steve Babel was with Phillips when they spotted a man on the platform and called out for him to halt. Instead of surrendering, the fugitive broke for cover and fired. Testimony later described Phillips going down during the exchange, while officers scrambled to return fire and figure out how badly he was hurt. What began as a search for a fleeing gunman turned, in a few violent seconds, into the wounding of a deputy who would not survive the night. The date of death is consistently given as March 5, 1955, even though the shooting itself happened on March 4 in Green River.
As for the suspect, online historical sources identify him as Charles Billings. There was no later arrest, murder charge, trial, or conviction in Phillips’s case because Billings did not live long enough to face court. After shooting Phillips, he fled from the rail yard into a nearby residential area, took a family hostage, and was then killed in Green River by Union Pacific special agent Gaylord Sherman during the final confrontation. A coroner’s inquest was convened on March 9, 1955, and Sherman was exonerated in Billings’s death. Sources also note that Billings was briefly misidentified at first because he had been using the alias Melvin H. Gray, but investigators later confirmed his true identity. In the end, the man responsible for Phillips’s death was known, but the case never moved into the usual sequence of arrest, prosecution, and conviction because the violent chain of events burned out in a single day, leaving Phillips remembered not as the center of a courtroom case, but as the lawman who fell while trying to stop a roaming killer.
