On April 21, 1927, Charles Mortimer Cosby Jr., a 43-year-old White male, rode out from Laramie as Albany County's sheriff on what seemed at first like another lead to chase down. A University of Wyoming student had told him about a strange man camped in the hills east of town with two automobiles, and Cosby, only a few months into office but already known as a fearless lawman, went with Deputy Robert Welliever to see for himself.
In a ravine several miles east of Laramie, they found a man beside a partly dismantled Studebaker, another car nearby, and an engine block set off on the ground. The man gave his name as Frank Bray and tried to explain away the scene, but Cosby suspected the cars were stolen and told him he was under arrest.
What happened next unfolded with sudden, brutal speed. After Cosby sent Welliever to inspect the engine and take down its number, the deputy heard a gunshot and turned to see the sheriff struggling with Bray. According to the newspaper account later quoted in modern reporting, Bray had a. 38 Smith & Wesson pressed against Cosby's body and fired again as the fight continued. Before Welliever could fully close the distance, Bray shot the sheriff twice more, mortally wounding him. Welliever then opened fire, striking Bray in the knee and abdomen. Cosby fell, and when his deputy reached him, he is reported to have said, “Yes, he got me,” before dying there in the sand. Bray was taken back into town alive but gravely wounded, and he died later that night after surgery.
Because the gunman did not survive the day, there was no arrest that led to formal charges, no trial, and no conviction in the ordinary sense. The only suspect identified in the killing was the man calling himself Frank Bray, though investigators quickly began to doubt that even his name was settled. Newspaper reports and later summaries said authorities looked into whether he was connected to a Littleton, Colorado, bank robbery, and they also traced the two cars in the ravine to purchases made in Denver by a man using the name Frank Dill. Dealers reportedly said the buyer had behaved oddly, and police checked cash found on Bray for possible links to the robbery. A coroner's jury later concluded that Bray had shot Cosby without provocation and that Deputy Welliever had shot Bray in the line of duty.
Even after Bray's death, the mystery around him lingered. One report said a man named Dill came forward and claimed the dead gunman was his long-lost brother; another account suggested the man may have been known as Bragg; still another woman traveled to Laramie believing Bray might have been her missing husband. Stories conflicted over where he had been born and who he really was, and some details published in the days after the shooting were never firmly verified. What did seem clear was that investigators never reached a final, public resolution of his background before the case effectively ended with his death. In that sense, the killing of Cosby was both solved and not solved: the shooter was identified by the officers at the scene and died that same night, but the full truth of who he was and what else he may have done appears to have gone with him.
Cosby's death hit Laramie with unusual force because he was more than a sheriff. He had been a newspaperman in Brooklyn, Denver, Cheyenne, Washington, and Laramie before turning to law enforcement, and accounts from the time described him as widely liked and deeply respected. Memorial services in Laramie were held with full military honors before his body was sent to Brooklyn for burial in Cypress Hills National Cemetery. He left behind his wife, Frances, and two children. The surviving record paints his last day as the kind of hard frontier encounter that could turn fatal in seconds: a sheriff following up on a suspicious tip, a lonely gulch outside town, a struggle at arm's length, and a killing that ended almost as soon as it began, leaving behind a dead lawman, a dead suspect, and questions that never entirely closed.
