Edward “Ed” Samuelson, a White/Caucasian male guard at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, was killed on November 1, 1907, in a burst of violence that turned an ordinary day behind prison walls into a deadly escape attempt. The accounts that survive describe Samuelson as a guard caught in the path of a desperate inmate who had somehow obtained both a handgun and a stick of dynamite inside the prison.
In that hard, isolated penitentiary town, where every locked door and every key mattered, the attempt to break free ended with Samuelson being shot and fatally wounded while on duty.
The man identified in online historical and memorial sources as Samuelson's killer was inmate Adam Eckert. By the time Samuelson was killed, Eckert was not a new suspect on the outside but a prisoner already serving a life sentence inside the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Those same sources trace Eckert's earlier criminal history back to 1901, when he was arrested after the killing of Deputy Sheriff Charles B. Holden in Evanston, Wyoming. Reports linked that earlier case to a check-forgery matter, and Eckert was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder and sent to prison for life. That meant that when Samuelson was slain in 1907, the principal suspect was already under lock and key, a man with a known history of lethal violence against law officers.
What happened next gave the case its grim finality. After shooting Samuelson, Eckert reportedly tried to blast his way out by using the dynamite on a door leading to freedom. The plan failed. With the escape collapsing around him, he turned the gun on himself and died there in the prison. Because of that, there was no later arrest for Samuelson's killing, no separate murder trial, and no conviction arising from Samuelson's death itself. The man responsible was identified immediately by the circumstances and by his own final act, but he never stood in court for this crime.
So the story of Edward “Ed” Samuelson ends not with a long investigation that stretched on for years, but with a sudden prison killing whose answer seems to have arrived almost as quickly as the gunfire. The available online record does not clearly provide Samuelson's age, but it does preserve the outline of his final moments: a guard at Rawlins, confronting a violent escape, killed by a prisoner who had already once been arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for another lawman's death. In the end, the suspect in Samuelson's case was Adam Eckert, and the resolution came in the bleakest way possible, with the killer dying by suicide before any new charges could be brought.
