On the night of September 24, 1928, Merchant Patrolman William Sterling Ashby was working his rounds in Globe, Arizona, when what should have been a routine check at a downtown garage on Broad Street turned deadly. Ashby, a 67-year-old male whose race and ethnicity are not clearly documented in surviving public records, was employed as a merchant patrol officer, a type of private security guard tasked with protecting local businesses in the overnight hours.
Contemporary accounts remember him simply as “Merchant Patrolman William Ashby,” emphasizing his role watching over commercial properties in the mining town’s business district.
At about 3:00 a.m., Ashby entered a garage on Broad Street while a robbery was in progress. A robber had confronted and was in the process of holding up an employee of the garage when Ashby walked in. Almost immediately upon his arrival, the assailant shot him with a handgun, fatally wounding him. He died of gunfire injuries as a direct result of interrupting the crime, and his death was recorded as occurring in Globe, Gila County, Arizona, on September 24, 1928.
The investigation into his killing was complicated from the beginning by the fear of the primary witness. The employee being robbed that night initially refused to cooperate fully with investigators because he feared retaliation from the gunman. As a result, the case lacked a clear suspect in its early months, and there was no immediate arrest for the murder. It was only about six months later that the same victim of the robbery finally identified a suspect, by then already in custody in Phoenix for a series of other robberies.
The man identified by the robbery victim had been arrested in Phoenix on unrelated robbery charges and ultimately received a sentence of 15 to 25 years in prison for those crimes. However, available records do not clearly show that he was ever formally tried or convicted specifically for Ashby’s murder; sources note that it is unknown whether he faced a separate homicide prosecution for the killing in Globe. In that sense, while law enforcement believed they had identified the likely gunman, the legal resolution of the murder charge itself remains historically murky.
Beyond the circumstances of his death, scattered genealogical and memorial records sketch an outline of Ashby’s life. He was born in Missouri around 1858 and later appears in records connected to Texas and New Mexico; he married Rosa Bell Ford in Texas in 1899 and they had several children together before eventually separating at some point prior to his final years. Family and memorial notes describe him as having led a “complex life,” and by the time of his death he was a widower, buried in Globe Cemetery after being killed in the line of duty as a merchant patrolman. Some family lore, summarized in later online genealogical discussions, even suggests that earlier in life he may have been imprisoned in connection with a prior killing, allegedly remaining incarcerated until the mid-1920s before ultimately ending up in Globe, where he met his own violent death just a few years later. These aspects of his past are presented as family tradition rather than firmly documented court history, but they contribute to the picture of a man whose life story was as turbulent as the circumstances under which it ended.
