Chester Arthur Mason, a 28-year-old male, White/Caucasian, was a United States Department of Justice Bureau of Prohibition special agent working an undercover liquor case near Beatrice, Nebraska, on November 12, 1932. With a confidential informant, he arranged a buy from a known bootlegger, Ted Wells, on a rural road about three miles south and one mile east of town.
When Mason moved in to make the arrest after the transaction, a struggle broke out; Wells pulled a handgun, fatally shot Mason, and fled, leaving the informant seriously wounded.
The wounded informant is identified in a Nebraska State Patrol finding aid as Bryan Kennedy, underscoring how quickly the attempted arrest devolved into gunfire on the edge of the community. Mason s death fell squarely within the violent backwash of Prohibition enforcement in the early 1930s, when federal agents routinely used informants to pierce local bootlegging networks that operated on secluded roads and farm lanes around small Midwestern towns.
Officers searching for the killer found Wells shortly afterward at his brother s home. He was taken into custody, charged, and later convicted of manslaughter; the sentence imposed was eight years imprisonment. Memorial accounts from federal and law-enforcement organizations preserve the core sequence of events and the identification of Wells as the gunman, aligning with archival references that list Mason s killing and Kennedy s wounding in Beatrice that day.
