Frank Delmege, 37, a White male detective with the Des Moines Police Department, was killed on September 20, 1909, after answering a report of a man with a gun near his own neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa. Summoned while on duty at home, he joined another officer at the scene. As they approached the suspect’s house, the man stepped out and, from a lawn set several feet above the sidewalk, leveled a shotgun and fired at close range, mortally wounding Delmege.
The second officer immediately returned fire, hitting the gunman multiple times in the chest and stopping the attack. Surviving his wounds, the suspect was taken into custody. Contemporary and memorial accounts agree that a shotgun was used and that the confrontation unfolded in the suspect’s yard as the detectives attempted to make contact.
In the aftermath, city leaders publicly expressed condolences to Delmege’s family, and the department marked his death as an “end of watch” line-of-duty killing. Records indicate the assailant was later sentenced to life in prison, where he eventually died. These pieces—official memorial summaries, later archival notes, and a contemporaneous register notice—corroborate the sequence of events and the ultimate disposition of the case: an arrest, prosecution, and life sentence for the shooter.
Over the years, Delmege’s name has remained on roll calls of fallen officers, and memorial listings preserve the essentials of the case: the date, the place, the shotgun blast that ended a detective’s life, and the capture and imprisonment of the man who fired it.
