Galen Gilmore

In the heat of a summer evening in Las Vegas on June 21, 1941, a young man named Galen Gilmore, age 21, lost his life to gunfire. His death was not an isolated event on that violent night; two other individuals, 34-year-old Charles J. Decker and 24-year-old Evelyn Tyler, were also killed, their fates intertwined in a burst of violence that has largely been lost to the passage of time.

Surviving records from that period are sparse, offering only a stark and tragic summary of the event. The ...