Harry C. Beasley, a 41-year-old white male police patrolman in Newark, Ohio, had already lived one life of danger and distinction before the night he was mortally wounded in the summer of 1931. Born and raised in Newark, he left home as a young man to join the United States Navy, serving aboard the battleship USS Florida and earning the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism during the 1914 occupation of Veracruz, Mexico.
After reenlisting during World War I and rising to the rank of chief petty officer, he eventually returned to his hometown, trading his sailor’s uniform for a police badge and walking the same city streets he had known since childhood.
By the early 1930s, Beasley was an experienced downtown patrolman trusted to keep watch over Newark’s busy business district as closing time approached. On the evening of June 30, 1931, while working his usual beat, he noticed suspicious activity and unexpected light in an alley behind a shoe store where the windows should have been dark. Moving in to investigate, he discovered burglars in the midst of a bold attempt to steal a heavy safe from the shop. Confrontation came quickly. In the confined space of the alley, gunfire erupted; a. 38-caliber handgun barked in the darkness and Beasley was struck by multiple rounds as the thieves fought to protect their escape. Fellow officers and bystanders rushed to his aid and he was taken to a hospital, but his wounds were too severe. Two days after the shooting, on July 2, 1931, he died from the injuries he had suffered in the line of duty.
In the aftermath, detectives traced the burglars’ path by the evidence they left behind. The safe the gang had tried to carry off was found discarded, and investigators searched it and the surrounding area for fingerprints and clues, hoping that careful forensic work might turn random marks in metal and dust into names and faces. The city mourned the fallen officer who had once been a national war hero; he was laid to rest in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Newark, where his grave joined those of other local families. Years later, his military decorations, including his Medal of Honor, would be placed on display in the lobby of the Newark Police Department, a daily reminder to officers and visitors of the man who had survived a storm of gunfire in a foreign port only to be cut down guarding a small Midwestern city’s storefronts.
For a time, it seemed as though the investigation might find its villains. Not long after Beasley succumbed to his wounds, two young men already imprisoned in Chillicothe were held on suspicion of involvement in the robbery and shooting. Identified as Morris Deer, 23, and Paul Murphy, 22, they were kept on technical charges while authorities compared their fingerprints with those recovered from the abandoned safe taken from the Newark shoe store. Whatever hopes detectives placed in those comparisons, they ultimately came to nothing; no charges followed, and the trail that had briefly appeared promising went cold. Despite the effort expended in the weeks and years after the crime, the burglars who fired into the darkness of that alley were never conclusively identified or brought before a court, leaving the killing of Harry C. Beasley one of Newark’s enduring unsolved murders.
