Troy Police Chief Curtis Bull wrote a letter seeking a retraction to two state newspapers that published articles quoting Bull as saying officer Youngblood "disobeyed orders" to not confront Gault.
Chief Bull comments:
“Its my opinion he gave his life to save the people inside the store,” said Troy Police Chief Curtis Bull. “He probably thought the gunman was going to take hostages.”
“We lost a fine officer,” ... Youngblood was “dependable and reliable and had an excellent record as a a police officer."
Bull stated that it was his belief that Youngblood was not attempting to make an arrest but to protect the occupants of the store.
"Reports were already out that the bandit had a woman hostage, and Policeman Youngblood went into the store warn and protect Mrs. Brantley. Whether the bandit would have entered the store to harm Mrs. Brantley no one knows, but in light of what he had already done, and the report that he had one woman as hostage … Youngblood certainly did the only proper and right thing when he went in the store protect Mrs. Brantley.
"... The bandit started up again, and Youngblood was at the front door of the store when the bandit came by or approached the front in his car ... Policeman Youngblood did the only thing he could have done, and he violated no order.
"Policeman Youngblood gave his life in the line of duty, and I request you correct your news story that he disobeyed an order."
More detailed account of the shooting at Hickman Store:
By Joyce Murphy (of The Troy Messenger):
“Every time I close my eyes, I see him lying there with blood gushing from him,” said Mrs. Frances (Hickman) Brantley today, the operator of the store where Troy police officer J.H. Youngblood was shot down yesterday.”
“I keep wondering if there wasn’t something I could have done for him,” but I know he was dead before he hit the floor,” Mrs. Brantley, the wife of Troy postmaster Charles (Tack) Brantley said after spending an almost sleepless night.
Mrs. Brantley and James Jackson, a wholesale grocery salesman from Petrey, were alone in Hickman’s Store on Highway 29 at about 3:30 p.m. Neither had heard of the bank robbery.
As Mrs. Brantley sat near a window, she heard a car drive up. She glance out and saw a blue and white Cadillac pass the window. A drive way circles the store, which its located the the Needmore Road-Highway 29 intersection.
She paid little attention to the automobile since it was not traveling at an excessive rate of speed. But moments later, she heard a squeal of tires in the driveway as officer Youngblood and a police car from Clio occupied by civilians pulled into the drive in such a way as to block one end of it.
Apparently thinking that he had the killer, who he had chased for some distance on the highway, cornered in a dead end drive, Youngblood jumped from his car and ran into the store. He excitedly asked Mr. Brantley if she had a shotgun.
“What’s the matter?” She asked.
“There’s a bank robber in back of the store,” Youngblood answered.
“Oh, my God,” she uttered, as she ran to the back of the store in search of a shotgun. “All I’ve got is a rifle,” she told Youngblood, after she found that the shotgun normally kept in the store was not there.
As she started back to the front of the store to get ammunition for the unloaded rifle, she heard a shot. She instinctively ducked behind the meat storage box. There were two more shots.
When she looked up, she saw the salesman behind another counter. She looked further and saw a pair of man’s legs extending from in back of a soft drink box.
Mrs. Brantley ran to the outstretched form and found that it was Youngblood. He was stretched full length on the flood, face down, his arms folded under his chest. A pool of blood was rapidly forming about his head.
Jackson felt for a pulse beat. There was none. Mrs. Brantley called for an ambulance, although she felt certain that the man was already dead.
Neither Mrs. Brantley nor Jackson witnessed the actual shooting. However, according to the best available information, Youngblood and B.F. Ketchum of Clio, were standing near the door of the grocery store when the killer rode by the front door, having circled the store.
Youngblood apparently fired one shot from his police revolver, and succeeded in wounding the would-be bank robber in the arm.
One bullet in the chest felled Youngblood. He did not utter a sound, but was caught in the arms of Ketchum and slipped quietly to the floor. His blood soaked Ketchum’s clothing.
AP account - As the gunman’s car disappeared behind the store, Youngblood pulled up in front of the store, leaped out and race into the store.
“There’s a robber out back,” he said. “Get me a shotgun.”
Youngblood then dashed back to the front door just as the gunman’s car came back around front.
More details on the shootout on a street in the middle of Clio's main business district:
(Chief of Police) Roberts … his lung punctured by the shoulder wound, staggered back.
“Bill didn’t fall,” his wife said. “He leaned against his car and walked two doors down the street to the doctor’s office.” - Sept. 9, 1963 - Dothan Eagle
Roberts was jolted a good six inches when the big .45 caliber bullet smashed into his chest.
But, with undaunted composure, he fired back, hitting his opponent in the head and knocking most of the fight out of him.
… Without warning, Gault rammed his right hand through the left window of his own car and fired his automatic pistol.
“It felt like somebody had hit me with a fist,” Roberts recalled. (“It knocked me back, but I shot at his head.”)
Blood spurted out of his face as soon as I fired, and he fell back inside the car. I thought I had killed him.”
Roberts laid his empty gun on the rear of his own car and reached into the cruiser in search of another weapon. Gault drove away.
“I don’t know how I hit him in the leg,” Robert said. “I was shooting at his head every time. Doctors tell me I was able to get off my first shot all right because the bullet that hit me had not taken effect.”
Roberts said he turned from the police car and walked toward a doctor’s office as soon as the shooting was over. His wife was the first to reach her husband. She and a service station operator helped him to the doctor’s office.
Note: Roberts was one of just two police officers employed by the town of Clio.
Possible clues to Gault’s criminal bent were seen in literature found at his Prattville apartment, most of it dealing with get-rich-quick schemes and criminal ventures. A sample of book titles:
“Pocket Guide to Daily Money Handling.”
“How I made $2 million on the Stock Market”
“Badman’s Holiday,”
“Countdown to Order,”
“The Tough Ones,”
“Now or Never.”
A pile of mimeographed material also told how to buy gold.
After 13 years of trying to (unsuccessfully) establish a chiropractic practice in Glens Falls, New York, Dr. Eugene S. Gault decided to start “new” in a different state. For reasons unknown, he chose the state of Alabama for this fresh start.
Gault’s wife, thinking the family needed a steady income, refused to join him in Alabama. Also a trained chiropractor, Mrs. Phyliss Gault had given up on this profession and was now working in the business department of a Glens Fall department store.
As he his wife would later tell reporters, her husband had “great skills” as a chiropractor and “could have been very, very successful.” He was also a “deep thinker,” she said. Some acquaintances described him as having an “educated” demeanor, a person who spoke well.
At least two former Prattville patients said he seemed to “know his business.”
Another acquaintance remembered him as “nice quiet man. He wasn’t aggressive, but seemed to mix well and was liked by those who met him.”
However, he was “timid” and shy and was never able to make friends, his wife said, adding that “he always felt he was a failure.”
Others who knew him described him as “strange and moody.”
“He was a peculiar kind of fellow who never had much to do with anybody,” said one acquaintance from Prattville.
When he first moved to Alabama in 1959, Gault practiced briefly in Theodore outside of Mobile He later practiced in Tuskegee for about a year where he “is remembered as a quiet and not-too-sucsessfull professional man. He had no close friends here and disclosed little or nothing about his background.”
More about the horrific scene at the First Community Bank in Ozark:
“The man (Gault) just walked in the door and went straight to the loan cage where Mr. Flowers was standing, said Mrs. Wood Osenby, a bank employee. “I din’t hear him ask any questions, but the next thing I knew the man was climbing up on the loan cage and firing a shot.
“He then came across the room and we all started running for the back door. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was horrible …. Just plain horrible.”
A few headlines from the bank robbery Gault pulled off on New Year's Eve (Dec. 31) 1960 in downtown Auburn:
“It was one of the slickest jobs I’ve ever seen,” said Acting Police Chief Fred Hammock - January 2, 1961
The robbery lasted only “three or four minutes."
Gault got away with $29,200.
"A polite, neatly-dressed holdup man who held on a gun on a teller and told him, “you get the point”
There were no known witnesses who saw him after the holdup.
Described as being 35-40 years old, about five feet nine inches tall and weighting 160 pounds. He had dark, slightly graying hair and was wearing rimless glasses, a dark gray hat and a gray overcoat.
Several tellers were placing money in the teller’s cages when the holdup man wandered in a back door at 8:30 a.m. about 30 minutes before opening time.
An Auburn student later provided details for a police sketch of the suspect. The drawing, which was publicized in state media, was said to look remarkably similar to Gault, making one wonder why nobody identified Gault as the possible robber.
After the bank robbery, Gault moved from Tuskegee and bought a chiropractor practice in Prattville, telling people he had inherited money from his late mother.
Seventeen months later, he was apparently broke, necessitating another bank-robbery attempt.
Other reports said Gault was seen in April 1962 in downtown Troy casing out F&M Bank on the Square. In the search of his apartment, law enforcement officials found a receipt from a gas station in Brundidge dated April 19, suggesting Gaut might have been scouting out banks to rob in Brundidge or plotting his get-away route.
Among the local residents who said they saw (and spoke to Gault) in Troy was Albert Scarbrough, a well-known and colorful local character who suffered shell-shock after WWII.
When law enforcement officials searched Gault’s apartment in Prattvile they found this hand-written “to do list” for robbing banks. Gault also successfully robbed a bank in downtown Auburn 17 months earlier. (Gault got no money in the aborted and deadly bank robbery in Ozark).
Troy Police Chief Curtis Bull wrote a letter seeking a retraction to two state newspapers that published articles quoting Bull as saying officer Youngblood "disobeyed orders" to not confront Gault.
Chief Bull comments:
“Its my opinion he gave his life to save the people inside the store,” said Troy Police Chief Curtis Bull. “He probably thought the gunman was going to take hostages.”
“We lost a fine officer,” ... Youngblood was “dependable and reliable and had an excellent record as a a police officer."
Bull stated that it was his belief that Youngblood was not attempting to make an arrest but to protect the occupants of the store.
"Reports were already out that the bandit had a woman hostage, and Policeman Youngblood went into the store warn and protect Mrs. Brantley. Whether the bandit would have entered the store to harm Mrs. Brantley no one knows, but in light of what he had already done, and the report that he had one woman as hostage … Youngblood certainly did the only proper and right thing when he went in the store protect Mrs. Brantley.
"... The bandit started up again, and Youngblood was at the front door of the store when the bandit came by or approached the front in his car ... Policeman Youngblood did the only thing he could have done, and he violated no order.
"Policeman Youngblood gave his life in the line of duty, and I request you correct your news story that he disobeyed an order."
More detailed account of the shooting at Hickman Store:
By Joyce Murphy (of The Troy Messenger):
“Every time I close my eyes, I see him lying there with blood gushing from him,” said Mrs. Frances (Hickman) Brantley today, the operator of the store where Troy police officer J.H. Youngblood was shot down yesterday.”
“I keep wondering if there wasn’t something I could have done for him,” but I know he was dead before he hit the floor,” Mrs. Brantley, the wife of Troy postmaster Charles (Tack) Brantley said after spending an almost sleepless night.
Mrs. Brantley and James Jackson, a wholesale grocery salesman from Petrey, were alone in Hickman’s Store on Highway 29 at about 3:30 p.m. Neither had heard of the bank robbery.
As Mrs. Brantley sat near a window, she heard a car drive up. She glance out and saw a blue and white Cadillac pass the window. A drive way circles the store, which its located the the Needmore Road-Highway 29 intersection.
She paid little attention to the automobile since it was not traveling at an excessive rate of speed. But moments later, she heard a squeal of tires in the driveway as officer Youngblood and a police car from Clio occupied by civilians pulled into the drive in such a way as to block one end of it.
Apparently thinking that he had the killer, who he had chased for some distance on the highway, cornered in a dead end drive, Youngblood jumped from his car and ran into the store. He excitedly asked Mr. Brantley if she had a shotgun.
“What’s the matter?” She asked.
“There’s a bank robber in back of the store,” Youngblood answered.
“Oh, my God,” she uttered, as she ran to the back of the store in search of a shotgun. “All I’ve got is a rifle,” she told Youngblood, after she found that the shotgun normally kept in the store was not there.
As she started back to the front of the store to get ammunition for the unloaded rifle, she heard a shot. She instinctively ducked behind the meat storage box. There were two more shots.
When she looked up, she saw the salesman behind another counter. She looked further and saw a pair of man’s legs extending from in back of a soft drink box.
Mrs. Brantley ran to the outstretched form and found that it was Youngblood. He was stretched full length on the flood, face down, his arms folded under his chest. A pool of blood was rapidly forming about his head.
Jackson felt for a pulse beat. There was none. Mrs. Brantley called for an ambulance, although she felt certain that the man was already dead.
Neither Mrs. Brantley nor Jackson witnessed the actual shooting. However, according to the best available information, Youngblood and B.F. Ketchum of Clio, were standing near the door of the grocery store when the killer rode by the front door, having circled the store.
Youngblood apparently fired one shot from his police revolver, and succeeded in wounding the would-be bank robber in the arm.
One bullet in the chest felled Youngblood. He did not utter a sound, but was caught in the arms of Ketchum and slipped quietly to the floor. His blood soaked Ketchum’s clothing.
AP account - As the gunman’s car disappeared behind the store, Youngblood pulled up in front of the store, leaped out and race into the store.
“There’s a robber out back,” he said. “Get me a shotgun.”
Youngblood then dashed back to the front door just as the gunman’s car came back around front.
More details on the shootout on a street in the middle of Clio's main business district:
(Chief of Police) Roberts … his lung punctured by the shoulder wound, staggered back.
“Bill didn’t fall,” his wife said. “He leaned against his car and walked two doors down the street to the doctor’s office.” - Sept. 9, 1963 - Dothan Eagle
Roberts was jolted a good six inches when the big .45 caliber bullet smashed into his chest.
But, with undaunted composure, he fired back, hitting his opponent in the head and knocking most of the fight out of him.
… Without warning, Gault rammed his right hand through the left window of his own car and fired his automatic pistol.
“It felt like somebody had hit me with a fist,” Roberts recalled. (“It knocked me back, but I shot at his head.”)
Blood spurted out of his face as soon as I fired, and he fell back inside the car. I thought I had killed him.”
Roberts laid his empty gun on the rear of his own car and reached into the cruiser in search of another weapon. Gault drove away.
“I don’t know how I hit him in the leg,” Robert said. “I was shooting at his head every time. Doctors tell me I was able to get off my first shot all right because the bullet that hit me had not taken effect.”
Roberts said he turned from the police car and walked toward a doctor’s office as soon as the shooting was over. His wife was the first to reach her husband. She and a service station operator helped him to the doctor’s office.
Note: Roberts was one of just two police officers employed by the town of Clio.
Possible clues to Gault’s criminal bent were seen in literature found at his Prattville apartment, most of it dealing with get-rich-quick schemes and criminal ventures. A sample of book titles:
“Pocket Guide to Daily Money Handling.”
“How I made $2 million on the Stock Market”
“Badman’s Holiday,”
“Countdown to Order,”
“The Tough Ones,”
“Now or Never.”
A pile of mimeographed material also told how to buy gold.
After 13 years of trying to (unsuccessfully) establish a chiropractic practice in Glens Falls, New York, Dr. Eugene S. Gault decided to start “new” in a different state. For reasons unknown, he chose the state of Alabama for this fresh start.
Gault’s wife, thinking the family needed a steady income, refused to join him in Alabama. Also a trained chiropractor, Mrs. Phyliss Gault had given up on this profession and was now working in the business department of a Glens Fall department store.
As he his wife would later tell reporters, her husband had “great skills” as a chiropractor and “could have been very, very successful.” He was also a “deep thinker,” she said. Some acquaintances described him as having an “educated” demeanor, a person who spoke well.
At least two former Prattville patients said he seemed to “know his business.”
Another acquaintance remembered him as “nice quiet man. He wasn’t aggressive, but seemed to mix well and was liked by those who met him.”
However, he was “timid” and shy and was never able to make friends, his wife said, adding that “he always felt he was a failure.”
Others who knew him described him as “strange and moody.”
“He was a peculiar kind of fellow who never had much to do with anybody,” said one acquaintance from Prattville.
When he first moved to Alabama in 1959, Gault practiced briefly in Theodore outside of Mobile He later practiced in Tuskegee for about a year where he “is remembered as a quiet and not-too-sucsessfull professional man. He had no close friends here and disclosed little or nothing about his background.”
More about the horrific scene at the First Community Bank in Ozark:
“The man (Gault) just walked in the door and went straight to the loan cage where Mr. Flowers was standing, said Mrs. Wood Osenby, a bank employee. “I din’t hear him ask any questions, but the next thing I knew the man was climbing up on the loan cage and firing a shot.
“He then came across the room and we all started running for the back door. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was horrible …. Just plain horrible.”
A few headlines from the bank robbery Gault pulled off on New Year's Eve (Dec. 31) 1960 in downtown Auburn:
“It was one of the slickest jobs I’ve ever seen,” said Acting Police Chief Fred Hammock - January 2, 1961
The robbery lasted only “three or four minutes."
Gault got away with $29,200.
"A polite, neatly-dressed holdup man who held on a gun on a teller and told him, “you get the point”
There were no known witnesses who saw him after the holdup.
Described as being 35-40 years old, about five feet nine inches tall and weighting 160 pounds. He had dark, slightly graying hair and was wearing rimless glasses, a dark gray hat and a gray overcoat.
Several tellers were placing money in the teller’s cages when the holdup man wandered in a back door at 8:30 a.m. about 30 minutes before opening time.
An Auburn student later provided details for a police sketch of the suspect. The drawing, which was publicized in state media, was said to look remarkably similar to Gault, making one wonder why nobody identified Gault as the possible robber.
After the bank robbery, Gault moved from Tuskegee and bought a chiropractor practice in Prattville, telling people he had inherited money from his late mother.
Seventeen months later, he was apparently broke, necessitating another bank-robbery attempt.
Other reports said Gault was seen in April 1962 in downtown Troy casing out F&M Bank on the Square. In the search of his apartment, law enforcement officials found a receipt from a gas station in Brundidge dated April 19, suggesting Gaut might have been scouting out banks to rob in Brundidge or plotting his get-away route.
Among the local residents who said they saw (and spoke to Gault) in Troy was Albert Scarbrough, a well-known and colorful local character who suffered shell-shock after WWII.
When law enforcement officials searched Gault’s apartment in Prattvile they found this hand-written “to do list” for robbing banks. Gault also successfully robbed a bank in downtown Auburn 17 months earlier. (Gault got no money in the aborted and deadly bank robbery in Ozark).
1. Get out of sight as soon as possible.
2. Get it all.
3. Expect to do a good job. Enjoy it!
4. Deal with as few people as possible.
5. Don’t let anyone get behind you.
6. Concentrate on one person.
7. Breathe deep before going in.
8. Don’t get caught up with the room.
9. Cotton-pipe-hat, coat, glasses.
10. Car-gas.
11. Keep it simple.
12. Leave keys in the car
13. Shave
Bill. Was Gault buried in Troy?