Two Gun Crowley and the Knowledge of Good and Evil

 In the fall of 1931, Francis “Two Gun” Crowley was on death row for killing a police officer. Earlier that year, the 18 year old’s crime spree began when he caused a disturbance at a dance. When two adults came to remove him, he shot them and fled. A judge signed a warrant for him for attempted murder, and Francis went into hiding. Two weeks later, he along with two friends robbed a bank, and he earned his nickname by wielding a pistol in each hand. A short time later, he shot a man five times while burglarizing his apartment.

With Crowley at the top of New York’s most wanted list, every cop in the city was looking for him, and they spotted him one afternoon, driving a stolen car. They tried to pull him over, but he starting shooting. After a rolling gun battle, Crowley escaped. Two weeks later, two cops pulled up behind him in the stolen car where he sat parked with his 16 year old girlfriend. The policemen carefully approached the vehicle and asked him for his driver’s license to make sure they had their man. Francis pulled his pistol and killed Officer Frederick Hirsch and wounded Officer Peter Yodice. 

The next day, the police found him holed up in a 5 story apartment building, in a room with his girlfriend and two friends. Three hundred police officers converged on the building while 15,000 spectators gathered outside. Instead of surrendering, Crowley fired on police while his friends reloaded his guns. Police returned fire, shooting over 700 rounds into the apartment. They threw canisters of tear gas inside his room, but he merely picked them up and tossed them out the window, back at the police. The gunfight ended when Crowley surrendered after being shot four times.

While waiting to be executed for the murder of a police officer, Crowley wrote a letter “To whom it may concern.” For someone who inflicted violence on so many people while stealing and robbing the innocent, perhaps his pending execution would humble him and bring him to regret, but it did not.  He wrote, “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one - one that would do nobody any harm.”

A philosopher might contemplate whether it is the heart or mind which causes criminals to rape, kill, and destroy, but regular people see through an evil man’s rhetoric and recognize his statement for what it is: unrepentant self-justification. 

The heart is the source of rebellion and evil. According to Jesus, “…out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” (Matthew 15:19) This heart condition originated in the Garden of Eden, the home God gave to the pinnacle of his creation: man. Man consisted of Adam and Eve, the two creatures who made up mankind and whose very existence was to glorify God. But there was a problem…

God gave mankind one rule along with the ability and desire to keep his rule. “…the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” One rule with the consequences of disobedience clearly spelled out, “You will surely die.” 

But mankind considered death something to be scoffed at. Thinking they were missing out on something beneficial, they ate the forbidden fruit and were instantly guilty, and now they had something they didn’t have before: the knowledge of good and evil. 

The knowledge of good and evil is a trait which originated with God and was perfect because God is holy, but when man sinned, the knowledge of good and evil was tainted. For Adam and his progeny, the knowledge of good and evil means the children of man are born deciding for themselves what is right and wrong apart from God. It means we inherited the desire to please ourselves rather than God. The knowledge of good and evil means each person fashions their own morality, prioritizing what they think is important and excusing whatever they please. Two Gun Crowley’s knowledge of good and evil placed him in the center of his universe with everything else revolving around him. The things he considered good: women, money, and fancy cars existed for him to take at his good pleasure. Those things he considered evil: cops, apartment owners who interfered with burglaries, and anyone who got in his way, should be eliminated. His morality existed to serve his lusts, so in his quiet moments of rest in solitary confinement, he could reminisce about having a pure and innocent heart under his coat because that is what the hearts of the children of man do: deceive. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) Like Crowley,  our hearts are so deceitful, we deceive ourselves into thinking we are something we are not. If we are not very careful, we will scam ourselves and believe our own lies.

There is only one way to redeem our deceptive hearts. “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” The proud says, “I will…” The humble says, “Thy will be done.” The humble yield to God and consider Christ to be great treasure.

At the tender age of nineteen, Francis Crowley’s life came to an end in an electric chair. There is no evidence to suggest he ever humbled himself. Instead, it appears he stood before the Lord’s throne without an alibi.

The End of the Line

In 1995, I was a patrolman with the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office on day shift. One spring morning just after sunrise, someone reported an overturned vehicle at the railroad crossing on Highway 169, just north of I -20. When I arrived, I found a van, upside down in the ditch. It was pinned against the banks on both sides making the back doors the only way to get inside. I ran to the van, opened the doors and found a woman crushed between the roof and the back seat. It appeared the van was involved in a crash with a train, and the driver was not wearing a seatbelt. She had come to the end of her line.

There was no train in sight, but from the tire marks in the pavement at the crossing, it was clear a collision occurred. I spoke to the railroad company and found out the last train passed west-bound at 1:30 am. The railroad company called the conductor who by then was deep in Texas and had him stop the train. The conductor walked the line and inspected his equipment. When he got to the fifty-third boxcar he found damage where the van struck it. That meant the van crashed into the moving train and was thrown into the ditch where it went unseen for five hours. No one on the train knew the crash occurred.

When I finished working the scene, my Lieutenant and I drove to a little house in Shreveport. I knocked on the door, and a woman of about 60 answered. The Lieutenant asked if we could come inside. She reluctantly let us in. He asked her to sit down and gently broke the news of her daughter’s death to her. She screamed, leaned over a table, and wept.

Train crashes are rare, but when they occur, they often result in tragedy. Patrolmen know three important facts about trains to help them investigate railroad related crashes. First, since trains run on tracks laid to specific destinations, they always know where they are going. Second, trains are gigantic pieces of machinery and cannot stop instantly, so they always have the right of way. Third, because trains have the right of way, they are never at fault in any crash involving motor vehicles. 

In the same three ways, God is like a train. He always knows where He (and we) are going because he is the sovereign Creator. “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.’” (Isaiah 46:9-10)

God is like a train because he always has the right of way. He who creates has the right over his creatures. He gives life to the humble and executes judgment on the proud.

God is like a train because he is never at fault. One word that uniquely describes him is holy. Holiness is moral perfection. God’s holiness is so great, he is completely faultless and separate from his creatures, and he gives us a requirement, “Without holiness no one will see God.” (Heb 12:14) 

This requirement is impossible with men because we are sinful. God created mankind to glorify or please himself, but sin interrupted paradise, and as a result, the children of man are born wanting to please themselves instead of God. How then can we fulfill God’s requirement of holiness when we defy his purpose for us the moment we take our first breath?

Here’s the good news: God doesn’t run rough shod over his rebellious creatures. He warns, he promises, he commands, and here lies the great hope for us…he loves and forgives. There is only one source for this hope, and it is found in Jesus Christ. Those who see themselves the way God sees them (unholy) must abandon all hope in themselves, declare spiritual bankruptcy, turn away from their sin, and trust in the holiness of someone else: Christ alone. 

One day we will all come to the end of the line. On that day, don’t stand before the throne of God declaring your own holiness. Have Christ as your alibi…

Jack Daniels and John’s Gin Road

Summer’s constant companion, humidity, was inescapable. It was Sunday evening. Billy Bowers and I were talking to a victim of a theft at the end of Colworth Place. We were by the patrol car when the call came out. “Signal 53, John’s Gin Road at Keatchie Marshall Road. Occupants of a four door Chevrolet are trapped inside.”

John’s Gin Road is the last north/south road before the Texas state line. Keatchie Marshall Road is the last east/west road before you get to Desoto Parish. It is rural on a busy day. We were 12 miles away as the crow flies but along country roads it was closer to twenty. Billy and I were the closest unit. I flipped on the lights and siren and drove like I could get there in five minutes. That’s when the rain hit.

The thunderstorm did not prevent the sun from shining. We were driving into the early stages of sunset, and the reflection on wet pavement blinded us at times. I snuck up on half a dozen Sunday drivers and flipped my siren from Yelp to Hi-Lo, but when we got to John’s Gin Road, the traffic thinned out. I was making good time in the straight away when I forgot about the 45 degree curve ahead. It was too late to apply my brakes in the pouring rain, so I took the curve at 60 mph which is foolish on a good day. I expected to end up in the ditch, but somehow, the tires held on to the wet pavement. I whispered, “Thank you Lord,” and Billy gave a hearty amen.

Fire District 4 was on scene when we arrived and had the intersection shut down. A four door sedan was on the far side of John’s Gin on the shoulder. The driver’s side was caved in from an impact which was heard from miles away. A large van was a hundred yards west on the side of Keatchie Marshall Road with heavy front end damage, enough to push the motor into the driver’s compartment. Two hundred more feet and it would have made it to Texas. Billy and I went to the van and spoke to the driver who was upright, and by divine providence, unscathed. He had a van load of migrant workers who disappeared before our arrival. He told us the car shot out in front of him, having run the stop sign at the intersection. The van T-boned the car at 55 mph and spun out of control to its final resting place.

We rushed over to the car which by now was draped with a tarp. I lifted the tarp and opened the passenger door to find two men lying silently in seats broken loose from their mounts and leaning backward. It was a scene from a horror movie. The air was heavy with iron from blood and alcohol. I reached over the corpse of a man to open the glove compartment. Behind two bottles of Jack Daniels Lynchburg Lemonade, I found the registration and insurance. 

The paramedics were fifty feet beyond us, desperately working on a thirteen year old girl who had been thrown from the car during the crash. We set up an LZ in the middle of the road, and Billy, who was a helicopter paramedic when he wasn’t riding with me or working full time as a Shreveport Fireman, directed the landing of the helicopter in the middle of the road. Other deputies arrived to control traffic as the rain stopped and the sun dropped in the west leaving a masterpiece of a sunset. The raincoat that kept me dry earlier became a sauna. I was dripping wet before finally removing it and hanging it on my mirror to dry.

The little girl was stable when the helicopter left to take her to the hospital. I took measurements, found the point of impact which was a deep, long gouge in the pavement, and collected the paperwork I needed. The Coroner arrived, and the firemen cut the car open to extricate two men who weren’t going home that night. We made room for two body bags in the Coroner’s van. Two wreckers arrived but were delayed with the clean up of glass, metal, plastic, bottles, and car parts. The firemen sprayed the intersection down with their hoses, washing away oil, transmission and brake fluid. When the wreckers were loaded, the only evidence of a crash was the gouge in the pavement.

There was no field sobriety or Breathalyzer tests to do. Justice came in a different jurisdiction leaving those who remained to some how learn to live with tragedy that would never go away.

Billy and I left the crash scene for the hospital to check on the little girl and get her information. We were on I-20 in Shreveport when Dispatch called and told us the little girl didn’t make it. I looked up to see a billboard with a picture of a cold bottle of Lynchburg Lemonade on it, and I thought about the irony of the picture and the scene I just left. The bottles in the glove compartment of the car filled with death were not as appealing as the picture on that billboard. 

The law enforcement officers who do our dirty work and clean up our messes live with constant reminders of how frail life truly is. For guys like me, those reminders are accompanied with the realization that God does not leave his creatures without hope. You see, Christ gave himself on the cross to provide for all who repent and trust in him alone. “For God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteous of God through him.” 2 Corinthians 5:21

Rest In Peace Billy Bowers, 2024