The murders of Lawrence Smoyer and William Wathen

Nothing in this solve was new science; it was old paper, found again. Wathen, wounded in the pasture, wrote down descriptions of both men, the car, its license plate and the shooting, and recorded that he had shot at the car several times, according to the Attorney General’s report. Within three days investigators learned the Ford had been stolen in Denver, with plates taken from a Boulder mining company, and Colorado authorities identified the thieves as Doody and Cooley. The car turned up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with bullet damage. The report said three eyewitnesses independently identified Cooley, a plaster of Paris cast matched his footprints, and when he was apprehended in Cheyenne his shoes were black and white saddle shoes dyed black, as Wathen and a witness had described. About a year later there was enough evidence for a first-degree murder warrant for Cooley, but he was serving a third Colorado term and, under the law then, Nebraska had to wait until his parole in 1948, by which time the original investigators had retired, died or gone to unknown military posts. No warrant was obtained for Doody, whose whereabouts were unknown. The Associated Press reported that the files were shuffled when the Nebraska State Sheriff’s Association was reorganized into the State Patrol and were not found again until about three years before the announcement. What reopened the case was a phone call in late December 2014 from a man who said he was Doody’s son; he had read a Nebraska Life magazine story and told the Seward County sheriff he was convinced his father was involved. The sheriff, who had spent years going through the files, scrapbooks kept by Wathen’s daughter and conversations with Smoyer’s brother, teamed with Bill Black, an investigator for the Attorney General’s Office. On October 3, 2017 the office announced that Doody, who died in 1995, and Cooley, who died in 1965, were the shooters. Neither was charged, because both were dead.