Why did Omaha sniper kill? Well, it was his ‘fun hobby’
In early February 1926, someone started taking random shots through windows of Omaha homes.
The gun made no sound when it was fired. People didn’t know they had been targeted until they felt a pellet whizzing past them or found small holes in the glass. No one was hurt.
Police first thought it was a nasty prank by a kid with an air pistol. Then ballistics experts determined that the weapon was a .22-caliber gun.
“Omaha’s Phantom Sniper” was the name newspapers gave the mysterious shooter.
The city was already in a frenzy of fear when the shooting spree turned deadly. On Sunday, Feb. 14, William McDevitt, 35, a dairy worker, was found on a street near a church, sprawled facedown in a pool of blood, a .22-caliber bullet in his brain.
His watch and about $40 were still on him, ruling out robbery as a motive.
Two days later, the phantom struck again.
“MAD MAN OR FOOL SHOOTS IN OMAHA,” reported The Hastings Daily Tribune on Feb. 17. A shot flew out of the dark and into a drugstore, narrowly missing a young woman.
The Omaha police force threw almost all its resources at the phantom, but they failed to prevent another tragedy.
“DOCTOR SLAIN IN OFFICE,” screamed the banner page-one headline of the Feb. 18 Omaha Evening World-Herald.
The victim was wealthy Dr. Austin Searles, 62. His widow said he failed to come home for supper Feb. 17, but she didn’t worry until after midnight. His patients often scheduled nighttime appointments.
Many of them were dope fiends or victims of “diseases of men,” as Searles noted in his advertising. The phrase was a delicate way of referring to syphilis. Searles said he had a cure. He didn’t.
Like McDevitt, Searles had been shot from behind with a .22.
The .22-caliber phantom next turned up at a rail yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa, about 4 miles away.
Ross Johnson, 28, a railroad detective, was inspecting boxcars just after nightfall when he noticed a man crouching behind a pile of railroad ties. The stranger leaped up and started shooting. Johnson took six bullets in his torso and arms, but miraculously survived and got a good look at his assailant.
Within a day, a posse captured and hogtied a man fitting Johnson’s description of the shooter. At the time of his arrest, the suspect was carrying a small .22-caliber automatic with a silencer in a holster fashioned from a piece of a car tire. It was concealed under his arm.
The suspect gave his name and age as Frank Carter, 45, a farm laborer. Newspapers said he looked like a mild-mannered nice guy — until he opened his mouth.
“You fellows were pretty lucky that gun was under my coat, or I’d have shot you all,” he said. “I’m a crack shot.”
Carter boasted that if he wanted to do someone in, he never missed. The woman in the drugstore, for example, was never in danger.
“Sometimes I want to kill, kill, kill, but I just fired to scare her,” he said. “The bullet went about 6 inches from her head. But how she did jump!”
Asked why he shot into the windows of more than a dozen Omaha homes, he said, “for fun.”
Carter knew neither McDevitt nor Johnson. But he did know Searles and insisted the doctor had it coming.
“I had a grudge against Dr. Searles,” he said. “He gypped me out of some money three years ago while he was treating me for a social disease.”
Carter said that the disease he contracted around 1911 was why he went after Searles. The doctor falsely advertised a sure cure for syphilis.
Newspapers published the story of his
bleak life, which included the death of his mother when he was 6 and endless poverty. No matter how hard he worked, he could never make enough to live. He had neither family nor friends.
In 1916, he went to prison for a decade for shooting a herd of dairy cattle, an act of retribution against the farmer who owned the cattle. Carter worked on the dairy farm, but the farmer fired him. He was freed on parole a few years before his shooting spree.
A seasoned police officer called Carter “the most cold-blooded and dangerous man I have ever known.” Police believed he was responsible for a dozen or more murders.
At his March 1926 trial, defense attorneys took a predictable approach — an insanity plea. They declared their client “a moral imbecile” based on the opinions of two alienists.
But the alienist for the prosecution said Carter’s actions “were the acts of a cold-blooded cruel mind. … He’s just mean.”
Carter himself agreed with the prosecution. “I’m not a nut. I tell you, I’m not a nut,” he shouted while the defense experts testified about his mental state.
The jury swiftly agreed with the prosecutors.
Carter grinned when he heard the sentence — death in the electric chair.
“That electric chair is going to be more fun than a circus,” he said and noted that he wanted to party right before his death.
A group of reporters kept him company at his preexecution gathering. Murder, he told them, “was my hobby.” He said he killed 43 people over the years.
The phantom was pale but calm as prison employees strapped him into the chair on June 24, 1927. Slightly different versions of his last words have been reported, but the basic gist was, “Turn on the juice.”
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