By Michael Earl Simmons
This is Part two of a two-part story.
If Part One was cold steel and northern highways that never warmed, this part is pure Gulf Coast: air so heavy it clings to your skin like regret, salt on your tongue, the low moan of ship horns drifting over Pensacola Bay like a warning.
Roland Lalone didn’t learn. After conviction for the trooper’s murder—second-degree, life sentence—he sat in Wethersfield prison only long enough to plan.
January 4, 1930, 5:05 a.m.: he and two others cut through a skylight in the bakery, dropped into darkness, and ran. Dogs bayed, posses formed, towns locked tight. Fear turned farmers into hunters. They stole cars, pointed south, chasing warmth like it could burn away the blood on their hands.
Jacksonville caught them first. January 17. Detectives Willie Smith and William Jones stopped an out-of-state car near Duval and Liberty—gritty streets, river smell, port-town edge. Gunfire answered the stop. Smith died in the street. Jones survived, bleeding but breathing. Like an army, the Jacksonville residents came alive with fury. The city boiled over—sirens, armed citizens, rage thick as the St. Johns current.
One accomplice, Landry, got nabbed under a porch on vagrancy. Roland and Moulthorpe slipped out of town and headed west again. Federal revenue men tailed them 180 miles through Florida pine, thinking bootleggers. No shine in the car when they hit Pensacola—just two desperate men, the Bay air thick and damp, clinging to collars even in winter.
They ditched at Alcaniz and Intendencia, ran into the shadows. Chief Willie O’Connell—practical, no-nonsense, the kind of lawman who knew Pensacola’s pulse—didn’t just send uniforms. He sent ears. Barrooms, boarding houses, wharves, back doors. Information lived in those places, not files.
Tip came: the steamer Westmore Mossella at Bruce Dry Dock, headed for Mobile. chief O’Connell, and Special Officers Bowman, Schmitz, and Everett boarded quietly, hid in a storeroom closet like gators in the reeds. Grabbed Moulthorpe.
Not Lalone. Slipped away…again.
Willie O’Connell was a smart, practical man. As he thought about where Lalone could be, he asked the real question: Where does a cop-killer, who has been locked up for months, with cash go when the net’s closing?
The answer was as old as the city: The Line. Pensacola’s red-light district—vice humming low, deals cut in whispers, madams who knew when heat was too hot.
Mollie McCoy ran her house tight. She didn’t shelter killers who’d drag the whole department down. Phone rang: “Willie… he’s here. Asleep.” She wanted her cut first, then quietly, the officers slipped in the back door like always.
They came soft. Roland woke to revolver steel and O’Connell’s voice—deep, steady, final: “Good evenin’, Mr. Malone.” Guns everywhere. No seam to slip through. Shoulders dropped. Hands out. Cuffs on.
No Hollywood shootout. Just a back-door tip, a town that watched its own, a chief who turned the city into his eyes and ears. Hauled back to Jacksonville under guard, tried in a courtroom thick with press and tears. Guilty. Life. No Old Sparky…the state’s electric chair.
Sitting here now, salt breeze moving the curtains, humidity settling like a second skin, I think on it. Roland believed he could outrun three states, two murders, his own legend. But you can’t outrun a place that knows itself.
In 1930 Pensacola—docks alive, alleys listening, air tasting of yesterday—Chief O’Connell proved the oldest law: hide from police if you want. You can’t hide from a town that’s watching.
Stay safe out there, folks. The shadows on the bayou got long memories.
I love reading your post. Keep up good work.
Jim Sanders