In 1942 news was dominated by war reports from the Pacific Theater.
But, on the morning of March 28 Moran residents awoke to horrific news that their city marshal, Clarence Sanger, had been shot to death during the night, struck, a coroner’s inquest found, by seven buckshot pellets.
At Monday night’s Moran City Council meeting Sheriff Bryan Murphy presented to the city a memorial stone bearing Sanger’s name. The stone had been part of the older Law Enforcement Memorial near the Capitol in Topeka. When Murphy learned it would be replaced, “I knew the people in Moran would like to have Sanger’s stone.”
The story of Sanger’s death gripped the area, as Kansas Bureau of Investigation and local officers followed a shallow trail of clues in efforts to find the killer. Three men eventually were arrested in Kansas City.
Tire theft was their intent.
After the nation was thrust into World War II by the pre-emptive Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, rationing of most commodities became a way of life. Among things in short supply were tires. Most rubber was diverted to military use. A new tire seldom was seen on a civilian vehicle.
Officers’ theory was the three men meant to steal 25 new tires Harvey Alumbaugh had in his Moran garage. Burglars then had little use for tools or fluids, one cheap and other hard to transport. But tires had a ready market in back alleys, particularly in such places as Kansas City.
Among those who testified at the coroner’s inquest was James Sutterby, a Moran printer. Sutterby said he had gone to the print shop to retrieve a package and spoke to Sanger on his way home. About five minutes later he saw a flash, heard a shot and the marshal call for help.
Sutterby ran toward the shot’s sound and Sanger’s cry. “Where are you,” he called. “Behind Alumbaugh’s,” was Sanger’s feeble reply. Sutterby found him bloodied and barely clinging to life. The large diameter buckshot had shattered his left thigh, ruptured a large artery in his groin and hit him in the chest.
A shotgun shell and wadding, as well pellets in the garage door, were found by investigators.
His death soon after the shooting was attributed to shock and massive hemorrhaging.
ARMED ROBBERY and burglaries accompanied by violence are an anomaly in Allen County today.
Not so in earlier years. A clerk at Iola’s Santa Fe depot was killed in a gunfight a few years before Sanger. Holdups were common.
Also, safes were a favorite target, their cracking occurring with alarming regularity during the Great Depression — with loss often more in damage than loot.
