True Crime Chronicles: An Oklahoma crime spree in the early 1950's led to a one-day stay on the FBI Top Ten Wanted list
The stop came on a two lane stretch outside Locust Grove in Mayes County. An Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper pulled over the pickup carrying Chester and Norman Davenport. The brothers, already wanted on theft charges out of Idabel and known for moving cattle across the Arkansas and Texas lines, did not wait.
They took the trooper and, in the same stretch of days in February 1951, a civilian who happened to be nearby. Both men were driven farther into the county before the Highway Patrol closed in and the Davenports were lodged in the Mayes County jail at Pryor.
That jail did not hold them. They forced another local man into a car and headed south for Wichita Falls, the same country they had left months earlier. Officers caught them again before they could disappear into Texas. The charges that stuck were the kidnapping and robbery tied to the Locust Grove stop.
Each received twenty five years. The Mayes County sheriff’s office had already been working the early reports of the rustling and the traffic stop when the brothers were first brought in. Their second escape from Pryor simply lengthened the chase across the same hills and gravel roads the office already knew.
Both men were sent to the Oklahoma State Reformatory at Granite. Norman broke out in the fall of 1953 and traveled with the wife of a rancher from Clovis, New Mexico, until he was taken off a Texas and Pacific train at Arlington on the day after Christmas. Chester stayed free longer.
He walked away from Granite on the Fourth of July and stayed out until early January 1954, when the FBI placed him on the Ten Most Wanted list. A veterinarian near Dixon, California, recognized the photograph in a local paper the next morning. Agents found Chester in a dairy barn, still milking when they walked in. He had been on the list for one day.
On the long ride back, the reformatory clerk driving him removed the handcuffs outside a San Francisco courthouse. Near Vernon, Texas, Chester tried once more. Two armed men stopped the car. He ran only as far as the front seat. A slight gray haired woman of fifty two grappled with him and helped end the attempt. Oklahoma troopers met the party at the Red River and finished the return to Granite.
Chester spent more time in solitary. After the years were served he went back to Wichita Falls and worked as a painter until 1978. Norman never made the federal list.
The only part of the record that stayed fixed in Mayes County was the original stop outside Locust Grove, the two men taken there, and the jail in Pryor that failed the first time.
