True Crime Chronicles: On election night in 1956, the incoming Adair County sheriff and his predecessor shot each other to death

In the still hours before dawn on July 4, 1956, inside the Adair County jail in Stilwell, Oklahoma, two men who had spent their lives in the same tight circle of Cherokee families and local politics faced each other with guns.

Officials were still counting the returns from the statewide primary held the day before. Bob Alberty had just won the Democratic nomination for sheriff, defeating the incumbent Chester Crittenden in the race that mattered most in Adair County.

In those years the Democratic primary decided the office. Alberty was the sheriff-elect when the shooting began.

Sheriff William Chester Crittenden, born in 1905 in the small community of Chewey, came from one of the oldest Crittenden lines in the Going Snake District. His people had lived on that land since the days of the Old Settlers and the forced removal, with names like Henry Clay Crittenden and George Washington Crittenden appearing in the rolls and cemeteries that still mark the hills around Westville and Chance.

Crittenden had held the sheriff’s office and meant to keep it. He ran as a Democrat against Alberty and lost.

Robert “Bob” Alberty, thirty-two years old that summer, was born December 26, 1923, in Westville to William Wilder Alberty and Ella Bell Alberty. The Albertys ran even deeper in the same soil. Bob’s grandfather Moses Alberty died young in 1891.

Moses’s father was John Wright Alberty, known throughout the district as Uncle Jack, a judge whose family donated land for the Methodist church and the cemetery that still bears their name.

Alberty had served in World War II as a private in Company E of the 1st Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. After the war, he worked as a prison guard at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and earlier as undersheriff.

He had married Opal Laften in 1947 and already had two small sons, Robert Cleveland and James Ronald.

On Tuesday, he became the Democratic nominee. By early Wednesday, he was dead.

The two men were more than political rivals. Night watchman Dace Kirby, known locally as Dutch, later told County Attorney L. O. Grant that Crittenden had accused Alberty of trying to wreck the sheriff’s marriage.

On Tuesday evening Kirby and Alberty had gone to the courthouse to watch the primary returns. They were standing outside when Crittenden walked past. Kirby recalled the moment in plain words: “He started cussin’ my friend.”

By early Wednesday the counting had moved inside the jail. What happened next remains tangled in the statements Grant collected. Jailer Ike Martin Jr. gave conflicting versions of the shooting. Grant told reporters it first appeared the two men had shot each other to death, yet he was also checking the possibility of a murder-suicide. Alberty, Grant said, had fired from a darkened room.

Both men died where they fell. Because the principals were gone, no charges followed. Alberty was buried among generations of his family in Alberty Chapel Cemetery, his military service recorded on the stone that marks his place.

Crittenden was laid in New Hope Cemetery at Chance.

The Alberty and Crittenden names had shared the same ridges, the same churchyards, and the same county offices for more than a century.

On that July morning, their long local story ended in the same small room, the precise order of the shots and the full weight of the personal accusation left unresolved in the record Grant compiled.