Pancho's Stolen Guns.

The little village of Columbus has a museum that is housed in the old railroad station that served the railroad that at one time came through Columbus. The building is an old fashioned wooden structure, similar to many built by the railroad in many towns throughout New Mexico. The railroad line was abandoned in the middle 1960's and all of these little stations were either torn down for the lumber, or moved.

The Columbus station is still located in the original location it was in when Pancho Villa raided the town in 1916.

When I was Chief in Columbus in 1989 the museum was robbed of many of the old rifles, and a pistol that were gathered off of the battle field where some of Villa's men were killed as they fled Columbus on the way back to Mexico, by U.S. Army troops defending the town.

Many of the rifles taken were old Kragg Gorgenson bolt actions in 30-40 caliber, and old lever action Winchesters, but the pistol that was taken was one that I had admired ensconced in it's case on previous visits to the museum. It was a Model P Colt, single action revolver in .45 caliber that had a beautiful set of mesquite handles that looked as though they had been hand made by an artisan in Mexico. This revolver is the type seen carried by all of the old western movie stars, Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers and John Wayne.

The rifles were valuable for their historical value, but the revolver not only had historical value, but it had collectors value because it was a 1st generation Colt bearing the serial number of 851 in wonderful condition.The thief had taken the revolver and holding it by the barrel used the handle like a hammer and broke out the glass of the display cases, this caused one of the mesquite grips to fly off of the revolver along with the revolver's main spring, both of which I found on the floor in front of a display case.

When I was called and told about the missing weapons I immediately began an investigation into the crime. I took photos of the damage the thief had done to the display cases in which the weapons were stored for public viewing, and also took finger prints from the glass of the display cases themselves. I did an extra good crime scene investigation because I was aware the the museum board was very upset, and I wanted to make a good impression and solve the case because I was new to the job.

The crime scene investigation itself yielded no suspects, but finally after several weeks I received a tip from an informant who led me to a teen aged boy whose father at one time was a local sheriff's deputy. I was able to get this boy to confess to the theft of the guns, and then he led me to where he had stashed them after the burglary.

After taking the guns from the museum the boy carried them across the street from the museum and into a deep, heavily brush lined wash where he threw the guns into the brush at various locations along the banks of the wash. We found all of the rifles, but we could not find the revolver. He stated to me that when he saw that the pistol was missing a grip panel and the main spring, he threw it in the brush without looking.

I told him that if we had to search the wash all day we were going to find the missing pistol. After a couple of hours of intense searching I finally found the pitol hanging by the trigger guard on a mesquite limb about three feet above the ground.

I was elated to find the missing guns, and the museum board considered me to be the flavor of the month for some time after I recovered the guns, but there was one more problem to overcome. The guns had been left outside for the weeks since they had been taken and they had been rained on which caused their metal parts to have a surface vaneer of rust on them. The museum board decided to have the guns re-blued which would then reduce their value. I tried without success to cause them to just have the guns cleaned only and not re-blued but they insisted. The guns while still retaining their historical value lost much of their collector's value when they were blued.

After the guns were re-blued and placed back in their restored glass cases to be viewed by the public, someone stole the .45 caliber revolver three days after it was replaced in the case. I did an investigation and placed the pistol in the NCIC (National Crime Information Computer) data base, and I have searched for the revolver in every gun show and in every gun shop I have entered since it was stolen, but I have never found it and it has never been recovered by a police agency. I imagine that the revolver is sitting in someones private collecton somewhere and will never be found.

Because the young man who perpetrated the burglary was a juvenile at the time he received a slap on the hands and was released.