Just like the Old West, an early day Lancaster County sheriff outsmarted an angry lynch mob after a judge was shot twice in his chair.
Sheriffs have come and gone over the years, and now Sheriff's Capt. Gary Juilfs is assembling materials for a book and display commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Lancaster County Sheriff's office.
The front page of the Lincoln Evening News screamed out the news on Wednesday, March 9, 1892.
HE SHOT TO KILL.
Charles Warner Shoots the Police Judge in His Chair.
TRAGEDY AT THE STATION.
It was the kind of story a paperboy might yell out to sell papers: Read all about the half-crazed man who rushed into the crowded police station at 9:30 a.m., leaned over a desk and shot the judge twice as he sat in his chair.
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The first evidently was aimed at Acting Police Judge A.D. Borgelt's heart, wrote a reporter who witnessed the shooting. The bullet bruised the skin and was said to have been stopped by Borgelt's clothes and a passbook in his pocket.
The second hit the judge in the forehead, an inch above his left eye.
He fell back in his chair and started to slip to the floor when an officer caught him.
After Warner had fired the second shot he half hesitated, while a fiendish look spread over his face, but before he could raise the gun again, Captain Miller, Officers Kucera, Kiser and Lister pounced upon him and the revolver was wrested from him.
He fought like a wild beast, and it was necessary to beat him almost into insensibility. He was then ironed and placed in a cell.
... The first minute or two the judge lay in his chair as if stunned, but after the blood had been washed from his face and a handkerchief bound round the wound in his forehead, he apparently recovered, and drawing up his chair to the desk arranged his papers as though he were about to begin holding his session of court. When the doctor arrived he could speak sufficiently to tell the number of his house.
The judge later took a turn for the worse and doctors said there was no chance he would recover.
They were wrong.
But the shooting left tensions so high Lancaster County Sheriff Samuel McClay had to take unusual steps to prevent a lynching.
* * *
In 2010, Sheriff's Capt. Gary Juilfs sits at his desk, a computer file folder of black and white photos in rows on the screen before him.
The faces aren't mugshots of suspects or the county's most wanted, but part of a different kind of investigation, one that stretches to a time before Warner and McClay to Oct. 8, 1861, the day voters are said to have elected the county's first sheriff.
It'll be 150 years next year.
To commemorate, Juilfs is editing a book to be printed next spring at the Lancaster County Deputy Sheriff's Association's expense.
With the help of volunteers, he has been compiling information on each of the county's 29 sheriffs. Or is it 28?
Juilfs said whether Louis Loder was, in fact, the first sheriff is debatable. There's no mention of it in his biography, but history books say he was.
"We're finding some very interesting information."
Like the story about Fred Miller, who tackled Warner after he shot the judge and two years later was sheriff. And about McClay, the Civil War veteran who prevented a lynching that night.
Juilfs is tracking down relatives on Ancestry.com and Facebook, and he's collecting memorabilia to display at an open house next year.
He has a revolver Sheriff Nick Ress carried in the early 1900s, a stick pin Sheriff Ira Miller wore in his election photo.
The cane deputies presented to Sheriff Granville Ensign in 1878 is headed to Lincoln from South Carolina.
Juilfs hopes for more.
"It's almost like you get to know a little bit about their personality," he said.
McClay is one of his favorites.
* * *
Back to the night of March 11, 1892. It didn't look good for Borgelt, and McClay had a mob on his hands.
Telling the story years later, Sheriff Henry Hoagland, a deputy at the time of the shooting, said 200 to 300 men gathered around the jail after doctors said Borgelt likely would not survive.
"There was just as warm a time around the county jail for a few hours as I ever want to see," Hoagland said.
He, McClay and a number of other deputies and guards were inside with guns and clubs, but they didn't want anyone hurt any more than they wanted their prisoner hanged.
They decided it would be best to move Warner if they could. Hoagland said they met with a man visiting the city who looked similar to the prisoner and hit upon a scheme.
The four walked in the front door of the jail, and 10 minutes later four walked out, Hoagland said, this time with the would-be murderer and well-dressed stranger switching their clothes and places.
They took Warner by carriage to the state penitentiary, then gave the stranger back his clothes and he left the jail.
Hoagland said the crowd didn't know until the next day that Warner had been moved. By then, Borgelt's condition had improved, and there was no more talk of lynching, he said.
Warner got 12 years for the shooting but stayed at prison just a few months before going to a mental hospital in Hastings, where he died.
Reach Lori Pilger at 402-473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.
