Bobby Sproul tucked his Luger into a holster before walking out the door. He knew he was headed into trouble.
The 43-year-old Oregon rancher’s destination that summer day in 1958: a section of road that his brother-in-law, Harland Williams, known as Link, had larded with boulders, making it impassable.
“Link, I’m coming in there next Saturday and clear off those rocks,” Sproul had told Williams a few days before.
“If you do, be there with a Winchester,” Williams responded. He added: “One of us will go out feet first.”
Williams, 47, was right about that – and he was the one who left feet first.
The resulting murder trial riveted Grant County, where both men were well-known. The case garnered attention farther afield, too. Newspapers across the country called the shootout the “‘High Noon’ Slaying,” likening the deadly showdown to the climactic scenes in the popular 1952 Gary Cooper movie.
The long-running spat between Sproul and Williams was over land and money – and, perhaps most of all, hurt feelings.
The short, intense Sproul and the lanky, equally intense Williams had inherited adjacent ranchland from Williams’ late father. Williams, a bachelor, wasn’t happy that Sproul’s property was larger than his – and prospering.
“Link apparently was jealous of Bobby’s success,” Bruce Spaulding, Sproul’s Portland-based defense lawyer, wrote in an unpublished memoir.
The two men’s dislike for one another played out harmlessly for years, with gibes and rolled eyes. Williams needled Sproul as “yellow,” because Williams had served in the military during World War II while Sproul, married to Williams’ sister Violet, had stayed home.
The bickering finally led to Williams blocking off the road.
The barricaded section of dirt track was on Williams’ property, but Sproul used it to reach the far outposts of his own land.
Sproul believed he was well within his rights to drive on the road. It had been an established right-of-way for 20 years, two lawyers had separately advised him.
Williams didn’t care what any lawyers had to say about the matter.
The night before the showdown, Williams had gone to the home of Mildred Allen, one of his sisters, to vent his frustrations. He told Allen he would kill anyone who came onto his property the next day.
“They are big and I am little,” he said. He added: “If anything happens to me, I want you to tell people I was honest.”
Allen didn’t like what she was hearing.
She pleaded with Williams to keep his cool. When he stormed out, she called after him: “I love you.”
She didn’t chase after him, knowing it would do no good. Instead, she phoned the local sheriff and told him what her brother had said.
“The sheriff said he couldn’t do anything about it because he had to help his wife, who was running a restaurant in John Day,” Spaulding later wrote in his notes for the case.
The Grant County Jail in Canyon City in 1947. (The Oregonian archives)
So Allen placed a phone call to their brother Dolly Williams and asked him to drive over from neighboring Malheur County. She thought he might be able to calm Link down.
Then, she later testified, “I said my prayers and went to bed.”
Sure enough, Link Williams – with his brother Dolly in tow – was waiting for Sproul the next morning. Link cradled a rifle in his arms. He also had two pistols in his belt.
Dolly Williams, watching Sproul’s truck grow out of the horizon shortly after 9 a.m., asked his brother what he expected to happen.
Link Williams replied:
“When Bobby Sproul comes through that gate, I’ll show you.”
Sproul stopped the truck and climbed out. His 9-milimeter Luger was stuck into a holster that swung from a belt around his neck. He hefted a rifle out of the truck as well, looking to match his brother-in-law’s firepower.
Sproul stepped through the small gate that separated the two properties. He reiterated what he had told Link Williams days earlier: He was going to clear away the boulders so he could use the road.
“If you do, I’ll kill you,” Link said.
“Get at it,” Sproul replied.
But nothing happened. The two men stared at each other. Dolly Williams later said he thought both men believed the other was bluffing.
Finally, Sproul told Dolly to drop a rock to begin the shootout.
“Hell, no,” Dolly Williams replied. “And there isn’t going to be any shooting.”
He added: “Goddamn, you can’t come down here on a man’s own property and shoot him.”
“Bob said, ‘I know it,’” Spaulding wrote in his notes after interviewing Dolly Williams and Sproul. “Or he may have said, ‘I ain’t a-going to,’ or he may have said, ‘I ain’t a-going to unless he shoots first or tries to shoot first.’”
Sproul started to retreat, walking backward so he could keep an eye on Link Williams.
But Link followed, and now the antagonists took up another subject, an old and sore one: “They were arguing about how they divided the place,” Dolly Williams recalled, meaning their respective properties.
Link Williams seemed agitated by the discussion of property lines and his father and siblings.
Julia W. White, an artist and granddaughter of the late defense attorney Bruce Spaulding, created a painting inspired by the Sproul trial. (Courtesy of Julia W. White)
Sproul, nervous, stopped in his tracks. Link kept coming on, his rifle pointed at Sproul’s chest.
“This is it,” Link muttered.
Sproul recognized that his best chance in a shootout was with the Luger, so he threw his rifle to the ground.
“The next thing Dolly knew there was a lot of rapid firing,” Spaulding wrote in his notes, now in the possession of his granddaughter, Julia White. “Dolly couldn’t tell who was shooting.”
Bobby Sproul would claim that a “wild animal look” had come over Link Williams’ face, causing Sproul to drop the rifle and grab for his pistol. In that same moment, he recalled, he felt a sharp pain in his stomach – he’d been shot!
Sproul fired the Luger through the end of the holster, which had been modified to allow him to do that cleanly. He fired the gun again and again and again.
One shot knocked the rifle from Link Williams’ hands. Link tried to snatch up one of the pistols in his belt, but he couldn’t.
“Link fell flat on his face, then he got partially up on his hands,” Spaulding wrote.
Sproul looked down at his brother-in-law sprawled on the ground. “Maybe we can help him,” he said to Dolly.
But it was too late. The local coroner would find eight bullets in Link Williams’ body.
And the gut shot that Sproul had suffered? The painful thump in the stomach apparently had been the recoil of the rifle he’d dropped. He hadn’t been shot.
Still, what exactly happened – and in what order – remained unclear. Investigators discovered that one shot had been fired from Link Williams’ rifle.
Grant County District Attorney Michael M. Mogan quickly charged Sproul with murder.
When the trial began in Canyon City in September, just three months after the fatal shooting, Mogan called Sproul’s actions premeditated.
“There’s one thing we’ve forgotten,” he added. “Harland Williams is dead, killed by a trick gun by Bobby Sproul” – a reference to the cutaway holster that allowed Sproul to fire the Luger “rat-a-tat-tat just like a machine gun” without removing it from the sheath.
“It was sneaky and low, and he planned it that way,” Mogan declared.
Mogan also revealed that while Sproul had backed away from Link Williams, the rancher wasn’t abandoning the fight that morning. He planned to escalate it.
“In other words, you were going to go around the fence line on your property on foot, get your tractor and come back on the road where the rocks were,” a prosecutor asked Sproul.
“That was my intentions,” the defendant responded. “But, of course, a person thought of everything.”
Spaulding, who’d made his name with the high-profile Marjorie Smith murder trial in Portland two years earlier, worked hard to overcome Mogan’s characterization of his client. He argued that Link Williams was a “bully who goaded his brother-in-law into the gunplay over a disputed road.”
Bobby Sproul fired on Williams, the defense attorney said, because he “believed he was fighting for his life.”
Dolly Williams, called by the prosecution, said he didn’t know who shot first. He insisted he’d happened to look off into the distance right before the gunfire started.
The jury had little trouble reaching a verdict.
The seven women and five men returned to the courtroom after less than two hours. They’d needed only one ballot.
When the decision was announced – “Not guilty,” the jury foreman said quietly – the courtroom’s gallery erupted. Reporters, some from as far away as New York, raced for the pay phone in the lobby.
“Sproul shook scores of hands and hugged both men and women well-wishers as tears coursed down his cheeks,” The Oregonian reported.
“I knew it was going to come out all right all the time,” Violet Sproul said, an arm around her husband’s waist.
In the years that followed, Bobby Sproul, who died in 2002 at 86, would continue to have the kind of success that apparently had nettled Link Williams. The Oregonian wrote in 1996 that Sproul ran “one of the largest cattle herds in Eastern Oregon.”
He never used his Luger again. In fact, he never saw it again.
After the trial, Spaulding took the gun back to Portland with him – though not because he wanted a macabre keepsake.
“The judge,” the lawyer recalled, “ordered it kept out of the county.”
— Douglas Perry; dperry@oregonian.com
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