RALPH HIRAM CASTNER
Bowling Green Police Department, Ohio
End of Watch Thursday, April 23, 1931
BIO
Age 29
Tour 2 years
Badge Not available
INCIDENT DETAILS
Cause Gunfire
Incident Date Thursday, April 16, 1931
Weapon Gun; Unknown type
Offender One shot and killed
Patrolman Ralph Castner was killed during a shootout. Patrolman Castner and the Bowling Green Police Chief were involved in a shootout with Pretty Boy Floyd’s gang on South Prospect Street.
The suspects were attempting to get away in their vehicle when Patrolman Castner and the Police Chief gave chase. The Chief stood on the running board of the patrol car with Patrolman Castner driving.
During the pursuit, the gun battle continued, and Patrolman Castner was shot.
He died from his wounds one week later. One of the suspects was also shot and killed in the shootout.
Patrolman Castner was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, Bowling Green, Wood County, Ohio.
Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd and members of his gang were responsible for the murders of several law enforcement officers.
Officer Harland Manes of the Akron, Ohio, Police Department was shot and killed on March 9, 1930, while investigating an accident involving one of the gang members. Patrolman Ralph Castner of the Bowling Green, Ohio, Police Department was shot and killed on April 16, 1931, while attempting to arrest members of the gang.
Special Agent Curtis Burke of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, was shot and killed on July 22, 1931, while serving a federal search warrant on Pretty Boy Floyd in Kansas City, Missouri.
Pretty Boy Floyd and Billy the Babyface Killer
This story is one of the better known crimes of Wood County’s past. On April 16, 1931, infamous gangsters Pretty Boy Floyd and Billy the Babyface Killer were staying at a Bowling Green hotel with the Baird sisters – Rose and Beulah.
They may have gone unnoticed, but the four were reportedly flashing money and dressed like mobsters.
It didn’t take long for local citizens to report the four to Bowling Green Police Chief Carl Galliher.
“He’d been getting reports of these unusual people,” Pratt said. Citizens were worried about them passing counterfeit money or robbing a bank.
A citizen who worked at Uhlman’s department store downtown called the chief with concerns that the Baird sisters were spending a lot of money on new dresses. Meanwhile, Floyd and Billy were at Lake’s Barbershop.
Galliher, who wanted to bring the pair in for questioning, saw the gangster’s car parked on Clough Street.
“As soon as they shout for them to stop, all hell breaks loose,” Pratt said.
Bowling Green Police Officer Ralph Castner is hit by gunfire, “but he continues to shoot as he is lying on the ground,” Pratt said.
Billy the Killer is killed, with two guns and $700 on him. One of the Baird sisters is wounded, and the other is caught. But Pretty Boy Floyd gets away.
Castner is taken to the hospital.
“He fights for his life for several days,” but then succumbs to his injuries and dies, Pratt said.
Floyd continued his life of crime until 1934, when he was tracked down and killed in East Liverpool after a bank robbery in Kentucky.
“He was a big deal. He was wanted by the FBI,” Pratt said.
On June 28,1925 , city Patrolmen Hermon Roth and Chester Smith went to the state line looking for Billy, locating him on the Ohio side. When Roth told him he was under arrest, Miller bolted. Roth fired at him, the bullet hitting in the leg, and he surrendered.
He was admitted to City Hospital where, eight days later, he escaped, apparently with the help of outsiders, one a woman. He climbed down from a second story window by way of sheets tied together to form a rope. Police said he was taken to New Castle where he recovered from his wound, and went to Midland where he got a job in the mill and took up residence.
Young Miller had indicated he planned "to go straight," and had made an offer only a week before the murder to make a settlement on the city liquor charge. Through a friend, a proposal to pay his fine in installments was relayed to Police Captain Conley. Conley obtained approval from Mayor Brown, and sent word to Billy just a few days before Sept. 18 that the plan would be accepted if he came to City Hall.
Billy Miller later went to trial in Beaver County on a first deQfee murder charge in connection with his brother's death. He claimed he fired his weapon only after Joe attacked him, and the jury returned a not guilty verdict.
However, the trial judge ordered him held under under an old English law requiring him to post $2,000 as guarantee for future good conduct. Unable to raise the money, he spent a year in jail until the bond was reduced to $500. It was posted by his mother who, it was said, mortgaged her home in Ironton.
Six years later Billy himself was slain in a gun battle he and Pretty Boy waged with police at Bowling Green, Ohio. Floyd escaped, but a cop was fatally wounded, Floyd's girlfriend was hit by a bullet and Billy's girlfriend was captured.
Billy had joined up with Pretty Boy in 1930, not long after Floyd escaped from a train taking him to the Ohio State Prison in Columbus to serve time for a bank holdup in Sylvania.
He and his holdup pals had been captured in Akron in an arrest raid in which a policeman was mortally wound.
Fugitive Floyd made his way by back roads to Kansas City, where he and Billy Miller met and joined forces.
They were seen together in Kansas City and in small Oklahoma oil towns.
Glendon Floyd, a nephew who visited here in 1994 for the 50th anniversary of his uncle's slaying near Sprucevale, is quoted in Michael Wallis' book about Pretty Boy, that Miller was always rubbing his revolver.
He had also refashioned the cylinder of the weapon so the cartridges would not rattle to alert unsuspecting victims.
Miller and Floyd along with George Birdwell, a veteran Oklahoma outlaw, held up the bank at Earlsboro, Okla., March 9, 1931, getting away with some $3,000.
At Kansas City, Miller and Floyd went to Sadie Ash's boarding house where Floyd had stayed before.
It was there where in the late Twenties he had met Sadie's daughter, Beulah, who, Wallis claims, gave Charles Arthur Floyd the name Pretty Boy.
According to the tale, she came in the room to serve beer, saw Floyd with a new haircut and spiffy clothes, and sat down beside him, saying, "Hello, pretty boy, where did you come from?"
In the winter of I930, Floyd again was drawn to Beulah, now 21 and married to Sadie's son, Walter. Miller turned his attention to her sister, Rose, wife of another son, William.
The Ash brothers were smalltime hoodlums who were also suspected of being police informants.
Tension developed between the Ash boys and the men who attracted their wives.
The two women left their husbands and took their own apartment.
After a near capture by Kansas City police in a bootleg raid, Floyd sensed someone had snitched on him. In March 1931, the brothers were seen racing in a car up a neighborhood street, chased by another holding Pretty Boy and Billy.
The bodies of the two Ashes were found two days later in a ditch in nearby Kansas, bullets through the back of their heads - a style more likely Billy's than Floyd who had not previously been tied to a killing.
Floyd with dark-haired Beulah and Billy with Rose left Kansas City for Oklahoma, then through Kentucky and were soon seen in northwest Ohio and southern Michigan.
They were suspected of bank jobs in Kentucky and Whitehouse, Ohio, but were not found.
Bowling Green, police became suspicious in April 1931 about a foursome in town spending large sums of money in various stores for a week or so.
They left, but when on April 16 they reappeared, police suspected they were casing a bank.
Police Chief Carl Galliher and Patrolman Ralph Castner arrived at the site in an auto, and when they got out and approached the two couples, they scattered and the two men began to shoot.
The officers returned fire, and Miller was struck in the stomach by three bullets, falling dead after getting off only one shot of his .45 caliber revolver.
Patrolman Castner was hit in the abdomen by one of Floyd's shots, and fell to the street, but continued to fire.
Beulah was hit in the skull by one of Floyd's ricocheting bullets, but Rose was taken into custody unharmed.
Floyd kept firing until his gun was empty, then raced down an alley toward his car, leaped in and drove away. Galliher chased him, but netted only the license plate number.
The wound of Patrolman Castner, 28, took his life in a few days. Beulah recovered from her head wound, and Rose was released when nothing could be proven against her.
Billy Miller, a suspect in several robberies and the Ash brothers' murders, had kept his vow never to be taken alive.
Probably the last evidence of his link to East Liverpool came the day three years later when Pretty Boy was shot down near Sprucevale, and his body brought to the Sturgis Funeral Home on Fifth St.
Among the items in Floyd's pockets were his watch with Billy's lucky 50-cent piece attached to it - set aside for next-of-kin.