TWO CAPE POLICEMEN DIE IN 1961 SHOOTOUT WITH FUGITIVES

One of the bleakest nights in Cape Girardeau's history came on March 10, 1961, when a shootout between city police and two fugitives resulted in the deaths of two city police officers.

Killed in the shootout along Kingshighway just west of Arena Park was Herbert L. Goss, 67, an unpaid, volunteer auxiliary policeman. Donald H. Crittendon, 24, died March 21, 1961, from gunshot wounds received in the gunfight.

The shootout occurred 1 1/2 hours before Crittendon's scheduled resignation from the police force was to become effective. He had planned to take another job.

The killers were Sammy Aire Tucker and Douglas Wayne Thompson. Tucker was executed by lethal gas for Crittendon's death. After a multitude of legal appeals that resulted in two jury verdicts and life sentences being overturned, Thompson was convicted Dec. 13, 1984, in Scott County of killing Goss. He was given another life sentence and was paroled, only to break conditions of his parole and be sent back to prison.

Ironically, Thompson had been free on parole since 1980, but in 1981 won an appeal to his 1966 conviction in Mississippi County on the basis that the jury was improperly selected. Rather than allow that appeal to stand, the Cape Girardeau County prosecuting attorney at the time, Larry Ferrell, refiled a murder charge against him and obtained the 1984 conviction in Scott County.

His first conviction in Bollinger County had been overturned in 1965 on grounds that evidence had been suppressed.

Tucker, Thompson and Calvin Johnson broke out of a jail in San Luis Obispo, Calif., in 1960, and worked their way eastward across the country, committing a number of robberies in California, New Mexico and Kansas before arriving in Cape Girardeau March 8, 1961.

Johnson hanged himself in 1973 in a Kansas state penitentiary at Lansing where he was serving 30 years for an armed robbery at Hutchison, Kan.

The night the two police officers were shot, Tucker, Thompson and Johnson had planned to rob a Kroger store in the Town Plaza shopping center. The attempt was foiled when the manager became suspicious and notified police. Johnson went one way and Tucker and Thompson another.

The car in which Tucker and Thompson were riding was stopped on North Kingshighway. Tucker got out of the car and shot Crittendon at close range. Almost simultaneously Thompson opened fire on the opposite side of the car and shot Goss.

After the shooting, Thompson and Tucker took two cars at gunpoint and became involved in a high-speed chase with a highway patrolman. Tucker was arrested hiding in woods in Bollinger County the next day. Thompson remained at large for a week and was involved in another shooting near Poplar Bluff in which highway patrolman Glenn Davis was wounded, Raymond Glover was killed and a woman who was in Glover's car was wounded.

Thompson, who was shot in the nose during that exchange of gunfire, took the patrolman's vehicle and went to a house near Poplar Bluff where he was arrested the following day.