The Panama Hat Bandit

1958

AT NOON ON JUNE 24, 1958, Detective Walter Holmes walked into the Tangipahoa Parish jail in Amite carrying a month of dead ends.

Holmes was a sergeant with the New Orleans Police Department. He had spent the past six weeks chasing a killer from Kentucky to North Carolina and home again. The man he was hunting wore a Panama hat. Newspapers had taken to calling him the Panama Bandit, and bar owners across New Orleans had started sleeping with pistols on the shelf.

That morning, Tangipahoa Parish deputies phoned with a name. They had a truck driver in custody who sounded worth a look. Holmes loaded his evidence and drove north on Highway 51.

It had started six weeks earlier, on May 14, 1958.

At 3 AM, someone shot and killed 36-year-old Thomas Gagliano inside his own bar. The T&M sat at 210 North Dorgenois Street in Mid-City New Orleans, and Gagliano had only been running the place for seven months. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported the killing as a botched holdup attempt and noted an anonymous tip: the assailant was likely a transfer truck driver.

Gagliano had a history. He was a former cab driver. On Valentine’s Day 1955, police raided his home at 827 St. Charles Street and booked him for pandering, along with six women who all listed that same address as their own. But on that May morning in 1958, he was just a bartender trying to close up.

Witnesses said the killer entered the T&M shortly after midnight, ordered a drink, and left without trouble. He came back at closing time. He ordered another glass, then pulled a .25 caliber revolver and announced a holdup.

Gagliano laughed.

The bandit fired once into the ceiling. “Okay, okay,” the bartender said. “Don’t get excited.” Gagliano walked to the register, opened the cash drawer, and reached for the pistol he kept inside. A penny from the drawer caught in the gun’s action. The weapon jammed.

At that moment, 28-year-old Margie Simmons — Gagliano’s barmaid and common-law wife — screamed.

“Please don’t use that gun, Tom.”

The holdup man shot Gagliano where he stood.

Gagliano fell forward, knocking the locked register to the floor. The bandit ran. He left behind three witnesses: Simmons, barmaid Linda Pertuit, 38, and customer Louis Gallo, 41. Two days after the murder, a sketch artist sat with all three. The composite that came out of those sessions described a white male, 25 to 30 years old, five feet ten and 160 to 175 pounds. Straight dark hair. Olive complexion. Good teeth. A light plaid sports shirt, blue jeans with spots, and a Panama hat. Possibly a truck driver. Could speak Italian.

Holmes worked those leads hard. Two more bar holdups struck New Orleans in the weeks after Gagliano’s death — one witness described the same hat, though the third bandit wore a wool cap and a stocking mask. Holmes traveled to Kentucky. He cleared a suspect. He went to North Carolina and cleared another. He came back to New Orleans with nothing.

Then the call came from Slidell.

Shortly after lunch on June 23, 1958, stenographer Paula Rivet, 44, approached a Five and Dime store in Slidell and found a man pushing through the front door with a handkerchief over his face and a pistol in his hand. He told her the store was closed. Then he ran.

C. A. Strickland, who ran an electrical repair shop on the block, jumped into his truck and gave chase. He had the man cornered between two houses within three blocks. The gunman turned around. That is when Strickland saw the blood on the barrel.

“I shouted for him to stop and he came back. That’s when I saw the blood on the gun. He pointed it at me and said: ‘Please don’t shoot’ and tossed the gun under one of the houses. At that point, he ran off again.”

The man bolted through the adjacent yard, shoved past Mrs. Freda Magee, who was hanging clothes on a line, climbed into a heavy tank truck loaded with rice, and drove west on Highway 190.

Back inside the Five and Dime, Strickland found the cash register on the floor with a broken pair of scissors jammed in the locked drawer. In the corner of the store lay part-time cashier Myrtle Jones Pichon, 47. Her body had been dragged forty-five feet across the floor in a trail of blood.

Slidell Police Chief Clarence Howze picked up the rice truck on Highway 190 and called for four St. Tammany Parish sheriff’s deputies. The chase covered ten miles and lasted more than an hour. The truck weaved through traffic the whole way, the driver apparently changing clothes behind the wheel.

“It was the darndest thing. He was trying to change clothes as he drove. The way the truck was weaving, it made it dangerous for us to try and head him off.”

That was Howze. Tangipahoa Parish deputies stopped the truck at the parish line.

Delbert William Eyer, 24, a truck driver from Pennsylvania, climbed down from the cab. “I don’t know what you want me for,” he said. “I don’t know anything about what happened.” He tried to run. Howze bear-hugged him to the ground until deputies cuffed him. Police recovered his pistol from beneath a house near the Slidell crime scene.

That night, a mob came to the St. Tammany Parish jail — pistols, shotguns, and a hangman’s noose. Before sunrise, a judge transferred Eyer to Tangipahoa Parish, where Holmes was already on his way.

In the Amite cell, Holmes took one look at Delbert William Eyer and felt the case slip away.

Wrong complexion. No Italian. Rotten teeth. The rounds from Eyer’s gun were .22 caliber; the slugs pulled from Gagliano’s body and from the T&M bar were .25. Fingerprints from an ashtray at the New Orleans crime scene did not match Eyer’s prints.

No match.

A polygraph settled it. Eyer failed on the Slidell robbery and homicide. On the New Orleans killing, he passed.

Holmes packed his bag. He walked out of the Amite jail and crossed the parking lot toward his car. He had almost reached it when a man in a Tickfaw Police uniform stopped him cold.

“Are you Detective Holmes?”

The officer unfolded a crumpled newspaper clipping. It showed the Panama Bandit composite — the same one Holmes had been carrying for a month.

“You might want to stop in Tickfaw. I play cards with this man every week. He’s got family in Independence.”

What Holmes did next, the record does not say. No arrest followed. No trial was ever held. The column that ran under the headline “Panama Bandit, murderer at large since 1958” chose those words carefully.

Thomas Gagliano has been in the ground since May of that year. So has Myrtle Jones Pichon, dragged forty-five feet across a Slidell store by a man who begged C. A. Strickland not to shoot him.

Somewhere between a Tickfaw card game and an Independence address, a detective followed a lead that history swallowed whole. The Panama Bandit was never named in any public record I have found.

Sixty-six years is a long time to wear a hat.