Ed Cantrell

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Notorious Wyoming lawman, Ed Cantrell, was acquitted of shooting an undercover agent between the eyes in the backseat of his patrol car. He was successfully defended by famed trial lawyer Gerry Spence. The shooting and subsequent trial were publicized around the world.

[edit] BIOGRAPHY

Throughout history Wyoming has had its share of notorious gunmen, but none comes to mind more vividly than Ed Cantrell. Despite almost thiry years of dedicated service in law enforcement, Cantrell was branded an executioner although he was acquitted of the shooting of undercover agent Michael Rosa in a Rock Springs, Wyoming, patrol car, July 15, 1978. Cantrell, the son of a Nazarene minister in Bloomfield, Indiana, excelled in sports and graduated from high school in 1945 with a football and basketball scholarship.

Aspiring to be a coach, he had almost completed three years of college when President Truman ordered the Berlin airlift in 1948. Cantrell immediately enlisted in the air force and spent three years as an MP in the "bombed-out ruin" south of Frankfurt, Germany. His tour of duty was then extended due to the Korean conflict. Upon discharge, he graduated with honors from the Indiana State Police Academy.

An avid hunter, fisherman and marksman, he later visited Wyoming and decided to relocate. Accepted into the Wyoming State Police, he was assigned to the Rock Springs area in 1960. Although he liked his job, he later resigned from the highway patrol to lobby for a state police bill. "A little skeleton crew of highway patrolmen and a sheriff's department were understaffed," he said, explaining that he and his fellow officers were trying to create a more effective state police force.

The following January he was hired as a range detective in Lusk. His job took him all over Wyoming as well as neighboring states in pursuit of lawbreakers. Then, in 1976, following the the death of his oldest son in a car accident on his 21st birthday, Cantrell and his wife decided to return to Rock Springs, where he worked for undersheriff Jim Stark. The following year Cantrell assumed the post of safety director of a badly demoralized Rock Springs police force. He then formed a detectives division from existing officers and hired Michael Rosa as an undecover detective.

Not long after, Cantrell admonished Rosa for appearing on the witness stand in an umkempt manner and Rosa, Cantrell said, threatened him at the Sweetwater County Courthouse. Cantrell asked Rosa to meet him at the Holiday Inn on the afternoon of July 14, 1978, and, at one point, Rosa angrily said, "Where's your gun, old man?" Rosa had incurred a forty-dollar discrepancy on a drug-buying transaction and was also involved with a Rock Springs radio dispatcher, two situations that could have led to the married officer's dismissal from the force.

That evening Cantrell was called at his home by Sergeant Callas who wanted to discuss Rosa's $40 disceprancy with his boss at the station. The two men later drove to the Silver Dollar Bar with police officer Matt Bider to talk to Rosa. "When [Rosa] came out of the bar he had a wine glass in his hand," Cantrell said, "and when he saw me he was livid. He was so mad that when he walked over to the car, he kicked the asphalt. He didn't want to be fooled with." Rosa got into the car behind the driver, Callas, and into the back seat with Bider. Cantrell was sitting in the front passenger's seat with his head down "thinking" how he could discuss the discrepancy without angering Rosa further, he said.

Callas asked for Rosa's social security number and was writing it down when "something made me look over my left shoulder," Cantrell said. "Either my [dead] son told me or it was a sixth sense. Otherwise, I think he would have blown the back of my head off, or the side of my face. [Rosa] was glaring at me and said, "What do you want you *&&^%%#@," and his hand went like this," Cantrell said, pulling his hand back from his lap in the direction of his belt.

"I shot him. I didn't have any choice. I couldn't reach him. If he had been closer, I wouldn't have had to kill him. I've often thought that if I had gotten out of the car and talked to him in the parking lot, maybe it wouldn't have happened." Cantrell then called in the FBI, the state criminal investigation department and the highway patrol to investigate, and booked himself in jail, expecting a routine hearing. Instead, he was sent to the Evanston State Mental Hospital where he was confined to a small cell for ten days. He was then released on $250,000 bond and told to get out of town, but not the state.

Cantrell literally owes his life to Gerry Spence, who at first refused to take the case, but changed his mind after hearing Cantrell's version of what happened. Acquitted by a jury after less than two hours of deliberation, Cantrell found that the general public had not accepted the verdict. His safety director's job had been abolished and he eventually found work as a range detective in South Dakota. When interviewed at his home in 1981,

Cantrell, who in all the years of his police work had never shot anyone before Michael Rosa, said, "I wish I had never been a police officer. The thing that hurt me worst is that people insinuated that I'm a crook. I'm honest, you know. And never in my life have I had to go around protesting not only that I'm innocent, but that I'm honest." (Excerpted from Jean Henry-Mead's interview with Cantrell at his home for her book, Wyoming in Profile. ISBN 0-87108-600-X)