After serving in the Navy during World War II, thirty-five-year-old David Keegan returned to civilian life. The transition from solider to citizen did not go smoothly for the Kingsley, Iowa, native.

Keegan’s decision to go into the saloon business was probably not the best career choice for a perpetual drunk. Patrons kidded that he was his own best customer. Rumor had it he also owned a whorehouse and was also its best customer.

Somehow, though, this plastered pimp managed to elude a nationwide dragnet.

David Keegan

Desperate for money to support his habits of booze and bimbos, Keegan was told that fifty- -year-old William Edwards had a safe stashed with cash in his rural Mondamin, Iowa, home, approximately forty miles north of Omaha, Nebraska.

At 8:15 p.m. on February 22, 1954, Keegan and two other bartender/stooges, thirty-six-year-old Harold Henderson and thirty-nine-year-old Maurice Walsh, burst into the Edwards home with guns drawn. They forced Edwards, his sister Florence, and cousin Mattie Myers into the bedroom where the safe was located. Edwards was shot several times as he attempted to wrestle a gun from one of the intruders, later determined to be Keegan.

As Florence attempted to phone a doctor, one gunman knocked her down and another tore out the telephone wires. Florence was then tied to a chair with strips from a bedspread and Mattie was locked in a closet. The gunmen then grabbed the safe and fled.

The women were able to free themselves and phone for help.

Mattie Myers and Florence Edwards

William Edwards, however, was pronounced dead at the scene. The fatal bullet had gone through his brain, killing him instantly.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/136986200/william-elvin-edwards

William Edwards

The safe was found the following day just outside North Sioux City, South Dakota, sixty-five miles north of Mondamin. Although $8,300 in bonds was scattered around it, the thieves were believed to have absconded with approximately $9,000 in cash. The getaway car was found abandoned and was traced to Keegan. Henderson and Walsh were soon apprehended, but Keegan had vanished.

On June 21, 1954, David Daniel Keegan became the seventy-eighth person, and the first Iowan, to be placed on the FBI’s four-year-old Ten Most Wanted List. He remained on the list for over nine years, being removed in December 1963, after the federal process (federal charges) against him were dismissed. He was still sought on the state charge of murder, but he was never apprehended.

A Top Tenner

The FBI says, not counting the current Top Ten fugitives, of the five-hundred-twenty-two people placed on the Ten Most Wanted List, four-hundred-eighty-five have been captured or confirmed deceased. Thirty-seven fugitives have been removed from the list either because the FBI no longer considered them an imminent danger to society, or, as with Keegan, they were removed after federal charges against them were dismissed. Of those, twenty-four were ultimately located.

David Daniel Keegan is one of only thirteen fugitives to make the FBI Ten Most Wanted List who were never found, either dead or alive.

 

An Elusive Iowan

SOURCES:

• Des Moines Register
• De Moines Tribune
• FBI
• Sioux City Journal