On a warm spring day in 1909, shots rang out from a business in downtown Huntsville, Ala. Two men would be dead and another headed to a mental hospital.

By the time the facts of the shooting became known, the Huntsville business community was in shock that one of their own, a well-respected businessman, had shot two men for no discernable reason.

W.L. Halsey Grocery, established by William LeRoy Halsey and his brother Charles Henry Halsey, had been in business for 30 years in 1909. William, who ran the store, was 55 years old. The store is still in business at 305 Jefferson Street today.

The murders

It was nearing closing time on Friday, May 7, 1909 when Robert Jones stopped by the grocery store. Jones was a “prominent insurance man” and longtime friend of Halsey’s. He stopped on that day to discuss business and collect Halsey’s regular insurance premium, according to a 1909 article in The Huntsville Weekly Democrat.

The men were talking near the front of the store, apparently in a genial manner. That was about to change.

“Mr. Halsey pulled a Smith & Wesson .38-calbre pistol and opened fire on Mr. Jones, firing four times,” the newspaper account said. “Mr. Jones fell on the floor dead.” A customer who was in the store fled.

Halsey’s son, William Jr., was also working and witnessed the shooting. He was stupefied. But there was no time to try to figure out why his father would randomly shoot his friend to death. William Jr. called to store clerk Gus McDowell, who was near the office at the back of the store, to come help him disarm his father. McDowell came to the front of the store and stopped to make a phone call to a local drug store to request a doctor and an ambulance for Jones.

Before McDowell could finish the call, he was cut off – McDowell, too, had been shot by Halsey. He fled the store and collapsed in the alley, “suffering intensely from his wound,” the Weekly Democrat reported.

“He has been a shipping clerk in the Halsey store for six years and was a favorite with his employer,” the newspaper reported. McDowell had been married for just two years.

Surgeons removed most of McDowell’s colon but McDowell died two days later.

No one could think of any reason Halsey shot two friends so the local newspaper made its own diagnosis: “The fact that Mr. Halsey shot him as he did is taken as conclusive evidence that Mr. Halsey is insane.”

Halsey was escorted to the Huntsville Jail and McDowell was rushed to the hospital.

The Weekly Democrat reported that “It is reliably stated that Mr. Halsey has been affected mentally for some time past and has recently been under treatment of alienists [an early type of psychiatrist]…Those who visited him in jail say that he does not realize what he has done.”

Within days of the shooting, Halsey was deemed insane by the courts and he was committed to Bryce Hospital, a mental health facility in Tuscaloosa. Although it is unclear when, Halsey was eventually released from the hospital and went to live in New Orleans. He died there in 1938. He is buried in Huntsville’s Maple Hill Cemetery.

The Halsey family continued to run the store for four generations until it was sold to Legacy Food Group in 2024. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.