Cop shot, killed on routine patrol

BY LAUREN TERRAZZANO | Newsday Staff Writer

November 27, 2006

Police Officer Charles Shaw was shot to death when confronting a car thief in Woodmere in 1940. Officer Shaw pulled up next to the stolen car, got out of his car, approached the window of the stolen car and was shot with a shotgun. His partner Officer Robert Kirk was was walking around the front back of the car and heard the shot fired. He returned shots but the gunman ran off into the woods. (Newsday / J. Conrad Williams Jr.)

The shotgun blast sliced through a September night in a desolate area of Woodmere. And more than six decades later, the mystery still lingers over who killed Nassau County Police Officer Charles Shaw.

The 33-year-old was about three hours into the midnight tour with his partner on Sept. 6, 1940, at Railroad and Woodmere avenues, when they came upon what case records noted as a "suspicious car" that police later said had been stolen.

Shaw and his partner, Sgt. Robert Kirk, got out of their patrol car and approached the vehicle when suddenly the blasts of a gun rang out. The bullets were fired at 3:39 a.m., into Shaw's chest and neck. He died three hours later at St. Joseph's Hospital in Far Rockaway.

A few minutes earlier, the two officers from the Fourth Precinct had spotted the stolen car's plates and stopped to investigate. Whoever fired the shots ran off into a forest bordering the Woodmere Country Club, according to records and news reports at the time. Shaw's killer was never found.

"He was murdered in this county, with an eyewitness, and they never caught anyone. It just doesn't make sense," said Officer Joe Failla, the recording secretary for the Nassau Police Benevolent Association, which originally posted a $2,500 reward for Shaw's killer. The case piqued Failla's interest in the early 1990s when he was researching department history and the open case has kept his interest ever since.

"We posted a reward that's still standing out there for this one. That was a lot of money back then." The reward has increased with time to $5,000, Failla said.

Shaw, who lived most of his life in Inwood, had always dreamed of becoming a police officer, toiling at the then-Queensboro Gas and Electric Company and going to school at night to fulfill his career ambition, according to a 1940 Newsday story. He joined the Nassau County Police Department in 1937. He left behind a wife, Margaret, and a young daughter, Jean. Family members could not be reached for comment.

But those who knew Shaw at the time described him as a dedicated family man who loved nothing more than to work on the five-room cottage he shared with his family in Baldwin, according to news accounts and records.

In fact, at the murder scene was evidence of a life suddenly interrupted.

On the ground was a photograph of himself that Shaw had been carrying. It had a simple note scribbled on the back: "get ketsup and toilet paper from the grocery store." But he never did make it home.

Anyone with information on this cold case or others can contact Nassau's Homicide Squad at 516-573-7788. The department's Crime Stoppers line is 800-244-TIPS.