Jimmy “Two-Gun" Lyons Murder Case Revisited – Part 1

Headline from Feb. 18, 1926

About a year ago, I did a few posts about Jim Lyons (sometimes spelled just ‘Lyon’), the man who murdered a railway express agent near Havana, Ohio back in February 1926. The manhunt for Lyon and his brother ended with their capture in Michigan about three weeks later. They were brought back to Norwalk to stand trial, but in April that same year Jim Lyon managed to escape from jail and run amuck for a day before turning himself in.

After my two-part series on Lyons' escape and recapture, I wrote about the farm house (at left) where the murder took place, as well as my road trip to Havana.

Since my original posts were based on a 1957 Lorain Journal article about the crime, I decided to go back and review newspaper microfilm from 1928 to see how the murder and the escape from jail were handled in the local press.

At the top of this post, you see the Norwalk Reflector headline from Feb. 18, 1926,  the day of the murder. Unfortunately, most of the faded front page was unreadable except for the headline.

The Lorain Journal covered the murder the next day with this small front page article (below).

The impending trial of Jim Lyon only warranted a small article on the front page of the April 10, 1926 edition of the Journal as well.

But it was the Journal’s turn for a dramatic headline when Jim Lyons escaped from jail in April. Here’s the front page from April 12, 1926.

Surprisingly, the best account of his capture after roaming Norwalk for a day was written by none other than Jim Lyons himself, who wrote his own story for the United Press. Stop back here tomorrow for that unique bit of journalism which appeared on the front page of the Journal.