Posted on Sat, Aug. 30, 2008
Parker County Sheriff Larry Fowler spent much of early Friday morning on the phone, talking to people about the Case of the Dark-Haired Beauty on the .45
Pistol.But none of the callers could answer Fowler’s questions about the seized weapon — who was the woman in the photos beneath the
pistol’s custom plexiglass grips and who was the gun’s owner?
Then, about mid-morning, an emotional Jim Morris called from his home in Stephenville with a story about a Nebraska girl who met a young officer from Texas and sent him off to fight the Germans.
Within a few hours, the case was solved.
“I have no doubt it’s his pistol,” Fowler said. “It’s a great ending to a mystery.”
Morris, 62, can hardly believe that he opened his morning Star-Telegram and saw his father’s service weapon and his mother’s picture, in the hands of the Parker County sheriff. He had all but given up hope he would see it again.
“Nothing in this world that I owned had more sentimental value to me,” he said. “That gun meant the world to me. It means the world to me. I was in tears when I read that article.”
Last October, someone stole three guns from Morris’ house, including his father’s .45-caliber Army pistol. He filed a police report with Stephenville but did not have the serial numbers.
Two months later, sheriff’s deputies in Parker County seized the weapon while executing a search warrant at a house near Azle. But because the serial number wasn’t in a crime database, they didn’t know to whom it belonged. They put it in a property room, where Fowler — a history buff — found it this month and renewed a search for the rightful owner.
Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, James L. Morris — born in Palestine, reared in Maypearl — dropped out of the Texas Tech University engineering program and enlisted in the Army. The Army sent him to officer candidate school in Virginia.
There he met Velma Cashatt, a girl from Harrison, Neb., who had gone to Washington, D.C., to work for the government during the war.
They married before he shipped out with the 82nd Engineer Combat Battalion, which landed at Omaha Beach two weeks after D-Day. Morris served as the battalion’s executive officer and later its commanding officer as the unit fought through France and Germany in 1944 and ’45, including the Battle of the Bulge.
“He got to see a lot of the horrors of that time,” his son said.
The custom, plexiglass hand grips came from the windshield of a crashed German bomber.
“His men took that windshield out and made those grips for his weapon,” Jim Morris said. “They really admired him.”
His father died last September at the age of 89. His mother died in 2005.
About 10 years before his father died, Jim Morris, a retired Navy chief petty officer, asked him for the gun. After losing it for nine months, he plans to drive to Weatherford on Tuesday to retrieve it and thank Fowler.
“I never thought I would see it again,” he said. “My son will get it when I pass away.”
Fowler, for his part, isn’t quite done with the case.
“I expect I’ll be filing charges of possession of stolen property on the guy who had it,” he said.
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