Fired town marshal murdered the new guy

By Finn J.D. John
February 16, 2025

EVERYONE IN THE tiny Harney County town of Westfall knew something bad was going to happen after City Marshal Asa Carey was fired for the second time.

Carey had been an odd pick for city marshal, but maybe he’d been given the job because he wanted it badly — and Carey was a dangerous man to say “no” to. Basically, he was the “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” of Westfall ... right down to the “.32 gun in his pocket for fun,” about which more in a red-hot minute.

And the town council really should have known better. This was not Carey’s first time being entrusted with the town marshal’s baton. His first term in office had gone a long way toward demonstrating to everyone in Westfall that giving the “meanest man in the whole damn town” a badge was bad for business.

In fact, Carey appears to have been one of the main reasons the town had a regional reputation as a nest of hooligans. In 1906, while serving as marshal, Carey had gunned down fellow Westfall resident Frank Cammeron in a fight. He was acquitted on a plea of self-defense; but three years after that, he got in a fistfight with 80-year-old Dan Brady and beat the frail octogenarian to death. Both of these little incidents had made headlines statewide.

The Brady incident appears to have been the point at which the town council replaced Carey as town marshal, ending his first term of office by appointing a hardware-store clerk named Ben Corbett to the position. Doubtless the town’s business leaders breathed a sigh of relief.

And Corbett had done a fine job. In fact, he’d done such a fine job that the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office hired him, which meant he had to tender his resignation as city marshal. That was in April of 1912.

Mayor William West was out of town at that time. Carey had been the town marshal before Corbett took over, so he knew the job; the town council not knowing what else to do, and Carey being eager to take it on again, they went ahead and gave it to him.

Reading between the lines in the newspaper coverage of these events, it looks like there was some suspicion that all this was coordinated — that Carey was planning to get back in the seat, with the help of some friends on the town council, and probably some folks at the sheriff’s office as well.

The theory would be that they waited until Mayor West was out of town for several weeks, then pulled whatever strings they needed to pull to get Corbett hired by the sheriff, so that he would resign as city marshal without notice while the opposition was out of town.

Whether that was true or not, the fact was that Carey was back into the marshal’s office in jig time for his second go at the job, and when Mayor West returned to town he found it was a fait accomplit.

But West, when he came back, wasn’t having any of that. Immediately he called the town council together and they voted to fire Carey effective immediately. Then they appointed Jasper Westfall, a scion of the family the town was named after, as town marshal.

Carey took the news every bit as gracefully as you would think a guy like that would. Enraged, he started boasting around town that Westfall was too chickenhearted to risk arresting a boss baddie like himself, and had no business trying to enforce the law.

Then the next day, he stuck his .32 automatic in his pocket and, joined by his friend Arthur Ricketts, he rolled into town to start patronizing saloons, with the stated intention of proving Westfall couldn’t do the job.

Toward the close of business, Carey, thoroughly and belligerently drunk and ready for some action, repeated his boast that Marshal Westfall was afraid to arrest him, then out came the .32 and he and Ricketts both started pumping lead into the porch roof over the Jones Saloon.

Westfall came on the run, but unarmed. Carey covered him with his gun muzzle and told him he’d gun him down in cold blood if he tried to arrest him.

Westfall backed down. But then he went back to the office, retrieved his revolver, and came back to try again.

He got the drop on Carey, but Carey whipped out the .32 as Westfall’s revolver bellowed. It was a clean miss. Then Carey’s little automatic was snapping. Three shots, including one that was, within an hour, fatal.

Carey then proceeded to hold basically the entire town at bay with a pistol that, later on, would be revealed to be empty. But, finally Ben Corbett — remember him? — tracked him down and pleaded with him to give himself up.

Carey refused to do so. But he added — according to the Malheur Enterprise’s report — that “if he was a friend, then he could get him some cartridges, and handed him a dollar.”

Corbett said, “Follow me,” and walked into Jones’s general store, headed for the ammunition counter.

In the process of the purchase, the still-rather-drunk Carey let his guard down, and Corbett leaped upon him and pinned him to the counter. Other townspeople rushed to help, and Carey was thus taken into custody.

When they took his gun, they found it completely empty. His last round had been the one that killed Marshal Westfall; he’d been bluffing the whole time.

THE RESIDENTS OF Westfall were very worried about their prisoner. First, the chance of a lynch mob forming and taking justice into their own hands (and thus adding yet another “black and grained spot” to leave its tinct on Westfall’s reputation). This did not turn out to be a problem.

The other worry was that he would figure out a way to get the shackles off and escape from custody. Carey was a blacksmith by trade, so he had a pretty good understanding of what can and cannot be done with metal. This would turn out to be a problem, although not until Carey was safely out of Westfall and “in durance vile” at the county seat in Vale; and more on that in a bit.

In custody, Carey was defiant. He told reporters his only regret was that he hadn’t murdered Mayor West while he was about it.

In addition to various reporters, Carey was visited in the city joint by the director of the Westfall brass band, Charles Tapp.

“According to Mr. Tapp, Carey was a member of the band all last winter and spent a good deal of time practicing on his horn,” the Enterprise reported. “It is said that Carey’s wife was overjoyed over the interest that Carey took in the band as he seemed to keep away from the saloons and out of trouble. Just before the terrible tragedy Carey had received a new horn and his wife was more than pleased at the interest he had manifested in the band as it seemed to make him a better man. But the marshalship trouble came up and his worst nature was aroused, resulting in the awful deed for which Carey must now answer.”

Marshal Westfall’s funeral was held on Sunday, two days after the murder, and town undertaker T.T. Nelson said it was the biggest funeral in the town’s history.

“There were 36 rigs in the procession from the Methodist church to the little cemetery, each wagon or buggy carrying from 2 to 10 persons, while a number of persons followed on horseback,” Nelson told the reporter. “It was one of the saddest affairs I have ever attended and the whole town was in mourning.”

CAREY WAS DULY hauled off to the county pokey in Vale, where he made at least one attempt to bust out. In July, a sheriff’s deputy making the rounds noticed something funny at the top of the cell bars and investigated. He found three hacksaw blades stashed there.

“Since Carey was lodged in the jail, officers have taken every precaution,” the Oregon Daily Journal’s Vale correspondent wrote, “having been warned that he would make a get-away if given a chance. It is supposed his friends assisted him, but how Carey secured the steel saws is a mystery, as every suspicious character around the jail has been watched. ... As he is a blacksmith and an expert machinist it would have been easy for him to cut his way out of the cell.”

Eventually, the murderer made his way into court, and the courtroom was packed. The cop-vs.-cop nature of the shootout, and the Wild West setting, made for some highly dramatic newspaper stories, and public interest was strong.

In the end, Carey was convicted of second-degree murder and sent off to serve a life stretch. According to the newspaper reports, he would be eligible for parole in 15 years with good behavior, so he probably was out in time to go back and see his old town before it faded away and crumbled into the high desert it had sprung out of.

Today Westfall is basically a ghost town, although it does have a post office that serves nearby ranches. As with so many colorful little towns in Malheur and Harney counties, the high-desert homesteaders whose trade supported it eventually gave up and sold their land off to stock ranchers, leaving the landscape peppered with empty buildings and dusty memories.

(Sources: Archives of the Malheur Enterprise (May, June, and September 1912), Portland Journal (July 1912) and Portland Morning Oregonian (September 1912); “22 murder cases that rocked Oregon,” an article by Douglas Perry published in The Portland Oregonian on Jan. 22, 2018)

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