Shep Hurd was awarded the entire $1,500 reward posted by
Attorney General Homer Cummings for information leading to the apprehension of the Brady
Gang. For years, he displayed the canceled check at his Central Street store and later, at
his expanded store on Broad Street. Long after the autopsy of Al Brady, whenever curious nursing students or vacationing G-men were in Bangor they stopped at Eastern Maine General Hospital where doctors showed them the outlaw's brain preserved in a glass jar. It didn't look different from any other brain, they agreed, and eventually it most likely was destroyed. "Frankly, I doubt if he had a brain," mused Walter Devereux in 1980. Devereux went to his own grave convinced his rifle shots hadn't killed Al Brady, but confessing he had no memory of the brief gun battle beyond the point when the outlaw got out of the car with his hands in the air After the shooting, in which his pack of cigarettes and holster were damaged by Brady's gunfire, Devereux rested on the curb for a few moments. "I was numb in body and spirit, having never experienced anything like it, "he recalled. Neither had the people of Bangor, who still talk about the October day Central Street ran red with the blood of the infamous Brady Gang. |
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