Frederick D Fair, two time escapee and convicted cop killer of Patrolman John McDaniel in 1928.

On August 19, 1928, Atlanta Police Department Patrolman John McDaniel responded to a disturbance between two acquaintances. When Officer McDaniel attempted to arrest Frederick D. Fair, the principal instigator, Fair shot the forty-nine-year-old lawman in the chest.

McDaniel was transported to the hospital, but died three days later of his wound.

Fair was later apprehended, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. The Georgia Supreme Court overturned his conviction and he was tried a second time, again convicted of murder, and again sentenced to death.

On August 21, 1930, the suspect, along with another condemned murderer, escaped from the Fulton County Jail. He was recaptured on August 6, 1936, in Enid, Oklahoma, where he lived, worked and was married under the name Roy C. Wallace.

According to his ex-wife “Mrs. Wallace,” who divorced him shortly before he was identified by an Enid police officer through his fingerprints, she claimed he wasn’t that bad of a guy. “His only trouble is that he has outbursts of uncontrollable temper. At other times he was as kind and generous as could be.”

Fair was returned to Georgia where Governor Herman E. Talmadge commuted his sentence to life approximately two months later on October 14, 1936.

On May 22, 1938, Fair escaped from a prison work camp in Chattooga County, Georgia. He was recaptured two weeks later in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Just before he was to be returned to Georgia, Oklahoma officials discovered that he was responsible for the attempted murder of a man and his wife in Hennessay, Oklahoma, (twenty-one miles south of Enid) just before he was recaptured the first time in 1936.

On August 9, 1938, he was convicted of two counts of attempted murder and sentenced to two concurrent 10 year sentences in the Oklahoma Penitentiary.

Patrolman McDaniel had been employed with the Atlanta Police Department for 17 years and was survived by his wife. Frederick Fair died in Atlanta, Georgia, in March of 1963.

Research Note: I could find no information about his Oklahoma conviction for attempted murder, or his time in an Oklahoma prison. However, I have sent emails and requested information from several state and city government sources and hope to have a more thorough update on this case in the future.

Officer Down Memorial Page for Atlanta Patrolman John E. McDaniel.

Photo Credit: [Photograph 2012.201.B0410.0175], Photograph, August 6, 1936; digital image, (http://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc196026/ : accessed June 24, 2014), Oklahoma Historical Society, The Gateway to Oklahoma History, http://gateway.okhistory.org; crediting Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

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