Hunting A Cop Killer: The Robert Bolden Murder

Robert Bolden

He was always right where you needed him. Gentleman of a cop and a really swell guy. He loved being in uniform.

He had been born and raised in South Carolina, and his family members were once sharecroppers on a plantation owned by the Pratt family called Good Hope.

He enlisted in the Navy after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. He was only 16, but lied about his age. When he came home from the war, he settled in New York City and married a lady who lived in Brooklyn. He first found work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s police unit before joining the Police Department in 1955. Where he worked in the 75th Precinct in East Brooklyn.

On Friday, January 22nd, 1971, Officer Bolden lived in the Farragut Houses, a public-housing project, with his wife and three kids. On his way home from work, 45-year-old Officer Bolden had stopped into Dunne’s Bar and Grill on Gold Street.. He was chatting with his friend and bartender, John Gallagher. The bar was unusually empty that night. Officer Bolden, Gallagher and a third man in the phone booth, were the only ones in the bar. 

It was around 10 p.m. when Mr. Gallagher decided that he was going to close the bar early. He asked Officer Bolden, who was not in uniform, to tell the man in the phone booth that the bar was closing. Officer Bolden went over, rapped on the phone booth door and said the place was closing.  When he returned to the bar, the man emerged from the booth with a shotgun. He fired and wounded Officer Bolden, who returned fire with his service revolver, his bullets missing their mark and slamming into the wood bar. The man fired again, this time killing Officer Bolden where he stood. He fell to the floor.

The gunman ran out of the bar. Moments later, two other men ran in, grabbed the officer’s revolver, and ran back out. Witnesses told the police the men fled in a different direction than the first man.

Behind the bar, Mr. Gallagher blacked out.

A police helicopter searched in vain for the shooter. Officers contacted people who had received calls from the pay phone that night, but none were believed to have spoken to him.

The bartender was interrogated and passed a lie-detector test, leaving detectives convinced he had nothing to do with the crime. He died a few years later.

In the days after the murder, the police thought they were close to an arrest. Two people outside the bar that night had said they saw a man leaving Dunne’s near the time of the shooting. But the man came forward to the police when he learned detectives were looking for him and brought five witnesses who said he was with them that night, nowhere near Dunne’s. A grand jury declined to indict him.

There was a lead about a serial killer incarcerated in another state that had traveled through town around the time that Officer Bolden was murdered.

There are rumors that Officer Bolden was shot over a woman and that a lot of things get covered up in that particular neighborhood because people are afraid.

Motivated by the death of his uncle, Gregory W. Bolden of Providence, R.I., joined his local police department. He died in 2005 of a rare illness. That same year, one of Officer Bolden’s grandchildren, John Bolden, joined the New York Police Department, starting at the same precinct where the grandfather he never met lived and lost his life. He too was inspired by Officer Bolden.

“I never met my grandfather but he is the reason I became a cop,” he said.

The department is offering a record $111,500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the coward that killed Officer Bolden.

Anyone with information about Bolden’s death should call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-8477 (TIPS).