PHOTOS BY WAYNE HINSHAW
He Got His Man
Retired
judge
recalls FBI
days on
killer’s trail
When John Leidy
Holshouser Jr. ’ 61 got his
law degree from UNC in
1963, he didn’t want to set
up shop in a big city law
office.
“The wonderful thing
about a small-town prac-
tice is that you meet so many people,” says the
Salisbury resident. “The one thing that I never
wanted to do was to be plunked down in some
law firm where I saw the same four walls and
200 people every day.”
In June Holshouser was inducted into the
N.C. Bar Association Hall of Fame in honor of
his service as attorney for Rowan County from
1990 to 2006, an N.C. Superior Court judge
from 2006 to 2010 and as a private attorney. In
the words of William Dudley Kenerly ’ 73 (JD)
in his nomination letter, Holshouser “epitomizes
all of the best qualities of a small town general
practitioner — friendly, intelligent, hard-work-
ing and well-versed in all areas of the law.”
At Holshouser’s judicial retirement dinner, his
friends and colleagues also were thinking of his
days as an FBI agent. The ceremony included the
dedication of a copy of Dapper & Deadly: The
True Story of Black Charlie Harris to the Rowan
County Library. Holshouser had been on the FBI
team that captured the man who said, “I never
killed anybody who didn’t deserve to get it.”
“Blackie was a gangland executioner who had
killed some 25 rival mob members,” Holshouser
recalls. “We had developed a former girlfriend
of his as an informant. One
day, out of the blue, she called
and said, ‘Blackie has contact-
ed me and said he was down
in Pond Creek.’ ”
Pond Creek was in the
area around Alton, Ill., where
the gangster had taken down
members of the powerful
Shelton Gang. Holshouser’s
team set up a stakeout. “He
could live almost anywhere,”
Holshouser says. “We would
go to these farmhouses where
we might see a few eggshells,
but he would stay out in the
woods for days, just coming in
Holshouser laughs now about the episode,
but at the time it was dangerous work. “They
had a lot of these little barns in the Pond Creek
area with lofts where they kept their hay. My
job was to go up the ladder into the lofts and
see if Blackie had been there or bedded down.
Every time I looked up in one of those lofts, I
just knew he was going to blow my head off.”
Patience and perseverance paid off. “We had
stayed down there for a week, and we had
searched and hunted and done every-
thing we could,” Holshouser says. “We
had decided we would hit this one
farmhouse at 4: 30 in the morning and
see if we could find him anywhere. We
found a room where there were
firearms, so we knew he had to be
around. We continued searching every
building.”
Holshouser pauses for effect.
“And if he wasn’t in this little out-
house! The wanted poster made him
look like a very handsome Boris
Karloff, but out came this scrawny,
hard-looking little man. He didn’t look
like anything you could have imagined
to be Blackie Harris!”
These days Holshouser, a history
buff, prefers searching through files at
the Rowan County courthouse. “One of our
most notorious lawyers was Andrew Jackson,”
Holshouser boasts. “He got his law license in
our little courthouse.”
Dapper & Deadly chroni-
cles the efforts to cap-
ture a gangland killer,
whom retired judge John
Leidy Holshouser Jr. ’ 61
pursued during his days
as an FBI agent.
— Susan Simone
70
November/December 2011
