The Gory Demise of Charlie Storms
In 1882 Luke Short was a Faro dealer in the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona Territories. At 32 years of age, Short was a seasoned gunman. On February 26th he was dealing cards to a local ne’er-do-well named Charlie Storms.
Storms was in his 60s and was likewise an experienced shootist. This fateful day Storms had been up all night playing cards, swigging cheap whiskey and quarreling. Storms wouldn’t live to regret his fulminant temper.
Storms ultimately accused Short of cheating and was asked to leave. Soon thereafter Storms returned in a drunken rage. He grabbed the Faro dealer Short by the ear and drew his Colt Peacemaker, a shortened Sheriff’s Model in .45 Colt. However, Luke Short was faster.
Short shoved his own Colt revolver into Storms’ chest, cycled the hammer and fired. He plugged the homicidal drunkard a second time as he fell backward to the floor. The range was so close it set Storms’ shirt on fire.
Storms fired twice as he fell, but his shots went wide. The misguided malcontent was dead where he fell. Meanwhile, a local sawbones doctor named George Goodfellow sat across the room nursing his own drink. When he subsequently examined Charlie Storms’ cooling corpse he made a most remarkable discovery.
On the fateful morning, Storms had placed a folded silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. Short’s heavy lead bullet had centerpunched this dainty accoutrement and pushed deeply enough to flatten against his spinal column. Though the wound was inevitably fatal, Goodfellow was surprised to find it relatively bloodless. Upon further investigation he discovered the silk handkerchief had encapsulated the bullet into the wound but had not torn.
Goodfellow, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the country’s foremost expert on gunshot wounds at the time, was intrigued. In 1887 he penned “The Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets” for the Southern California Practitioner, a prominent medical journal of the day. After a great deal of trial and error, this observation ultimately led to the soft body armor worn by law enforcement personnel around the world today. This remarkable odyssey began when Charlie Storms tried and failed to murder a card dealer in the Oriental Saloon with his cut-down Colt Sheriff’s Model.