FBI honors agent killed in Gallup manhunt in 1937

A ranch on the edge of Gallup became the setting for New Mexico’s only FBI agent killing when Special Agent Truett E. Rowe was shot dead during a 1937 manhunt for fugitive Guy Osborne. The case, long folded into FBI history, puts Gallup at the center of one of the state’s most consequential federal law-enforcement episodes.

Rowe, who was born in Amity, Arkansas, in March 1904 and began FBI training in 1935, was serving with the El Paso Division when he went after Osborne in McKinley County. He had previously worked in the Nashville, San Antonio and El Paso field offices. FBI history says Rowe and the Gallup police chief located Osborne at Osborne’s brother’s ranch late in the afternoon of June 1, 1937.

Osborne had escaped from the county jail in Eufala, Oklahoma, on April 22, 1937, and was also wanted in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on a Motor Vehicle Theft Act complaint. When the officers confronted him, Osborne drew a concealed revolver and fired at Rowe. The Gallup police chief tried to shoot back, but his gun misfired. Rowe died while being rushed to a hospital.

Osborne was recaptured that same evening. He was later tried in Albuquerque, found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison on October 5, 1937. He was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, on October 6, 1937.

The FBI’s El Paso and Albuquerque histories place Rowe’s death in the broader sweep of federal policing in New Mexico, when the territory now covered by the Albuquerque Division was handled by the El Paso office through the 1920s and 1930s. That history also underscores why Rowe’s name still stands out: he was the only FBI agent ever killed in New Mexico.

His inclusion on the FBI Wall of Honor has brought renewed attention to a case that tied Gallup to national law-enforcement history and to the violent realities of fugitive hunting in the Southwest. For McKinley County, the story remains a reminder that one fatal encounter on local ground helped define how the FBI remembers its own past.