To the Editor:

I read with interest the article in a recent issue of the News-Progress about the gangsters of Southern Illinois.
I was born in Fairfield, the home of the Shelton Brothers Gang, and my family had some personal experiences with the Sheltons and with ‘Black’ Charlie Harris, a onetime compatriot and later enemy of the Sheltons.
One day after school in October 1947, my father Jim Mauck met up with his friend Jim Zuber to go riding in a jeep owned by Zuber’s uncle, Carl Shelton. The very next day, Carl Shelton was ambushed and shot out of that very Jeep in the Pond Creek Bottoms east of Fairfield.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.