A 24-year-old man living a lie in Pinedale, Wyoming, was using the name of a friend he met while working in Basin in 1955 when his life was violently cut short following a murderous crime spree.
However, three years prior, his ruse was so successful that the Pinedale rancher for whom he worked allowed him to marry his 16-year-old daughter.
It’s unclear whether Charles Earnest Billings, also known as Melvin H. Grey, was a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde type or had simply grown tired of a life of pretence.
What is clear is that on March 4, 1955, he armed himself with two weapons and went on a violent criminal rampage, killing two people, injuring two others, and leaving two families dealing with the trauma of kidnapping and hostage situations.
Dean Binning, a Pinedale rancher, was shocked when law enforcement called him to Sweetwater County to identify the body of a young man who worked for him and was engaged to his daughter, Joella.
He recognised the man as Melvin Henry Grey.
“He was a fine boy,” he stated, as reported by the Casper Tribune-Herald.
But his character was not fine the day he died as a gunman fleeing police inside a Green River home where he attempted to kidnap a mother, her infant twin daughters, and a sister-in-law.
Rula Bullock was one of the 21-month-old twins living in a home near the Union Pacific railyard with her parents, Gus and Mary Kalivas, and twin sister Effie.
She currently lives in Vernal, Utah. Bullock said she and her sister, Effie Manley, who still lives in Green River, were too young at the time to remember anything about that terrible day, but it did have an impact on the family.
Especially their mother.
“We just know what was told to us growing up,” she told me.
Working Friendship
Billings was born in Cody on September 4, 1931, and raised in the area.
According to reports, he served in the Marine Corps, but this has not been independently confirmed. A photograph shows him wearing a military uniform cap.
According to a census record from May 18, 1950, he worked at the Snack & Cue in Cody. His mother, Ida P. Billings, was listed as the head of the household and a Missouri native.
In 1952, Billings collaborated with the real Melvin H. Grey.
Grey, who spent a year in prison in Wyoming for forgery, told The Portsmouth Star newspaper in Virginia on March 10, 1955, that he and Billings were once best friends. They met while driving for Pacific Intermountain Express Trucking Corp. in 1952.
After six months of working in Basin, Wyoming, Grey said they drove to Cody for the Fourth of July, where Billings got into a fight with his brother-in-law.
They left and drove to Casper. Grey continued to Denver, intending to return to Basin, but never did. He left a suitcase containing his clothing and other personal belongings with Billings.
“That was the last time I ever saw him,” Grey told the paper. “He was mean and wild, but we got along fine together. He might have been a little insane even then.
“He had done a few things that were wrong when I knew him, but nothing like killing anyone.”
Following Billings’ terror spree, his mother informed authorities that he had adopted Gray’s name after Charles Billings was involved in an accident in 1953 while driving a car owned by an auto company.
He assumed Gray’s name to avoid a lawsuit.
Her son was unaware of Gray’s prison record, she told The Associated Press in a story published in the Casper Daily Tribune on March 8, 1955.
Early on March 4, Billings wore a belt buckle with Gray’s initials, and the car he drove through the snow-covered roads to Kemmerer was registered in his name.
He apparently went to Kemmerer to see what opportunities there were to steal from a business, and he chose an auto dealership.
Burglary Discovered
Shortly thereafter, Kemmerer Town Marshal Frank Kulinski discovered signs of a burglary at the dealership.
Meanwhile, Don Wagner, the owner of the Kemmerer petrol station, was notified that vehicles needed to be serviced and went to the station. The time was 2 a.m.
Kulinski stopped at the station and asked Wagner to notify Albert Maffei of a burglary attempt on his business.
When Maffei arrived, the trio found tracks in the snow indicating attempts to break into the business, which led to car tracks.
They followed the tracks into Frontier north of Kemmerer, found the car, and were surprised when Billings came around a building with a weapon pointed at them.
According to newspaper accounts, Billings forced the three of them into his car at gunpoint and ordered them to drive north on US Highway 189.
Once north of Frontier, the three begged to be let out of the vehicle.
The gunman, who sat next to Kulinski in the back seat with Wagner driving and Maffei beside him, ordered them to stop 3 miles outside Frontier and get out.
Kulinski told a reporter from his hospital bed that he and Wagner were in the front of the car with Billings, while Maffei was in the back. Without warning, Billings shot Kulinski in the abdomen, knocking him to the ground.
Billings then fired at Wagner’s head, grazing his face.
Maffei, who was in the back seat of the car, began running down the highway as well. Billings pursued him and shot him in the back multiple times. He also shot him in the face while he was down, according to the Rock Springs Miner on March 6, 1955.
Billings then returned to the car to look for Wagner, who had run off the highway and hidden in underbrush and snow. Wagner said Billings fired several shots around him as he crept through the sagebrush.
“Wagner described the gunman as terribly afraid of something,” the Casper Daily Tribune wrote. He was able to walk and get help.
Kulinski, who was badly injured, also managed to get up and walk into Frontier for assistance. Maffei’s body was found with bullet holes in his back and a gunshot wound to the head.
Kidnapping
Alerted police saw Billings’ car near the Kemmerer-Evanston junction of U.S. 30 and 189 and chased him over snow-covered roads into Evanston.
The cops slid past a service station where Billings had stopped, then jumped out of the car and dashed into a field in the morning darkness. The officers began looking for him and spotted him leaving the station in a 1939 Ford with the lights turned off.
Inside the station, Billings quickly kidnapped Robert Durrant, 17, president of the Evanston Con Rodders, a hot rod club that promotes highway safety. He’d taken the job at the station shortly after Christmas because he enjoyed cars.
“The first I saw of him was when he entered the station,” Durrant told a United Press reporter published in the Casper Morning Star on March 5. “He waved a gun at me and asked where our money was. I took him over to the cash register, pulled the handle, and let him have at it. “He collected all of the bills.”
Billings then directed Durrant to get into Durrant’s 1939 hot rod and drive east to Little America for gas, then to Linwood, Utah, now a ghost town, where Billings bought new clothes and discarded his old ones along Highway 41 outside Linwood.
He kept Gray’s belt and buckle with the initials “MHG”. The pair then went into the Uinta Mountains, where they became stuck. They walked into a logging camp and persuaded loggers to help them get out, Durrant later told authorities.
Billings then directed Durrant to Green River and stepped out of the car across the tracks from the depot. He told Durrant to head west. Durrant arrived in Little America 22 miles west of Green River at 5:30 p.m. and reported that Grey had left his car there.
Sweetwater County Sheriff George Nimmo, who had been searching for the pair, happened to be passing through Little America at the same time.
He drove Durrant back to Green River and informed officers that Durrant claimed Billings had walked into the river via a flyover.
The Hunt
Officers searched the Union Pacific rail area, where Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Ed Phillips spotted Billings on a platform and yelled for him to stop.
Billings fled behind a box car, and Phillips pursued him and was shot under the arm. Billings then went to a nearby home where Mary Kalivas lived with her husband, Gus, and their twin daughters.
Bullock stated that her mother arrived in the country from Greece at the age of 24 and spoke little English by 1955, despite having been there for five years.
Her father was out of town working when the killer broke into their home.
“My mom was screaming out of the house and my aunt Georgia — I have two Aunt Georgias — my Aunt Georgia Barbarigos was in the house with us and my mother went screaming out of the house,” according to her. “My Aunt Georgia next door assumed that because we were twins, something happened to us in the bathtub, and we had drowned or something.
“And she came running out of the house (and into their house), but the killer shot at her and missed her, and thank God he did because the police department was right next door going through the houses.”
She said the police were aware Billings was in the area, and the shot at the aunt from next door is “what made them realise he was at my mom’s house.”
Furthermore, Manley stated that she understood the killer had a gun to her mother’s head and his arm around her neck at one point, “screaming at her to help him” before she fled screaming from the house.
With her limited knowledge of the language, she would have missed everything Billings said.
Newspaper accounts report. Billings made their Aunt Georgia Barbarigos sit in a chair with the two girls. Manley believes that her aunt “grabbed us and put us on her lap.”
Union Pacific Railroad special agents Gaylord Sherman and Edward Trittenham, along with Wyoming Highway Patrol Troopers Art Reese and John Hampton, responded to the shooting and fled into the neighbourhood. They arrived outside the home.
“When that posse got there, my mum kept screaming in Greek, ‘My babies are in there,'” Manley told me.
Sherman and Reese approached the front porch, and Billings told them to leave or he would kill the girls, according to news reports.
Billings’ End
The other officers went to the side of the house and broke out a window, saw Billings and fired, hitting him in a leg.
Sherman fired a 12-gauge shotgun through a front-door window, knocking the killer into a back bedroom and onto the bed.
The officers ordered Billings to come out. According to the Rock Springs Miner, Billings responded, “I’m dead, dammit, come and get me.”
The Casper Daily Tribune published a photo of Billings, who they thought was Grey at the time, lying on the bed in the home. His eyes were open.
Meanwhile, Durrant and Billings were covering territory in Utah on March 4, and Durant’s parents hired a private plane to search for their son in the Evanston area.
“Thank God, he’s safe,” Minnie Durrant stated in an article published on March 5 in the Casper Morning Star. “My son said he wasn’t hurt.”
Durrant expressed surprise when he learnt that his captor had killed people.
“He was a very nice guy. “I can’t imagine him shooting anyone,” he told the Associated Press.
Phillips died in the hospital after undergoing surgery to treat his gunshot wound.
Sweetwater County Sheriff George Nimmo took fingerprints from the gunman’s body and discovered they did not match those of former Wyoming convict Melvin Grey, whom authorities believed they were dealing with due to the abandoned car in Evanston.
An investigation revealed Billings’ identity.
Trauma Remained
Bullock said the incident traumatized her mother for the rest of her life. Her family continued to live in the house where the gunman was shot.
Her mother lived there until her death at the age of 91.
“My mom was a very private person and so she spoke about it, but it always frightened her,” Bullock told me. “From that day forward, she kept the doors locked. Even if you walked out the door to use the garbage can, she would lock it behind you. And I do not blame her. It was a terrifying experience.
Bullock said she was told Billings died in an ambulance a few blocks away from the house, not on the bed. Her sister believes that story was fabricated for the benefit of their mother.
“In the pictures that I have seen, he looks pretty dead on her bed,” she told me. “They tried to convince her that he didn’t die there, that was the big thing for her.”
Manley added that her mother “did not talk” for two months afterward, and that the family went to live with her sister for a while.
“She went completely silent because she was in shock. “I think she had PTSD,” Manley stated.
When the twins were older, their parents told them that their family’s story had been published in True Detective Magazine and two other detective-style magazines that focused on unusual crimes.
Bullock believes her father, who spoke about the incident, felt bad about not being home when the killer arrived. The twins occasionally share the story with others.
“I’ve told many people. “My sister has, too,” she added. “It’s quite bizarre. We were almost two, and our birthday is in June.”
Bullock stated that she was invited to a reunion in Green River about ten years ago to remember slain Sweetwater Deputy Ed Phillips, but was unable to attend.
Manley stated that she did attend the event. According to the Sweetwater Sheriff’s Office website, Phillips is the only deputy killed in the line of duty in the agency’s history.
Durrant joined the Wyoming National Guard, raised a family, worked as a master plumber, spent several years on the Evanston Fire Department, and eventually retired to Meridian, Idaho. He died in 2016 and donated his body to medical science.
Joella Binning, the rancher’s 16-year-old daughter, married, had children, worked for the United States Forest Service, and worked on the family ranch. She died in 2021.
Both Phillips and Maffei abandoned families with young children.
Both twins married, raised families, and lived normal lives.
Manley described her childhood memories in the same Green River neighbourhood that witnessed terror on that March day as being reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting. She mentioned that they went ice skating in the winter and played until dark in the summer.
Though she does not recall the events of March 4, she stated that hearing a gunshot “bothers” her. Manley said she doesn’t know if that’s an unconscious reaction to what happened because she was in that living room a long time ago.
She is grateful to the officers who arrived to save her family from Billings.
“We could have been killed,” she explained.
