Ed Cantrell

Who was Ed Cantrell?

Ed Cantrell was the public safety director of Rock Springs, Wyoming who was acquitted of killing one of his officers in 1978.

The son of Samuel Glenn, a Nazarene minister and Vesta Marie Robinson Cantrell, Cantrell was born in Bloomington, Indiana. Cantrell excelled in sports and graduated from Plainfield High School in 1945 with a football and basketball scholarship. Aspiring to be a coach, he had almost completed three years at Indiana State College when President Truman ordered the Berlin airlift in 1948. Cantrell immediately enlisted in the Army and spent three years as a military policeman in the "bombed-out ruin" south of Frankfurt, Germany. His tour of duty was then extended due to the Korean War. Upon discharge, he graduated with honors from the Indiana State Police Academy.

An avid hunter, fisherman and marksman, he later visited Wyoming and decided to relocate there. Accepted into the Wyoming Highway Patrol, he was assigned to the Rock Springs area in 1960. Although he liked his job, he later resigned from the highway patrol to lobby for a state police bill. "A little skeleton crew of highway patrolmen and a sheriff's department were understaffed," he said, explaining that he and his fellow officers were trying to create a more effective state police force.