Manalapan: History of Police Department


Manalapan’s police history
1931 —Town of Manalapan created by Commodore Harold Vanderbilt
1935 — Manalapan creates its Police Department and names Robert D. Wertz police officer and town clerk.
1938 — After being hired as a seasonal police officer, M. Dewey Morris becomes police officer and treasurer after resignation of Wertz.
1955 — Circuit Judge Curtis Chillingworth and his wife are killed in their Manalapan home in one of the town’s most notorious cases.
1958 — Morris totals his town police car and requests a retirement pension. He’s awarded $50 per month for life.
1959 — Police Officer Carl Bretz is promoted to chief of police with a salary of $370 per month.
1962 — Ralph Cummins is named chief.
1964 — Cummins is killed in a car accident on Osborne Road in Lantana. He was 37. At the time, Manalapan had 65 residents. Then Sgt. James Casey is appointed acting chief.
1968 — Sgt. Lawton W. Sauls is promoted to chief after the “untimely death” of Chief Casey.
1973 — John Wesley Schomberg is appointed chief of police at a salary of $138.50 per week. Dispatch was handled through Lake Worth. Officers carried a two-channel walkie-talkie that connected them to Ocean Ridge and Lake Worth.
1973 — The body of Palm Beach Junior College coed Pamela Curry is found buried in an old beach cabana near her aunt’s Manalapan estate.  A gardener at a nearby estate is tried for her stabbing death.
1974 — Ralph M. Meadows is named chief, a position he’ll hold until his retirement in 1993. At the beginning of Meadows’ term, the department shared one gun that duty officers rotated. By 1976 the department had five men on duty.
1976 — Ralph M. Meadows II goes to work as an officer, serving under his father. At the time the old gatehouse serves as police dispatch center. Town Hall and Police headquarters is a single-wide trailer positioned between two sets of tennis courts on the La Coquille Club property.
1990 — Meadows is investigated for alleged ethics violations. Investigation discovers Meadows used the town’s tax-exempt status to buy tires for his grandson, took money from residents for extra services and possibly sold property forfeited in police cases, pocketing the money. It could not be proven whether he misappropriated property because he had destroyed all the police department’s records prior to 1988.
1994 — Wes Smith III hired as police chief
1999 — Smith resigns, saying he’s had issues with the town. Clay Walker hired from North Palm Beach Police Department.
2004 — Walker takes heat from civil libertarians for installing cameras that capture license plate photos of cars driving through town.
2009 — Manalapan Police Department votes to unionize.
2011 — Walker retires.
                                                                       — Compiled by Angie Francalancia and Mary Kate Leming

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