Elmer “Sonny” Boyd was born in 1927 at Cryer Creek; his family moved to Blooming Grove in 1946 and he graduated from the high school here.¹ He joined the Dallas Police Department and worked as a homicide detective, badge 840, from 1957 to 1978.²

On 22 November 1963 he was among the first officers on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository to see the rifle and the three spent shell casings before anyone moved them. He was assigned to Lee Harvey Oswald and testified before the Warren Commission.³ He was also supposed to be the detective handcuffed to Oswald when he was moved through the basement two days later — he had worked until three that morning and gone home, so the assignment fell to Jim Leavelle, and it is Leavelle beside Oswald in the photograph everyone has seen.⁴

Boyd moved back to Blooming Grove in January 1999 and died here in 2024 at ninety-six, reported at the time as the last living Dallas detective connected to the case.⁵ He is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery.⁶ He called himself, in his own words, “just a old country boy from Blooming Grove.”⁷

A mural of him and Oswald, painted from the same photograph reproduced for decades in newspapers, covers the side of the Blooming Grove Historical Society building at the corner of South Fordyce and 2nd Street, a short walk from Market Row.⁸ It carries his name, his old badge number, and the artist's signature, @carlyhaynie, painted into the corner.⁹

The photograph under the mural is inscribed in his own hand: “For Cindie + Robert, from Elmer L. 'Sonny' Boyd, Retired Dallas Police Homicide Detective.”¹⁰ He is the man in the pale hat.¹¹