Courtesy photo City of Sturgis

Main street of Sturgis, South Dakota, during the annual Rally.

During the first full week of August for almost every year since 1938, throngs of motorcycle enthusiasts have descended on the Black Hills of South Dakota for the annual Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis.

The Rally can swell the population of the city of 55,000 to as much as 750,000, a figure which nearly doubles the 812,000 population of the entire state.

Bikers from all over the country and world attend. Hundreds of vendors sell motorcycles and accessories, alcohol, food, and clothing.

There are concerts, street dances, and motorcycle competitions, as well as social events like weddings, sometimes of as many as 200 couples a year.

And it’s not uncommon for people to die at the Rally — 11 people died in 1990 during the 50th anniversary of the event — or to be killed in traffic accidents traveling to or from Sturgis.

But in 1975 — the year the event expanded to a full week — a biker was murdered on the way to the Rally.

Courtesy photo hellsangelscleveland.net

Hell’s Angel James Bailey was ambushed and killed near Colfax while riding to the Sturgis Rally in 1975.

On August 14, 1975, three members of the “Dirty 30” Hell’s Angels Cleveland Chapter — 32-year-old James M. “Beetle” Bailey, Jr., 27-year-old Paul Philemon, and 31-year-old Richard Vesey — were riding their motorcycles to Sturgis accompanied by two other club members in a van.

At the Highway 117 I-80 overpass near Colfax in Jasper County, Iowa, gun shots rang out, fatally striking Bailey in the neck and wounding Vesey in the arm.

Investigators believed the shot that struck Bailey was fired from below and the one striking Vesey from atop the overpass, where they found two shotgun shells.

The Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation could not determine if the attack was directed at Bailey and his friends or if it was a random act.

Bailey, a Navy veteran of Vietnam, was Treasurer of the Cleveland Hell’s Angels, an affiliation he cherished so much that his tombstone, bearing the Hell’s Angel’s emblem, is inscribed with this epitaph:

Courtesy photo hellsangelscleveland.net

James Bailey’s elaborate tombstone in Municipal Cemetery, Mentor, Ohio.

If you have information concerning the 1975 unsolved murder of James M. Bailey, Jr., contact the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office at 641-792-5912 or Iowa Cold Cases through the Contact form.