Was a 7-Year-Old’s Halloween Murder Revenge for His Dad’s Crimes?

If the 1994 Halloween shooting death of a 7-year-old Las Vegas boy was, in fact, a retributive act intended to send a message to the child’s father, it would be the first reported instance of such a killing occurring, according to an expert on retaliatory violence.

Dr. Bruce Jacobs does not believe Tony Bagley Jr., was murdered because of a drug deal gone bad that involved Tony’s father, as then-Lt. Mike Blackwell with the North Las Vegas Police Department suggested. Instead, Jacobs—who teaches Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Texas in Dallas and has been researching revenge killings for more than 30 years—tells A&E Crime + Investigation the boy was likely “collateral damage.”

It was dusk, and Bagley, dressed in a skeleton costume, was out trick-or-treating in North Las Vegas with his mother, 10-year-old sister and aunt. That’s when an armed man donning a hooded sweatshirt and dark-colored jogging gear emerged from nowhere, sprinted into the street and sprayed the quartet with bullets before fleeing the area in a car that had been idling nearby.

All four family members were struck by gunfire. Tony's sister needed surgery to repair her perforated liver, and his mother was shot in the chest. His aunt sustained a gunshot wound to one of her legs.

Only Tony—who’d been shot in the head and was taken off of life support after one day—died. Police said that the gunman was African American, standing an estimated 5-foot-8-inches.

The boy’s father, Anthony Bagley, Sr., was nowhere near the deadly scene, but relatives speculated during subsequent police interviews that Tony’s dad had ripped off a drug dealer and that the shooting was payback—a theory that would only pick up steam in 1998, when Anthony was charged in a separate case for murdering a man over a $1,000 debt.

“It is super, super unusual to not only target a family member of the person you are after, but their child—that is really, really rare,” Jacobs told A&E Crime + Investigation. “Unless the affront involved the child of the grievant. But I don’t know if I have ever heard of that—going after a 7-year-old child for something their dad did. That would be called a ‘redirected strike,’ which really only happens when you’ve tried and tried and tried to get to the person who violated you, and you can’t.”

So, they target a family member “to send a message,” he continued. “But that typically wouldn’t be murder, it’d be something less extreme. Especially with a child, because they really did nothing wrong.”

As their investigation progressed, detectives theorized that the shooting was meant to kill a different member of Bagley’s family who was not out trick-or-treating that night, but they did not speculate on who the intended target may have been. To this day, police have been unable to establish enough solid evidence to implicate any potential suspects. Desperate detectives even enlisted a psychic medium in their search for answers.

Tony's father was 32 when he was arrested for killing Curtis Henry in 1998. He was later convicted, and at trial, witnesses called him an “angry” and “evil” person. They also testified that Anthony had bragged about his plans to kill Henry in the days leading up to the crime.

Jacobs says that, within the realm of retaliatory violence, murder “is probably a more frequent outcome than it normally would be.” But he was quick to add “retaliation encompasses all manner of different types of responses to an initial affront, with murder obviously on the extreme end of the continuum.”

Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that local media hasn’t reported much on Tony’s unsolved killing since it first happened, though Tony’s Halloween night murder was profiled on America’s Most Wanted.

“There have been other cases—we had a kidnapping of a boy over 50 years ago, perhaps—and every now and then, [the local press] do a story on it, reminding people it’s still a cold case,” Green says. “But we don’t tend to remember [Tony Bagley]. I guess, partly, it’s because it happened over 30 years ago and kidnappings tend to get more attention than murders, because murders are more frequent. This one also had all the elements of questionable activity involved.”

Green also suspects race might play a role.

“I hate to think it’s also because it was a little Black child,” he continues, “but I wonder. It certainly got more press attention when his father was arrested for murder a few years later.”

Tony’s case did draw support from a famous local character. Casino operator Bob Stupack offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s capture, which fueled further coverage of the tragic story.

“He owned a hotel called Vegas World, and at one point, he sought approval to put a giant monkey on the side of it,” Green, an expert on Las Vegas history, explains. “He was always involved in various promotions, scams—you name it.

Green calls Stupak a “classic old Las Vegas character.”

“He got the idea to build the tallest structure west of the Mississippi, and he got the Stratosphere Tower started,” he continues. “He ran out of money and had to sell it, but it got built. He also ran for mayor and he published a paper. He was the sort of guy who would see something like this, and it would touch him, and inspire him to act.”

Despite the reward offer, there has never been a suspect named or arrest made in Tony’s murder. Las Vegas’ cold case division continues to search for evidence that will lead them to the boy’s killer.