That's wonderful! :thumbup: That tape should come off easy, then you wipe the residue off with some Goo Gone, clean, oil and they'll hopefully look like nothing ever happened.

On a side note: I wen't to the Sheriff's auction a couple of months ago, and much to my surprise they had a whole bunch of WWII guns. You'll usually find Ravens, Rossis and other guns you don't want, so I asked a deputy what was up with that. He said that there was a new law (or maybe it was just new to them :rolleyes: ) saying that they can only hold guns for so long, so they had to get rid of a load of "oldtimers". Unfortunately, they must have been stored in a damp basement or something, because most of the guns had deteriorated quite a bit. According to the deputy, some of them had been in storage since the '70s or '80s, and it showed. Not only were they deteriorated, it also seemed like the staff had been helping themselves to a lot of mags, grips and other parts. I didn't count, but I would guesstimate that 50% of the grips and maybe 75% of the magazines were gone. :mad:

It made me wonder if there are more treasure troves hidden in the law enforcement offices around the country, just waiting to be auctioned off in the near future?

(And yes: A few of the guns did follow me home)

Pictures, or it didn't happen! :jumper:

Flip you're right! :rolleyes:
I'm looking forward to hear the end of the story now.

Here you go: Beretta 1935, CZ27 and Tula TT-33. I also bought a .25 Ortgies, but I can't find the pictures.

Ok Here are some down and dirty pics of them after i cleaned them up and got the adhesive tape off.
I will do a more thorough thread on the S/42 Luger at a later time.
I still think it is an old restoration but would like to confirm with you guys,

As for the p.38 is is absolutely right as rain.

the p.38

Wow... Seems like your PD had a better storage room than the Putnam County Sheriff's office! It's almost unbelievable that they made it through all those years without damage! :thumbup:

walter


Great, I'm ever so happy for you!
Thanks a lot for sharing with us, and by the way beautiful guns!

Kind regards.

Wayne8661, those pistols look great (to my untrained eye)! So happy for you and thanks again for sharing your feel good story.

Just occurred to me. If those pistols have been kept all this time with their actions open it might be wise to check those springs, main spring included in the P38.

Happy as this ending is, one still wonders why no efforts were made by the PD since 1996 to return stolen property.

Well there was a logical explanation i spoke with the ATF agent today. It sucks it took so long
Bur i wrote these two guns off years ago and it was a gift to get them back. I still lost my grandfathers .32 S&W and a couple of german daggers. Its a win for me and i am not angry
With law enforcement at all. I received a copy of all police records along woth them and they worked their asses off to try and find them.

Something "a bit" similar occured to me many years ago, when at 2 o'clock in the morning a couple of burglars tried to get inside my house, my Belgian Shepherd Dog barking probably scared them away, but my mistake was to shoot them with my S&W 28, just two rounds of 357 Mag. but I've never seen any other burglar since that day!
Still one of the rounds ended in the sitting room of a neighbour more than 400 yards away. The police that came later confiscated my revolver and I remained without it for about 4/5 months. I made a big mistake shooting towards them while they were escaping, but in the end I was very lucky as everything ended well.
Anyway at least they took care of my revolver, and when it was returned to me didn't present any signs of a bad storage.

Best medicine for house burglars is 12 gauge. :evilgrin:

... if I had used a 12 gauge by now I would be writing to you from my jail cell ...

Did I forget to mention bird shot only? :D

It is very interesting that the ATF had custody of these firearms. The ATF doesn't investigate murders, so it makes me wonder why they were in their evidence room. Normally they would be held for evidence at trial by the agency or department that investigated the murder. If they were sent to the ATF lab for some sort of testing they would have, upon completion been returned to that department.

If the case was ajudicated about 20 years ago, why were they not returned to the rightful owner (hayhugh), unless they were being held until the killer's many appeals were exhausted. Obviously someone in AFT did an inventory of the evidence room and realized they still had the guns and tracked down hayhugh's family.

Based upon hayhugh's explanation as to who originally stole his guns, just shows the unintentional consequences of a simple burglary conducted by a couple of teenager "friends" who knew he had these firearms in his house and later must have sold them "on the street", until they ended up in the killers hands. heyhugh didn't state the burglars were the shooters. What are the chances that these two pistols staying together all of the years they were on the street?

You would be surprised how many stolen firearms, when recovered, often in far away places, are returned to their rightful owner many years later by law enforcement agencies. Some never get returned, because the owners, who often inherit them from family, forgot to record the serial numbers, resulting in the info not getting into the police report and therefor never submitted to NCIC.

In this case hayhugh must have written down not only the serial number, but the letter suffix for both guns and the years they were made. If you run the just numbers for a P 08 or P 38 w/o the letter suffix, you normally get 4-6 hits or more reporting "that gun" being stolen all over the US over many years. Most owners think only to record the actual numbers and they often unaware of the importance of the suffix or just can't read it. Police officers taking the complaint are unfamiliar with the German military system of numbering guns, so they don't realize the value of the suffix. All 3 pieces of info are needed to be in the police report, serial number, letter suffice and year, if you have any hope of ever seeing your stolen Luger, P-38 or 98k again.

This really is a great story with a happy (delayed) ending. Congrats hayhugh.

Joe

The guns in this article belonged to :wayne8661 Not hayhugh.........