On the Run: Walter Turnbow’s Sprint from the Law

In the early 1900s, Walter Turnbow (1877—1947), one of the colorful characters perched on my family tree, drew acclaim as one of the swiftest runners in the Lone Star State.

With $1,000 at stake, he won a race against James Goldforth in Dublin, Texas, on October 16, 1905. That prompted G. H. Burrell of Cleburne to stake $500 that he could defeat Walter in a race. Yet, the plan was thwarted by the arrival of Officer Kirk from Hamilton County who came to arrest Walter for escaping from the county farm where he had been sent to pay off a gambling fine. The officer, refusing to accept Walter’s offer to pay the fine, boarded him on a Hico-bound train from Dublin. En route, the prisoner jumped through a window near Alexander and used his racing prowess to escape.

Officer Kirk could find no trace of Walter Turnbow. On October 19, Kirk traveled to Brownwood where he learned that some foot racers were in town to run in a competition the next afternoon. On the morning of the race, the officer scouted around town until he found and arrested Walter.

Eight years earlier, Walter—with a brother and a cousin—donned disguises in a failed train-robbing attempt. The trio were caught, leading to Walter’s two-year prison stint. More about the daredevil’s exploits are told in the pages of my book, Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes & Scandals in a Small Texas Town.

 

The Murders at Starved Rock: Prosecutor’s Son Reexamines 1960 Crime

David Raccuglia is best known as the founder of American Crew, the leading professional men’s grooming brand in the world. He’s also known for capturing famous faces through the camera lens, with outstanding portraits of Jack Nicholson, Ray Charles, and Yoko Ono—among many others. And he’s now appearing in The Murders at Starved Rock, an HBO miniseries that incarnates the boogeyman of his childhood nightmares. 

On March 16, 1960, three women were found savagely murdered at Starved Rock State Park in LaSalle, Illinois, David Raccuglia’s hometown. “Things like this just didn’t happen,” he says of the Illinois Valley town that then sported less than 12,000 residents. The wives of prominent businessmen, Lillian Oetting and Mildred Lundquist, both 50, and Frances Murphy, 47, made near-100 mile trip from Chicago to the popular state park for sight-seeing. The trio were last seen two days earlier outfitted in skirts, jackets, and rubber footwear pulled over walking shoes as they made their way along the wooded trails. Their battered bodies, with wrists bound by twine and clothing in disarray, were discovered in the cave of a secluded canyon. 

“I was only seven months old, but the Starved Rock murders was with me from the first day I could form a memory,” Raccuglia tells in HBO’s three-part documentary. An investigation led to the arrest of Chester Weger, a 23-year-old dishwasher at the lodge where the three victims were staying. Weger was given a life sentence in 1961. “I would lay in bed terrified that Chester Weger was gonna climb through the window and kill me,” says Raccuglia. That’s because his father, noted attorney Anthony Raccuglia, acted as lead prosecutor in Weger’s conviction. 

The crime is chronicled in historian Steve Stout’s 1982 book, The Starved Rock Murders. 

In 2003, an appellate court defender reopened the case, arguing that Weger was wrongly convicted more than 40 years earlier. “She was accusing my father of making inaccurate claims,” says the American Crew founder, who—for the first time—began to wonder if it’s true. 

The Murders at Starved Rock is a look at David Raccuglia’s wrestling with the question of Chester Weger’s guilt, his reexamining the triple crime with interviews with his attorney father, victims’ relatives, and Weger himself. Raccuglia follows every lead, objectively viewing every angle of the case that results in a compelling documentary about the boogeyman of his childhood.

Netlfix's "Yara" is a compelling true story

Serial Killers: A Scary Statistic

Oh, by the way, my wife was hacked to death last night

In 1910, an 81-year-old named Benjamin Franklin Matthews—called Frank—and his 71-year-old wife, Millie, lived on their farm in Cedar, a township in Boone County, Missouri. The federal census that year indicates that a servant made her home with them; yet, by 1914 they lived alone. The couple’s only two children, both sons, were seven years apart in age. Albert, the oldest, was born with a debilitating disability requiring constant care. He lived 45 years, dying in 1902, by which time the younger son, Eddie, had already died.

Mr. and Mrs. Matthews were respected in the community, though Frank had a reputation for being miserly and eccentric.  Although he apparently had money to live comfortably, he continued to toil on their farm into his 80s.

For two weeks during the end of September and the first of October in 1914, Frank, then 85, spent nights outside near the pigsty to shew away any prowling dogs from attacking his hogs. On the night of Tuesday, October 7, Frank returned to the bedroom he shared with his wife but slept in a different bed.

At 6:30 the next morning, he went to the home of a neighbor and asked for some matches. The two men chatted and discussed “trivial matters” before Frank prepared to leave.

“Millie is dead, so I must go home and get breakfast,” he said.

Dead? The startled neighbor asked what happened.

Oh, that. Frank took the neighbor to the Matthews farmhouse and showed him Millie’s body in bed, explaining that’s how he had found her that morning—bloodied from gashes in her neck and head.

Law officers and a coroner were summoned, but Frank had more important things to do than be bothered by a murder investigation. Needing to tend to farm chores, he wanted to bury the body of his wife that morning and didn’t expect his day to be interrupted by providing statements at the coroner’s inquest. The burial of his wife would be postponed until the next day.

The coroner’s examination revealed the four or five jagged wounds in 75-year-old Millie’s head and neck resulted from being struck by an axe or hatchet. Her death certificate simply states “Murdered” as cause of death, but a supplementary certificate specifies “skull crushed with some blunt instrument.” When the farmer’s wife was found in bed, she was still in the clothes that she had worn during the day. Frank could explain that; Millie’s nighttime habit was to shed her shoes, crawl into bed and sleep in her clothes.

Two hammers and a hatchet were found in the bedroom. In searching the house, several boxes of matches were discovered. Why, then, did Frank need to borrow matches from the neighbor? Investigators also searched an attic room and found an old lard can containing a blood-stained pair of trousers.

Oh, that. At the coroner’s inquest, Frank said that he had worn the trousers the previous morning when he was repairing a wagon. The blood had dripped from his hand after he accidentally crushed it attempting to set the wagon bed on the running gear. But why were the slightly bloodied trousers stuffed into an old lard can in the attic?

Frank theorized that the murder happened at night while he was milking his cows on a lot near the house. When he returned home, he found his wife lying in bed. He spoke to her, but she didn’t answer. Frank assumed Millie was already asleep. He slept soundly that fall night; nothing roused the farmer from his slumber, though he awakened twice during the night. Both times he spoke to her, but she never responded. The next morning when he awoke, he called out Millie’s name. Again, she didn’t answer. It was then, he said, that he realized that she was dead.

Rumors said the Matthewses were wealthy people who kept a large amount of money in their home, though some believed Frank buried pockets of cash in various spots on his farm. Some months earlier, Frank supposedly couldn’t get Millie to return money that he had left in her care, and townsfolk speculated that it caused discord in the Matthews marriage.

“No arrests have been made although suspicion strongly attaches to one person,” announced the Moberly Weekly Monitor (Oct. 13, 1914), alluding to Frank Matthews. Yet, investigators admitted they lacked evidence to make an arrest. Other Missouri newspapers, such as the Centralia Fireside Guard (Oct. 9, 1914), referred to the crime as “Another Ax Murder.”

Another?  Two years earlier, in Villisca, Iowa, five members of the Joseph Moore family and their two guests were hacked to death while they slept. Coroner E. G. Davis remarked that the Matthews murder “resembled” the Moore murders “in many respects.” In March 1915, a man named Loving Mitchell was arrested in St. Louis for a committing a triple hatchet murder in Illinois four years earlier. Mitchell was suspected of the hacking deaths of many others in the Midwest—including Millie Matthews, but detectives doubted there was a connection between the crimes. 

What became of Frank Matthews? He relocated some 40 miles north to New Franklin, in Howard County, where he survived his wife by five years, dying in 1919 at age 90. He suffered with chronic inflammation of the heart muscle, but it’s not known when he was diagnosed with that ailment. His death certificate states senility as a contributing factor to his demise, though that’s commonly found on early 20th-century death certificates for older adults. The death certificate gives full details about his exact date and place of birth and the full names of his parents and their places of birth, suggesting these facts were supplied by a close family member. Curiously, though, the spaced provided for identifying the informant is left blank. 

Finding Black Sheep in Your Family

In the 1950s Leon Nutes was at his mother-in-law’s New York City apartment when a stranger came knocking. Nutes recalled that the man’s handshake was a firm as steel. “Who is he?” he asked. In a hushed tone, his mother-in-law explained, “He’s a cousin of mine and he just got out of jail.”

     Nutes told of this encounter years later in a phone call to Carl R. Migden, a distant cousin who was researching the family tree. Bronx-born Migden learned that the “jail” was the infamous maximum-security prison Sing Sing. And the cousin released from there was Jacob “Kuppy” Migden, a member of the criminal organization known as Crime, Inc.

Kuppy’s criminal activities—an embarrassment to the family—were a long-held family secret. “It was the most fascinating genealogical research I ever undertook,” says Carl R. Migden, who wrote of the quest to uncover his criminal kinsman’s hidden story for a book entitled A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Black Sheep in Your Family.

In the 165-page paperback, published in 2016, author Migden gives advice about the sources available for research while detailing his own success with the clues and leads from newspapers, hospitals, cemeteries, courthouses, state archives, the Social Security Administration, municipal archives, census, prisons, U.S. Treasury Department, and the FBI.

    In newspapers, for instance, the author found more than 20 articles about Kuppy Migden’s involvement in a first-degree murder case in 1939. An order to assassinate a would-be court witness from testifying in a racketeering case led to mistaken identity and the shooting death of the wrong man. Kuppy unsuccessfully attempted to thwart arrest by having his face surgically altered. When he was apprehended, federal agents found Kuppy had planned to conceal his identity with a falsified birth certificate and other documents.

“I discovered the very interesting and rich details that criminal records can reveal… It put faces and images onto the pages of genealogical notes: precise dates, times, locations, buildings, allegations, and more,” says Kuppy’s cousin-turned-sleuth, Carl R. Migden.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Black Sheep in Your Family may be ordered online for $15.95 plus shipping from eBay:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/Black-sheep-in-your-family/322271906831

The Mysterious Woman Upstairs

In November 1915 Mary Connor purchased a large two-story home in the small town of Newmarket, New Hampshire. Mary and her sister, Annie, moved there from their farmhouse two miles away. The middle-aged, unmarried sisters were soon joined by a reclusive older woman, a stranger to townsfolk. George Bennett, the sisters’ former neighbor, would often drop by their new house for a visit. As Bennett recalled, “that lady living with them would instantly slip away and disappear upstairs.”

The mysterious lady was sometimes seen—dressed in black—stepping outside the house briefly but only at night. From a second-floor bedroom closet, the mysterious lady had a hidden staircase built that descended to the back of the house. She made a strange, cryptic remark to one of the Connor sisters of her inevitable fear that “one night they will come for me.”

Mail carrier Robert Bennett (brother to the sisters’ former neighbor, George Bennett) knew the name of the mysterious lady living with the Connor sisters, because he delivered letters addressed to her. She was Emma Borden, the estranged sister of Lizzie Borden who was acquitted of the 1892 axe murders of her wealthy father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. Emma’s New Hampshire residence was nearly 130 miles away from Fall River.

This story, from Frank Spiering’s Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden (New York: Dorsett Press, 1984), pp. 219-222, says Emma moved into the Connors’ home in 1916. However, in Lizzie Borden: Past & Present (Fall River: Al-Zach Press, 1999), pp. 312-313, author Leonard Rebello notes the appearance of Emma’s name in Fall River directories during 1914 to 1918. She then moved to an apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1919. Annie Connor later told a newspaper reporter that Emma moved into her home in 1923.

What caused Emma to relocate to the small New Hampshire town? Why did she live in fear?

While Spiering speculates Emma chose Newmarket because of its remoteness, Rebello’s book (p. 314) points to a 1981 newspaper article in which Louis Fillon recalled that while delivering grain to the Connor house, he learned that Emma Borden was living there. “He was requested by Emma’s lawyer to keep his discovery a secret to prevent Lizzie from finding Emma’s whereabouts and taking her money.” Annie Connor was surprised that Fillon discovered the mysterious lady’s identity.

In Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden (p. 224), Spiering tells of Emma’s being awakened at night after hearing a noise on the first floor. She came down the concealed staircase to investigate but missed her footing and fell, breaking her hip. She died on June 10, 1927, nine days following the death of her sister, Lizzie.

When walking with Mrs. Fitzpatrick after 9 p.m. could get you arrested

In Stephenville, Texas, in the late 1890s, any man seen walking with Mrs. Mary Fitzpatrick after 9 p.m. could be arrested and fined. Why? Because city penal code made it a misdemeanor for any male over 14 caught strolling the streets or riding in a vehicle with a known prostitute. Mrs. Fitzpatrick was one such character.

In December 1896, six men were arrested for taking night-time strolls with the strumpet.

From Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes and Scandals in a Small Texas Town

Lifetime's "The Night Stalker" based on true-crime bestseller

Eddie Ramos and Lou Diamond Phillips 

both play killer Richard Ramirez in The 

Night Stalker, Lifetime's movie version of 

Phillip Caro's bestseller of the same name.

(Photo: copyright 2016 Michael Clifford)

   The Night Stalker, premiering on Lifetime at 8 p.m. (CT), Sunday (June 12), stars Lou Diamond Phillips as Richard Ramirez, the serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. This “real-life” story is not a remake of Nightstalker, the 2002 flick inspired by Ramirez’s crime spree.

  Lifetime’s Night Stalker, based on Phillip Carlo’s bestseller of the same name, opens in June 2013 with a lawyer named Kit (Bellamy Young) visiting Ramirez in San Quintin where he’s been imprisoned for two decades. As Kit leaves the prison, she sees other women are waiting to visit with the convicted killer, too. But she’s not there as one of his fans. Kit meets with the Night Stalker to get a confession; she’s been hired to clear another convict who she believes is serving time for murders committed by Ramirez. 

  Flashbacks retrace Ramirez’s steps in becoming the Night Stalker, but they also reveal disturbing memories from Kit’s past. “You affected my whole life,” she tells him, explaining how their lives paralleled nearly 30 years earlier. 

The Violent Life and Death of Samantha Olds

    Halloween 2015 marks the 165^th birthday of Samantha Olds, one of the victims of an axe-wielding frenzy at a dilapidated Texas farmhouse in 1925.

    Violence had a strange, lifelong grip on her.

    Beautiful and vivacious, Samantha had a penchant for dangerous men, and they were equally drawn to her. Her teenage marriage to Amos Smith ended when he was gunned down in a hit orchestrated by a couple of his gambling partners in Iredell, Texas, in 1875. One of the men, according to The Austin Statesman, “was exceedingly intimate with Smith’s wife.” However, Samantha was never implicated in the crime, whereas the two gamblers and their triggerman were lynched. While awaiting execution, one of the men reportedly said, “This will make seven men who have been killed in quarrels about Mrs. Smith.”

    Soon Amos Smith’s widow was on the prowl for a new husband. She found Bill Olds, who was later arrested for theft, forgery, and murder. The daughters from the first marriage despised Olds for mistreating their mother. Samantha, however, used a gun to keep her husband at bay. She finally abandoned him in Iredell and moved to Waco with family members. “That old lady could shoot better than any man I know,” recalled a longtime Wacoan. “She lived down by the wagon yards and used to shoot up the place right regular—just for the hell of it.”

    Samantha’s legacy as a beacon of brutality passed to her daughter by Bill Olds, Maggie, who was twice widowed with the murders of her second and fourth husbands. Her choice for a fifth husband, F. M. Snow, led to the 1925 gruesome tragedy. She married the woodchopper shortly after the family moved to Erath County from Waco. Samantha’s new son-in-law, whom she called a “no-account,” was a violent ex-convict. Weeks after this unholy union, Samantha, Maggie, and Maggie’s son were butchered by Snow in an uncontrollable fit of rage. 

    No pictures are known to exist of Samantha or Maggie. Curiously, photographs of the fireplace where Snow burned her body show what some say is a woman’s face outlined on the chimney’s bricks.

 

Blood Legacy: The True Story of the Snow Axe Murders

    

Gunfighterology

That's the name of Bill O'Neal's upcoming presentation at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. We'll be there!

Lizzie Borden Brings Her Hatchet to TV

One of America’s most infamous unsolved murders will unfold in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax, premiering on Lifetime, January 25 (8 p.m., ET). Golden Globe® and Emmy® Award nominee Christina Ricci takes on the title role, while Stephen McHattie and Sara Botsford portray her father and stepmother. Screen Actors Guild Award® winner Clea DuVall plays older sister Emma. The 2014 movie, however, is not a remake of The Legend of Lizzie Borden, the 1975 made-for-TV movie starring Bewitched actress Elizabeth Montgomery.

On a hot August day in 1892, wealthy Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were the victims of a hatching-swinging killer in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Borden’s daughter Lizzie, an unmarried Sunday school teacher, was charged with committing the double homicide, but at the sensational trial that followed, the accused murderess was found not guilty. The gruesome story, a crime writer’s dream come true, has spawned countless books, many with different perspectives and theories which set out to prove or disprove Lizzie’s guilt.

Lizzie Borden Took an Ax ­captures the tension and resentment in the Borden household, but viewers can expect the movie will take creative license with the facts. Five-foot-three Abby Borden was “very well nourished and very fleshy,” at least according to the autopsy. That hardly describes Sara Botsford, the outstanding yet oft-overlooked Canadian actress who portrays Lizzie’s stepmother.

Christina Ricci had already turned 33 when it was announced she would play Lizzie Borden, making her closer in age to her character than Elizabeth Montgomery, who was 41 when she depicted the 32-year-old accused murderess. Although it’s hard to imagine the 2014 movie—or any other incarnation—eclipsing The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Lifetime’s Lizzie Borden Took an Ax sports a fine cast and a script from Mod Squad screenwriter Stephen Kay. 

Christina Ricci stars in Lifetime's fact-based movie, Lizzie Borden Took an Ax
(Photo Courtesy of Lifetime. Copyright 2014)

A review of "Sins of the Pioneers"

Bob Alexander’s latest book, Riding Lucifer’s Line: Ranger Deaths Along the Texas-Mexico Border, includes a review of my second true-crime volume, Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes & Scandals in a Small Texas Town. Alexander wrote:

“Author Pylant creates an enlightening portrait of the routine and not-so-routine criminality and scandals, surgically exposing the underbelly of Stephenville's raunchy and racy and sometimes perilous past.”

Pistols, Petticoats, and Poker

     I first read about Lottie Deno in the pages of a Texas history book, Ida Lasater Huckabay’s Ninety-Four Years in Jack County, 1854-1948 (privately published by the author in 1948). Lottie Deno, Huckabay explained, was one of the most successful gamblers at Fort Griffin during the Old West days of Lone Star State. Lottie, whose real name was unknown, was also regarded as strange and very reserved. Somewhere along the way she earned the nickname Mystic Maud. 

     Jan Devereaux, recipient of awards from both the Western Outlaw-Lawmen History Association and the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History Association, carefully backtracked the legendary Lottie Deno’s life, sifting through the folklore until she could reconstruct a true portrait of the lady gambler. Even the oft-published photograph identified as being that of Lottie Deno, Ms. Devereaux learned, was actually of someone else. 

     Lottie Deno is said to have been the inspiration for the character Miss Kitty Russell, the red-headed saloon keeper portrayed by actress Amanda Blake in the long-running TV series Gunsmoke. “We never say it, but Kitty is a prostitute, pure and simple,” said Norman McDowell, the show’s creator. Jan Devereaux found evidence where Lottie Deno was charged with “keeping a disorderly house.” Like Miss Kitty, Lottie Deno was described as having dark red hair.

     In Silver City, New Mexico, in 1880, Lottie Deno, at age 35, wedded Frank Thurmond. The marriage license records giving her name as Carlotta J. Thompkins. 

     Despite these discoveries much of the colorful Old West character’s life is shrouded in mystery. Jan Devereaux’s research unfolds in a book entitled Pistols, Petticoats, & Poker: The Real Lottie Deno: No Lies or Alibis. This well-documented, 277-page volume includes more than 100 photographs. It's available from the publisher’s website, High-LonesomeBooks.com

"Behind the Scarlet Mask" Inspired by Real Events

J. T. Upchurch's novel exposed the
truth about prostitution in Texas

     In J. T. Upchurch’s 1924 novel, Behind the Scarlet Mask, he told of a bartender called Jo Sally, a man who was born and raised in the red light district. “His mother was an outcast, his grandmother was an outcast, his great-grandmother was an outcast, and for ten generations back his maternal antecedents were of the scarlet sisterhood,” Upchurch wrote. 
     The author, as a long-time social reformer whose mission was to stop prostitution, was very familiar with the profession and the lives of those working in the trade. He drew heavily on that knowledge when writing Behind the Scarlet Mask, often creating characters based on actual experiences and people in Texas, including Waco. While Jo Sally was likely a composite character, he may have been loosely based on a Waco businessman named W. R. “Bud” Orman. 
     Not unlike Jo Sally, Bud Orman came from a questionable family background. How his divorced mother supported her three children and two unemployed young black women is unknown, except that Mrs. Orman had a “bad reputation.” Bud earned a living as a gambler, saloonkeeper, and a real estate investor. Specifically, Orman’s real estate investing involved building a bordello. He also was known to cosign bonds when madams were arrested for running “bawdy houses.” In fact, several such establishments dotted a lane in Waco known as Orman’s Alley. As Sherri Knight and I explain in The Oldest Profession in Texas, the offspring of madams and prostitutes often kept their ties to the red light district; they knew of no other way of life.
     In September 1885 a hack driver began repeating old tales about Mrs. Orman’s alleged past as a prostitute, and her livid son responded by shooting the man to death. Bud Orman stood trial for murder the next spring.
    “The testimony is shockingly indecent,” reported the Dallas Morning News. “The courtroom was crowded.” A jury found him guilty, but his attorney succeeded in having the case reversed and remanded. When a second trial ended with the same verdict, his attorney once again won a reversal. The third trial was heard in 1888, and this time jurors decided the accused was not guilty. 
    Despite the scandalous murder trail, Bud Orman remained in Waco. He died there in 1920, four years before J. T. Upchurch’s novel appeared in print. In Behind the Scarlet Mask, Jo Sally loses control of his anger and kills a man in a saloon. But unlike Bud Orman, Jo Sally’s murder trial ends with a guilty verdict which sentences him to death by hanging. 

A Look at Nineteenth Century Seduction

Nineteenth century Texans deemed that a girl had reached the “age of consent” on the day of her tenth birthday. Any man having carnal knowledge of a female under the age of ten — with or without her consent — was guilty of rape. The revised penal code, as amended in 1887, raised the age of consent by only two years. The Lone Star State was not alone in that mindset; other states had also followed the old English common law. After the age had been raised to 16 in New York, two attempts were made to lower it to 14, first in 1890 and two years later. The Encyclopedia of Social Reform (1897) reported that earlier in Delaware, “the age was at the shockingly low period of 7 years!” 

“Are the fathers who pass such laws drunk or insane?” asked a journalist in 1905. By that year Texas had raised the age of consent to fifteen. In the Carolinas, however, it remained at the age of 10. 

In Texas, a man eloping with a seventeen-year-old girl was guilty of breaking the law because he did not have parental consent. Yet, had he merely seduced her without eloping, no harm had been done — unless he first promised her marriage. And that could have led to an indictment for seduction. Even though a 15 year-old girl had reached the age of consent, the seduction of an adult female as old as 25 was still an indictable offense if her lover first promised marriage. The guilty party could face a five-year prison sentence or a fine up to $5,000. But such cases were hard to prove in court. A female was considered “an incompetent witness,” at least until the law changed in 1891 which allowed her to testify.

Texas’s statute provided an escape clause if the male were willing to make good on his promise. “If the parties marry each other at any time before the conviction of the defendant in good faith…no prosecution shall take place, or, if begun, it shall be dismissed,” the law stated.

Did John Wilkes Booth Flee to Texas?

Russell Cummings at 

the premiere of The 

Legend 

of Hell's Gate 

     Many tales are told of infamous characters such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and John Wilkes Booth faking their own deaths and fleeing to Texas and assuming new identities. The late outlaw historian and author Phillip Steele once told me that of all of the claims he had heard, the one he considered most intriguing was that of John St. Helen, believed by many to have been John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. St. Helen, a barkeep, ended up in the small town of Granbury in the 1870s. About thirty miles away, near Stephenville, lived a woman identified only as “Mrs. Booth,” who claimed that Lincoln’s assassin was her husband’s cousin. “It is generally believed that Booth is dead, reported the Stephenville Empire (Aug. 8, 1885), “but this lady says that it a mistake; that he is still alive, and that the family knows where he is.” 

     Granbury would not only become home to John St. Helen, but also to  J. Frank Dalton, who made headlines in 1948 when he claimed to be Jesse James. Dalton was not alone; Phillip Steele found at least a half-dozen other men who claimed to be that Wild West bandit.

     I recently attended the premiere of   The Legend of Hell's Gate,a Western that depicts John St. Helen, J. Frank Dalton, and John Davis Howard (an alias of Jesse James) in Texas. St. Helen is portrayed by Henry Thomas, with Lukas Behnken as Dalton and Russell Quinn Cummings as Howard. Perhaps one of the lines in the movie best explains why John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James would supposedly end up in the same small town: “Granbury can be a great place to become someone else.”

The State of Texas vs. One Chicken

While searching through 100-year-old criminal records in Waco, Texas, I came across an indictment against “one Chicken.” Although it may sound like a case of a fowl running afoul of the law, it was a situation where officials filed charges against a lawbreaker who was only known by his nickname: Chicken. 

     Similarly, Erath County officials charged “One Cat-Faced Kid” with gaming within the city of Dublin in November 1891. Then in May of 1894 a charge of prostitution was filed against “One Cross-Eyed Woman.” 

     Chicken’s identity surfaces in another indictment in Waco. In January 1903 Jonathan Columbus Turnbow, alias Chicken, did “unlawfully keep and exhibit, for the purpose of gaming, a gaming table and bank.” In 1910 either he or one of his relatives, noted only as “Mr. Turnbow,” and a madam, Mary Doud, were subpoenaed as witnesses in the State of Texas vs. Mary Hayden in which the accused was charged with running a brothel in Waco.

     Sometimes indictments reveal the true identities of these colorfully named characters when arrests were made. The accused, if posting bond, had to sign his or her name. But not so in the cases of Erath County’s feline-faced kid or the cross-eyed hooker, both of whom apparently eluded capture.

The Murder of Josiah Philips

     A story featured in Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes & Scandals in a Small Texas Town tells of schoolteacher Josiah Philips who had only been married a couple of months when the Lone Star State became embroiled in the War Between the States. Enlisting in the Confederate States Army, he was appointed chaplain of his regiment. Philips became a Presbyterian minister after the war, and he and his wife became parents to seven children, all of whom they raised on an Erath County farm.

(Courtesy of Stephenville Museum)

     One of Philips’s older sons, Willard, was judged insane and institutionalized, but in January of 1898 his parents brought their thirty-year-old son back home. He was not entirely discharged from the asylum, and the parents were cautioned that they may need to send him back.
     A little after dark on Saturday, May 7, 1898, Reverend Philips completed his work and returned home in his wagon. His son, hearing the father drive into the lot, took a gun and went outside to greet his father with gunfire. The fatal shot struck Josiah Philips in the lower part of his face on the right side, blasting away his jaw line. The killer was arrested and lodged in the county jail on Sunday morning. His trial was set for Monday, May 23.
     As Willard Philips was found insane, officials returned him to the asylum on November 17. Two years later residents of Erath County were shocked by similar murder in their midst. In April of 1900 nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter May Bruce took an axe and gave her mother several whacks. May, a blue-eyed, dark-haired beauty, who had been an affectionate and attentive daughter and a good student in school, could offer no motivation for the crime. “Do not know why I did it,” she said. “There was not a cross word between us. No quarrel; nothing at all.”
    The story of mysterious May Bruce also unfolds in the pages of  Sins of the Pioneers. In researching this bizarre case, I had the opportunity to meet and visit with three of May’s nieces who shared interesting family stories for the book.  

The Ghost at McDow's Hole

McDow's Hole as it looks today
(Courtesy of Sherri Knight)

In Sins of the Pioneers: Crimes & Scandals in a Small Texas Town, I told the legend of Jenny Papworth, a young wife and mother who met her fate at the hands of ruthless cattle-rustlers along McDow’s Hole, in Erath County, sometime in the 1870s. Several versions of this story were repeated over the years, always ending with eerie nighttime sightings of Jenny Papworth’s ghostly return to her neighborhood. Witnesses insisted that the willowy apparition bellows a blood-curdling scream.    

Sheriff R. T. Long
(Courtesy of Stephenville Museum)

One entirely different version of the haunting at McDow’s Hole made its way into the pages of a national magazine sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s when Texas writer Lewis Nordyke wrote an article for Cavalier called “Even the Ghosts Are Greater in Texas.” According to Nordyke, Sheriff R. T. Long, believing that the screams were made by a panther, kept a late-night vigil at McDow’s Hole until he, too, saw a strange apparition, a cloud forming over the water that morphed into the shape of a woman clutching a baby. Long, as the story goes, reported hearing the cloudy figure emit a piercing scream. “There is no man on earth who can begin to describe the feeling that comes over you when you are near McDow after sundown,” Long reportedly said. "You are scared to the marrow of your bones whether you see or hear anything or not."