July 2002
Dead Line
Homicide in Texas has a lively history. From the slaying of LaSalle to the killing of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, we present a crash course in murder and mayhem. And if you find it gross or ghastly—well, shoot.
French explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle is murdered on March 19 in central East Texas by Pierre Duhaut, who, along with other mutinous members of La Salle's expedition, had killed the explorer's nephew with an ax two days earlier and wanted to prevent retaliation.
On May 11 a soldier and one of the priests of Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria Mission, near present-day Rockdale, are found dead, the former with a gunshot wound, the latter with an arrow through his heart. The chief suspect is the commander of a nearby presidio with whom the mission priests have long feuded. The accused, who blames local Indians for the double killing, will be confined at another fort for eight years.
Comanche raiders attack Fort Parker in what is now Limestone County on May 19, murder founders Silas, Benjamin, and John Parker, and kidnap two women and three children. One of the children is nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, who becomes the most famous Indian captive in Texas history.
The Killough Massacre, the October 5 murder of eighteen white settlers in what is now Cherokee County, sparks the Cherokee War. Mirabeau B. Lamar, the president of the Republic of Texas, orders five hundred soldiers to the area to drive out the tribe for slaughtering the Isaac Killough family and their neighbors. The soldiers shoot more than one hundred Indians, and the defeated Cherokees leave Texas.
Texas Ranger Mabry "Mustang" Gray, accompanied by a gang of fellow hell-raisers, attacks a party of Mexicans near Goliad. The victims are respectable traders returning from a business trip to Victoria, but Gray and his cohorts rob the men, strip them, bind them together, and then shoot repeatedly into the terrified group. One, Manuel Escobedo, plays dead and survives, but the authorities never charge Gray, who will command a contingent of Texas Rangers in the Mexican War.
Jane Elkins, a slave convicted of murder, becomes the first woman legally executed in the state of Texas. She is hanged on May 27 in Dallas.
A group of Texans led by Juan Nepomuceno Cortina annihilates the state's last remaining encampment of Karankawa Indians, rendering the tribe essentially extinct. Cortina, an early activist for Hispanics' rights, will later become a folk hero.
Fearing a slave insurrection, vigilante groups in North and East Texas hang as many as one hundred people, both slaves and abolitionists, between July and September.
In what is euphemistically termed the Battle of the Nueces, on August 10 in present-day Kinney County, Confederate soldiers chase down and kill 28 German settlers who are attempting to escape into Mexico because their sympathies lie with the Union.
Josefa "Chipita" Rodriguez is hanged in San Patricio on November 13 for the ax murder of an Anglo man who stayed at her inn. She may be the inspiration for La Llorona, the crying ghost of Tejano legend. In 1985 state senator Carlos Truan will persuade the Texas Legislature to pass a resolution absolving her of the murder.
The Jesse James and Cole Younger gangs receive temporary shelter in the Scyene home of the teenage Belle Starr, who will go on to earn the nickname the Bandit Queen. Suspected of multiple murders and robberies, she will have liaisons with numerous fellow outlaws and will herself be shot dead in 1889. Her murder will remain unsolved.
In March deputy sheriff William Sutton kills horse thief Charley Taylor in downtown Bastrop, launching an eight-year feud, the longest and bloodiest in Texas history. At least 21 men in the Sutton and Taylor factions will lose their lives.
Bass Reeves becomes the first black U.S. deputy marshal in Texas, patrolling a large area south of the Red River from Paris to Sherman. He tracks and arrests scores of suspected murderers, including, at one point, his own son.
Outlaws Sam Bass and Bill Longley meet their maker. Bass is shot by Texas Rangers and vigilantes in Round Rock on July 19 and dies two days later; Longley is hanged before a crowd of thousands in Giddings on October 11.
In the Fence-Cutting War, which rages across Central Texas, confrontations between proponents of the open range and ranchers who favor barbed wire cause at least three deaths.
Two murderous lawmen, deputy sheriff John King Fisher and former U.S. marshal Ben Thompson, die in a March 11 ambush by gunman Joe Foster at a vaudeville theater in San Antonio.
In Austin a serial killer dubbed the Servant Girl Annihilator hacks eight people to death with an ax. The case is never solved.
Outlaw Luke Short kills former Fort Worth town marshal Longhair Jim Courtwright in a duel on February 8. The killing impels the city to undertake a major cleanup of its red-light district, Hell's Half-Acre.
Pardoned by Governor James Hogg after serving sixteen years for murder, gunslinger John Wesley Hardin is shot in the back of the head on August 19 while rolling dice in El Paso's Acme Saloon. The killer is John Selman, a notoriously corrupt constable who will be shot dead the following year by U.S. deputy marshal George Scarborough.
Rancher and businessman Dick Bivins, a member of a prominent Amarillo family, is shot and killed by Skid Ellis, a saloonkeeper who is enraged that the cattleman is dallying with Ellis' niece.
Waco's William Cowper Brann, an opinionated journalist who publishes an inflammatory rag called The Iconoclast, is shot in the back on April Fool's Day by Tom E. Davis, who is fed up with Brann's unrelenting ridicule of Baptists. Brann manages to kill his assailant before he dies.
George Morrison, a Methodist preacher in the town of Panhandle, is hanged for the fatal poisoning of his wife, whom he had wanted out of the way because he was in love with another woman.
Wealthy businessman William Marsh Rice, formerly of Houston, is poisoned with chloroform and mercury on September 23 in New York City by his valet, Charles F. Jones. Jones had plotted with Rice's lawyer Albert T. Patrick, who committed forgery in an attempt to inherit Rice's $5.6 million estate. Jones will testify at Patrick's trial and be set free; Patrick will be sentenced to death but later pardoned. Their victim's money will go instead to found Houston's Rice Institute, now Rice University.
Offended by what they misinterpret as insults, the Anglo sheriff of Karnes County and two deputies try to arrest an innocent Spanish speaker, Gregorio Cortez, for horse theft on June 12. The sheriff, W. T. "Brack" Morris, shoots, and Cortez, returning fire, kills him. Cortez becomes the subject of a huge manhunt and the hero of some of the most famous border corridos, or ballads, chronicling the mistreatment of Hispanics by whites.
In what becomes known as the Waco Horror, an illiterate black farmhand named Jesse Washington is convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman on May 15. Before he can be led from the courtroom, however, dozens of spectators drag him outside, hang him, douse him with coal oil, and burn him alive while four hundred townspeople watch.
Singer-guitarist Huddie Ledbetter is sentenced to thirty years at a Bowie County prison farm for murdering a relative with whom he had argued. During his time in prison, where he will be nicknamed Leadbelly, he will continue to write songs; after dedicating one to Governor Pat Neff, Neff will pardon him. He will go on to become one of Texas' greatest bluesmen.
The Texas Legislature votes to change the state's official method of execution from hanging to death by electrocution, ending the era of public executions. The following year, Charles Reynolds, a convicted killer from Red River County, will become the first inmate to die in the electric chair, a.k.a. Old Sparky. The chair will be retired in 1964.
Four men, including one dressed as Santa Claus, hold up the First National Bank in Cisco two days before Christmas. In the ensuing shoot-out, one of the robbers and the chief of police and a deputy are all mortally wounded. After an extensive manhunt, the three surviving perpetrators are caught in the town of Graham. Two are sentenced to death; one gets 99 years in prison.
On May 9 more than five thousand people surround the Grayson County courthouse in Sherman, intent on lynching prisoner George Hughes, a black man accused of raping a white woman. The crowd eventually sets fire to the courthouse, which burns to the ground. Hughes, who has been locked up for his own safety, dies of smoke inhalation, but they pull out his corpse and hang it anyway.
