Murder Most Texan

Introduction

We Texans love our history, our folklore and our myths. But we sometimes run into trouble when we cannot tell the difference.

For example, many of us believe that crime and punishment was a cut-and-dried affair in the good old days, that the Texas Rangers and peace officers on down the line always got their man and the wrongdoer always got what was coming to him. And, oh yes, jurors were not as easily fooled by smooth-talking lawyers as they are nowadays.

I may have thought that, too, thirty-one years ago before I began writing This Week in Texas History for small-town and suburban newspapers. But the research that went into the 1,600 columns I have written to date has taught me a thing or two, and one of those things is that criminals who were as guilty as sin beat the legal system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with appalling regularity. Crime may not pay, but sometimes it does not cost all that much! And on the flip side of that same coin, the innocent were all too often convicted of crimes they did not commit.

All this needed saying before you dive into the collection of sixteen classic murder stories from the Lone Star past that compose Murder Most Texan. While I have tried to keep the graphic details to a minimum for your stomach’s sake and mine, murder can be messy. Rest assured, I did not choose these specific cases for their shock value but rather for their inherent worth as fascinating glimpses into the dark side of human nature.

That and the simple fact that each one of these real-life stories is a part of Texas history and a darn good read!

CHAPTER 1

Texas Town Never Forgot Diamond Bessie

Present-day Jefferson is a popular place with the bed-and-breakfast set and travelers, who cannot get enough of quaint antique shops. Those visitors who take the time to dip their toes in the history of this out-of-the-way tourist attraction are invariably surprised to learn it was once Texas’ second-busiest port and sixth-largest city.

How could a town hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico and less than twenty from the Louisiana border ever have been a bustling inland harbor? The answer is a freak of nature known as the Red River Raft, a centuries-old logjam that made a network of interconnected waterways navigable all the way to Shreveport and New Orleans. Texas was still an independent republic in 1843, when the first steamboat reached Jefferson, ushering in a period of prosperity and growth that peaked three decades later with a population of 7,300.

The glory days came to a dead stop in 1873 with the removal of the Raft and the completion of the Texas & Pacific (T&P) Railroad line from Texarkana to Marshall. Overnight, the level of the Red River dropped precipitously, and Shreveport replaced Jefferson as the port of choice. The T&P linked the bypassed community to the main line the next year, but token rail service was not enough to prevent businesses from closing and residents from leaving town.

Jefferson was still managing to keep up appearances when a well-dressed couple stepped off the train on January 19, 1877. They took a carriage to the Brooks House, where the man signed the hotel register as A. Monroe and wife. Curious locals heard him call his eye-candy companion Bessie, a name they amended to Diamond Bessie because of the expensive jewels she wore around her neck and in rings on most of her dainty fingers.

Jeffersonians would learn in time the true identities of the twosome they found so fascinating. Both were the black sheep of their respective and respectable families. A. Monroe was Abraham Rothschild, son of a wealthy jeweler in Cincinnati, whose drinking, gambling and womanizing had tried his father’s patience to the point of disinheritance. Bessie was Annie Stone, born in 1854 to the owner of a Syracuse shoe store. She ran away from home at fifteen to be the full-time mistress of a man by the name of Moore. When they parted company, she took his last name with her and as Bessie Moore plied her trade as a prostitute in infamous fleshpots like New Orleans and Hot Springs.

It was at the Arkansas resort that Abe and Bessie met a year or maybe two before their grand entrance in Jefferson. Since his father had cut him off, Abe looked to Bessie to keep him in the style to which he had been accustomed his entire life. Given her affection for the scoundrel, she was happy to oblige but drew the line at selling her diamonds. When they fought, which had been often of late, it was over the jewels and her iron-willed determination to hold on to her prize possessions come hell or high water.

On Sunday, January 21, their third day in town, the couple decided to go on a picnic. With two fried chicken dinners under one arm and Bessie on the other, Abe strolled across the bridge over Big Cypress Creek and into the woods. He was alone when next seen in town that afternoon but made no effort to stay out of sight. In response to courteous inquiries about his wife, he said she was visiting friends in the area and would rejoin him in plenty of time to catch the eastbound train on Tuesday.

But that was not what happened. Witnesses would remember watching Mr. Monroe climb onboard the train with the complete set of matching luggage the two brought with them. But no one could recall seeing the missus since her picnic departure on Sunday.

A winter storm soon blew in, dumping half a foot of snow on northeastern Texas and subjecting Jefferson to a week of subfreezing weather. When the temperature at last began to rise, Sarah King went hunting for firewood and found instead the partially decomposed body of a woman in exceptionally fine clothes. She had been sitting on the ground with her back against an oak tree when her unknown assailant fired a single bullet at point-blank range through her temple.

Even though she had been stripped of her trademark jewelry, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the victim was the woman the townspeople had nicknamed Diamond Bessie. Jefferson was a long way from the wild frontier (in culture as well as distance), and murder, especially of a member of the fairer sex, was not an everyday event. That may explain why the inhabitants took pity on poor Bessie and paid for her plot and burial out of their own pockets.

The Monroes had mentioned a short stay in Marshall prior to their arrival in Jefferson. The authorities located the hotel where the couple had spent two nights and demanded to see the register. Right there in black and white was A. Monroe’s real name and his hometown. The Texas Rangers and Marion County sheriff arrested Abraham Rothschild in his Cincinnati hospital bed, where he was recovering from a self-inflicted wound. During a clumsy attempt to take his own life, the drunk had succeeded in putting out his right eye.

Meyer Rothschild may have washed his hands of his worthless offspring, but he could not sit back and allow his flesh and blood to hang for murder in faraway Texas. He financed the fight against extradition on behalf of his boy but lost that round when the governor of Ohio signed the order to send Abraham back to Jefferson on March 19, 1877.

While the wheels of Lone Star justice were famous for grinding at breakneck speed in those days, in this case they had trouble getting traction. Endless legal maneuvering by both camps and a change of venue to Marshall stalled the process for twenty months.

When the trial finally got underway in December 1878, there was hardly room for all the attorneys at the defense and prosecution tables. Papa Rothschild spent a huge chunk of the family fortune to hire the best legal talent on the market, leading one of Abe’s lawyers to brag that his fee was so big he never would have to work another day in his life. Shocked by this barefaced attempt to buy an acquittal, Governor Richard Hubbard sent reinforcements to the outnumbered prosecutor in the form of two assistant attorneys general.

The courtroom drama dragged on for three long weeks, as what must have seemed like half the populace of Jefferson gave sworn testimony for and against the accused. Being an attorney himself, the judge felt obligated to let every lawyer have his say during the summation and set aside three full days for closing arguments. To no one’s surprise, the dozen and a half counsels used every minute of the allotted time.

The foreman of the jury set the tone for the deliberations by sketching a passable likeness of a noose on the wall, autographing the artwork and declaring the drawing his verdict. The other eleven followed suit and in nothing flat found Abe Rothschild guilty as charged and sentenced him to swing. But Abe never made it to the gallows. His conviction was overturned on appeal primarily because the trial judge had permitted a prospective juror to take a seat on the panel after stating in open court that the defendant was guilty and ought to hang.

Jefferson courthouse in 1889, nine years after Abraham Rothschild’s second murder trial. Library of Congress.

Two years later to the month, the second trial was gaveled to order in Jefferson on December 14, 1880. The star witness for the state was Jennie Simpson, who testified under oath that she saw Abe return from the picnic without Bessie but with her diamond rings as plain as day on his fingers.

The defense counterpunched with Isabelle Gouldy, who was equally as firm in her belief that it was Bessie she saw with a strange man the day before her disappearance and four days after she was supposed to be dead. While there was neither testimony nor physical evidence to support the sighting, Abe’s attorneys had planted the seeds of doubt that bore fruit during deliberations.

The jury needed only four hours to arrive at a unanimous verdict of not guilty. Flanked by his much poorer father and weeping mother, Abe Rothschild practically sprinted to a waiting carriage that took the