The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (25 page)

Walt gaped at him, his eyes wide and watering and his nose abruptly running. Ketchel’s handprint bright red on his cheek.

“You sorry little puke,” Ketchel said. He held the rifle like a pistol and jabbed Walt in the chest with the muzzle. “Real killer, huh?”

Walt cringed at the touch of the muzzle. His mouth twitched.

“Take some advice, moron. You want to kill a man, use a real gun, not a toy like this.” He waggled the barrel in Walt’s face and laughed. “You’da shot me with this, I’da said
ouch
and then took it from you and rammed it so far up your ass it woulda come out your nose.”

He looked at Goldie, who stood paralyzed with her fists to her mouth, her eyes huge.

“This stupid hillbilly’s exactly what you deserve,” Ketchel told her. He tossed the rifle on the bed. “Get out of here, both of you. You’re fired.”

He turned and sat down to resume his breakfast and was raising the fork to his mouth when Goldie cried,
“No!”

He was halfway out of his chair when the rifleshot shook the room and he was punched hard on the back and lurched forward and jarred the table and then fell to his knees and folded to the floor. He couldn’t catch his breath. He saw the fine grain of the floor planks under his face and felt sick to his stomach and thought
he might throw up and then closed his eyes and felt slightly better. He heard the woman saying Oh God oh God and Hurtz saying He had it coming goddamnit he did and then their voices incomprehensibly fast and urgent and then she was saying No listen
listen
here’s what happened and then again he couldn’t understand their words and then heard heavy fast steps going out of the room and he felt something on his cheek and he knew it was the woman’s hand and he wanted to open his eyes but couldn’t and he sensed her face near his and heard her ask in a whisper if he was alive and heard himself groan and her hand left him and again heavy running steps and Hurtz saying I got it I got it and he felt hands at his pockets and heard steps hurrying into the kitchen and the screech of the rear door and voices outside and a shout of I shot the son of a bitch!

H
E KNEW HE’D
been unconscious but sensed that it hadn’t been long. He was not breathing well, as if something sharply rigid were wedged high under his ribs near the base of his throat. He could not overcome his astonishment at being floored by a .22 round. He made it to hands and knees but when he tried to stand up the floor swayed and he fell over. He was able to get back to all fours, then moved ahead ponderously, each forward placement of hand and knee a grunting effort, the floor seeming to give to right and left with each shifting of his weight as if it were a thin raft afloat. His improbable notion was to get to his gun and go after Hurtz. He traversed the dining room and made the parlor, blood dripping from his chin, smearing on the planks under his knees. He several times collapsed and then was crawling again. Now he was in his room and paused to rest. Now at the dresser and pausing again, thinking It was only a goddamn .22 for Christ’s sake, you only had
the wind knocked out of you, that’s all, you’re all right, you’re all right. Now
get up.
Onnnne…. Twoooo…. Groaning, gasping, using the dresser knobs to help pull himself up to his knees. Threeee…. Foooour…. Up on one knee now. Fiiiive…. Siiiix…. Grabbing the top of the dresser and bringing down the wash basin on its doily with a clanging splash. Sevvvven…. Eiiight…. Get up, man, get up!…Niiinne…. He was up. And saw the Colt was gone. The room undulated. He reeled to his bed and fell.

W
HEN NEXT HE
opened his eyes, he was lying on his side, his breath coming harder.

A stranger sat in a chair close beside the bed. He said, “I’m Noland, the carpenter. Bailey phoned the doctor in Conway. The constable, too. And the colonel over in Springfield. The colonel’s coming on a special train. Help’s coming, mister.”

“Thirsty,” Ketchel said. He started to roll onto his back but Noland grabbed him and said, “Don’t do that. You been shot in the back. Stay on your side.”

Noland fetched a glass of water and sat on the edge of the bed and held Ketchel’s head as he put the glass to his lips.

Ketchel took a few sips. “There’s blood in the water. I taste it.”

“Hang on, mister. They’ll be here soon.”

“I guess they got me, huh?”

Noland nodded sadly, wondering who this man was and who it was that had got him.

T
HE
C
ONWAY CONSTABLE
arrived, accompanied by a doctor. Ketchel was only partly conscious as they got his shirt off and the doctor examined the wound. He heard the doctor speaking low
like a priest in the confessional, felt the constable gently searching his pockets, heard him curse and say he’d likely been robbed. And then he was out again….

And then again awake, though he could not muster the strength to open his eyes. He heard talk…. Walt Hurtz on the lam…. The woman under arrest….

And then again awake to feel a hand stroking his hair, and opened his eyes. Saw it was the colonel, his gaze tearful.

“You’re going to be all right, son, you are. You are. Tell me,
was
it Walter Hurtz? Was it him, son?”

“Yes.” He tasted blood.

The colonel stroked Ketchel’s face and said they were taking him to the hospital, where surgeons would be waiting to fix him up good as new. “I’ll be right back, son. And I’ll be with you all the way.” He left the room and then Ketchel heard him say, “No-good lowdown bitch!” and the sound of what could only be a slap, and a woman yelped and someone said, “Enough! Enough now!” Then the colonel shouting,
“Five thousand dollars
to the man who brings me that son of a bitch dead.
Dead,
you hear! Not a nickel for him alive! Put the word out! Five thousand for the bastard’s head! Bring me his head!”

Daddy….

T
HEY CARRIED HIM
lying sidewise on the mattress and laid it in a wagon and drove him to the train, the colonel and two doctors at his side. He heard one say something about a kind of cavity filling up, about drowning, and he wondered who it was that had drowned and where. At the depot they carried him into a coach and laid him on a waiting cot. He heard somebody say all scheduled runs had been shunted onto sidings so the colonel’s train
could speed straight through to Springfield. And it seemed as though the train rumbled under him for bare minutes before they were carrying him off and under a bright cold sun to a motor truck and placing him on the mattress in its bed and the truck was moving and the colonel was saying, “Almost there, son, almost there,” and he could hear his father sobbing and cursing the driver, ordering him to go faster, goddamnit, and then they had him on a gurney and were wheeling him down various corridors and into a room with overhead lights so bright he could see them through his closed eyelids and all the while his breathing became more labored and the taste of blood was stronger and he felt himself quivering as if he were still on the rumbling train and….

…he’s riding the rails on a boxcar roof under a starry night sky and laughing at some joke by the hobo called Steamer and seeing the one called Eight Ball dangling from the rods and ripping to pieces and remembering Butte’s bonecracking winter cold and its summer stinks and its lack of color and no birds and Kate Morgan’s eloquent eyes and marvelous ass and happy laughter and expert instruction in shooting a revolver and he loves her more than he’ll ever love anyone else on earth and the blue fog of San Francisco like a dream and pretty Molly on that New Year’s Eve so happy and then so scared and fighting Joe Thomas in a nighttime thunderstorm and laughing with the wonderful Arapaho Sisters and the three of them dancing together and them talking him into the tattoo and all the fine days in all the good training camps and playing poker with Joe O’Connor and the Goat and getting caught cheating in the bunkhouse and the train trips across the amazing beauty of the country and Billy Papke’s heartbreak on his bloody face after their last fight and the redhead with Jack Johnson and her peachy tits and wondering evermore if they were freckled and
seeing big black Jack on the canvas looking up in disbelief and laughing with those gold teeth as he hit Jeffries again and waving so long as he gunned away in the yellow Packard and Jack London’s grand inscription and swaying on the tabletop in Raul’s yelling of ashes and dust and all the grand times in New York with Willie Britt and the smothering flowers of his grave and Jewel reading his behind and Evelyn showing him the front-row seat and sobbing into her pillow and his mother playing the piano and he and John singing and Killer Kid Tracy saying where you want the body sent and…

…he laughed through the blood and….

From the
New York Times
edition of October 16, 1910:

From the
Springfield Leader
edition of October 16, 1910:

G
RIM
R
EAPER
C
ONQUERS
K
ETCHEL IN
L
AST
G
REAT
F
IGHT OF
H
IS
C
AREER

Pugilist Dies Shortly After His Arrival
At Springfield Hospital

V
ERY LATE THAT
night Wilson Mizner was in a Manhattan saloon rolling dice with the bartender for the round when a sportswriter came in and announced that Stanley Ketchel had been shot dead in Missouri by the jealous husband of a tootsie who was making Ketchel’s breakfast.

There was excited murmuring along the bar. Mizner stared at the hack a moment, then rolled the dice. Boxcars.

He swore softly and paid off the bartender, then headed for the door. He was almost to it when he stopped and turned and shouted at the room: “Bullshit! They couldn’t kill that kid with a cannon. Tell them to start counting to ten over him and he’ll get up. They’ll see! They’ll see!”

T
he day after the shooting, Walter Hurtz, soon revealed to be Walter Dipley, was captured at a nearby farm, identified by the tattoos on his arms, and charged with the murder of Stanley Ketchel. Goldie Hurtz, soon revealed to be Goldie Smith, was charged as his accomplice.

Goldie cried rape. And Dipley claimed he killed Ketchel in self-defense when he confronted him about the attack on his wife and Ketchel threatened to shoot him.

At first, the couple received a measure of public sympathy due to the “unwritten law” that justified a husband’s killing of his wife’s violator, but when it became known that Walt and Goldie were in fact not married but living in sin, the sympathy largely waned. And as still other unsavory details about the defendants were brought to
light in the newspapers, public opinion almost entirely turned against them.

Stanley Ketchel’s body was buried in the Polish cemetery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on October 20, 1910. Three months later Walter Dipley and Goldie Smith stood trial in the hamlet of Marshfield, seat of Webster County, Missouri.

A
CCORDING TO THE
defendants, Ketchel raped Goldie on the night of October 14, and later that evening she told Dipley about it. The following morning, Ketchel was seated at breakfast and had his revolver in his waistband when Dipley accused him of the assault. He looked at Dipley over his shoulder and threatened to kill him, saying: “God damn you, if you start anything I will shoot you in two.” Dipley grabbed up a .22 rifle leaning against the foot of the dining room bed and told Ketchel to put up his hands. Ketchel said he would not, then started to stand and reach for his gun. Fearing for his life, Dipley shot him. He took the revolver from the fallen Ketchel in case he yet had the strength to use it. He and Goldie then left the house and ran into Bailey and Brazeale and told them what happened. Bailey advised that he turn himself in to the Conway constable. But Dipley knew that R. P. Dickerson had many friends in the region, including the constable, and he feared what they might do to him in the Conway jail. He intended to give himself up to the sheriff in Marshfield, in whose jail he believed he would be safer. But he was captured before he got there.

Assisted by a talented attorney hired by R. P. Dickerson, the prosecution derided Dipley’s claim of self-defense and emphasized the defendants’ criminal pasts and low reputations. As a navy deserter, Dipley had been a fugitive from justice even before taking flight after murdering Mr. Ketchel, and the Smith woman was on
judicial record as an unfit mother and was widely known to have led a sordid personal life. The sheriff of Coffeyville himself testified to her immoral livelihood in Kansas. In contrast, the state presented Stanley Ketchel as a person of exemplary character and called forth a series of respectable witnesses to so testify, though it seemed odd to some observers that R. P. Dickerson was not put on the stand, he who had been Ketchel’s closest friend.

The state offered at least two possible motives for the murder. The most likely was robbery. Mr. Ketchel was known to carry as much as a thousand dollars on his person at all times, but when he was found mortally wounded in the house his pockets were empty. Although no cash had been found on Dipley when he was arrested, neither had he been in possession of Mr. Ketchel’s pistol, having hidden it in a corn crib, as he later confessed, and where it was recovered. Who could say where he might have hidden the money in hope of recovering it later? Perhaps the defendants had intended simply to rob Mr. Ketchel and make their escape before he could notify police, but of course Mr. Ketchel would have resisted, and he was shot from behind when some distraction, most likely the Smith woman, caused him to turn his back to Dipley. The couple had then hastily fabricated their account of rape and mortal threat. Another possibility, considering her nature and personal history, was that the Smith woman attempted to seduce Mr. Ketchel and, given his upright character, was certainly rebuffed. Her pride injured and her relation with Dipley at risk should Mr. Ketchel inform him of her overture, she lied to Dipley about being raped, enraging him to homicide.

Whatever the killers’ true motive, the prosecution concluded, all that mattered were the facts. And the plainest and most irrefutable fact of the case was that Stanley Ketchel, the middleweight cham
pion of the world and a man revered by millions, a man who in the short time he’d lived in the region had become a highly respected member of the Springfield community, had been shot in the back.
In the back,
gentlemen of the jury. What could be more deliberate than a back shooting? What could be more cowardly? What could be more manifestly murderous?

Other than hold fast to the contention of self-defense, Dipley’s lawyers could do little except to claim prejudicial motive by the prosecution. The persistent disparagement of the defendants through R. P. Dickerson’s friends in the press and the denigration of their characters by Dickerson’s crony lawyer in the hire of the state were motivated expressly by Dickerson’s misguided desire for revenge. And the reason R. P. Dickerson was so vehemently bent on vengeance was that he was in fact the sire of Stanley Ketchel.

The assertion raised eyebrows across the country. What basis the defense had for making the claim was never revealed, nor what evidence, if any, it possessed to substantiate it. Nevertheless, defense lawyers asked various witnesses if they were aware that R. P. Dickerson was Stanley Ketchel’s father. In every instance, the state immediately objected and the judge each time sustained.

Dickerson publicly refuted the allegation. He said he wished it were true he was Stanley’s father, for he was the sort of young man anyone would be proud to call son, but in fact he and the young champion had simply been the best of friends. He admitted that he had been schoolmates with Ketchel’s mother in Michigan, but that was the extent of his relationship with her. He said the defense attorneys should be horsewhipped for causing such malicious and unwarranted embarrassment to Mrs. Ketchel with their falsehoods, especially in this time of her immeasurable grief.

Sought out by reporters for comment, Julia Ketchel said the
matter was embarrassing, and was quoted as stating: “If necessary to convict the slayer of my son, I will go to the witness stand and tell the whole world of my relations with R. P. Dickerson.”

The colonel hastened to explain that the brave woman simply meant she was not only willing to come all the way to Missouri to undergo the terrible humiliation of denying the outlandish accusation in an open courtroom, but was willing as well to suffer at even closer hand the publicity attendant upon her son’s murder, not to mention the ordeal of having to look upon the faces of his assassins.

As it happened, there was no need of Julia Ketchel’s appearance in the courtroom. The judge ruled that since R. P. Dickerson had not been obliged to take the witness stand, the question of his relationship to the victim was immaterial.

O
N
J
ANUARY
24, 1911, Walter Dipley and Goldie Smith were found guilty of the first-degree murder of Stanley Ketchel. The only point of debate among the jurors during their seventeen hours of deliberation pertained to the matter of sentencing. All of them were in favor of Dipley’s execution, but some argued that since both defendants were equally guilty they should receive equal punishment, and not a man of them was willing to send a woman to the gallows. Thus did Goldie save Walt from the noose. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment.

Their conviction was appealed to the state supreme court, which determined that, since she had taken no part in the shooting and there had been no proof of conspiracy, Goldie was guiltless. She had served seventeen months when she was set free.

Walter Dipley’s conviction was upheld. He would be paroled in 1934 and die in Utah of kidney disease in 1956.

G
OLDIE
S
MITH HAD
hoped for celebrity on her release from prison, envisioning herself portrayed in national magazines as the Evelyn Nesbit of the Ozarks. She was bitterly disappointed by the universal lack of interest in her story. She would move back to Springfield and manage a café for a time before taking her fourth husband, “Gentleman Jim” Hooper, a silver-haired gambler of bright personal charm whose luck at the tables went suddenly dark. He would finally turn to barbering in order to make a living, then one day settle into the shop chair for his usual noontime nap and never wake up. Goldie would grieve briefly. By then a corpulent dowd, she would not marry again, and would spend her final years as a seller of gimcrackery from the porch of her house.

R
OLLIN
P. D
ICKERSON
paid five thousand dollars for a Vermont marble monument more than twelve feet tall to stand over Ketchel’s grave. He refused, however, to pay the five thousand dollar reward to the men who’d captured Dipley. The reward, the colonel argued, was specifically for bringing in Dipley dead, not alive. The case went to court and the judge ruled that Dickerson’s stipulation was unlawful in that it amounted to solicitation of homicide. The colonel was ordered to pay the reward.

Age would neither dull the color of Dickerson’s character nor curb his eccentric leanings. On America’s entry in the Great War, he would propose to create and command a volunteer regiment of “Rough Riders” to confront the Hun, and the United States government would politely decline his offer. So he would instead establish the world’s largest mule ranch in order to ensure that the U. S. Army met with no shortage of good mules. Following the armistice, he would press his political friends in Jefferson City to pass legislation granting surplus military armament, including
machine guns and hand grenades, to police departments around the state, the better to arm them against the red troublemakers that continued to plague the republic. He would be instrumental in the formation of a loyalty league whose purpose was to foster patriotism in all corners of the country and maintain vigilance against subversive groups. He would keep wild animals as pets, including a pair of African lions, one of whom he named Stanley. He would permit them to roam freely over the estate and would quip that he had no problem with trespassers.

He would make a sort of shrine of Ketchel’s ranch house bedroom. Would hang its walls with posters advertising his fights against Joe Thomas, Billy Papke, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, and Jack Johnson. With framed photographs of Ketchel in the ring and on the town in New York, at work on the ranch, puffing a cigar on the porch, dandling his young niece on his knee. With a photo of Ketchel standing alongside Emmett Dalton at the Democratic convention in Jeff City and both of them staring narrow-eyed at the camera, and with one of Ketchel and the colonel himself, each with an arm around the other’s shoulders, both of them laughing hard at some joke the colonel had ever since tried to recall but could not. Every year, on the fifteenth of October, Dickerson would go into that special room with several bottles of whiskey and a box of cigars and shut himself inside and not emerge until two or three or four days later, haggard and red-eyed with drink and with weeping. An annual ritual he would maintain until his death in 1938.

T
HE NEWS OF
Ketchel’s killing nearly broke Billy Papke’s heart. Now he could never prove to the world he was the better of that son of a bitch.

Born just three days after Stanley Ketchel, Billy Papke would outlive him by twenty-six years. Yet it would be difficult to argue that his extra quarter century of life constituted any kind of victory over his nemesis.

Even after Ketchel’s death, Papke’s claim to the middleweight title would not be universally recognized. The lack of full recognition would rankle him for the next three years and then he would lose his portion of the championship to Frank Klaus in Paris by disqualification for persistent fouling. He would not fight for more than two years, and then barely manage a draw in Brooklyn against a palooka. Almost four years would pass before his next and final fight, a four-round loss in San Francisco.

He would then work as a referee for a time. He would serve as host for a posh Los Angeles nightclub and regale patrons with recounts of his fights, the most often requested being those of his contests with Ketchel. He would invest heavily in California real estate and prosper hugely. He would drink to excess. He would fall in love with and marry a woman of a nature as mercurial as his own. They would have tempestuous quarrels and she would eventually file for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty. On Thanksgiving Day of 1936, he would present himself quite drunk at her house and attempt to have sex with her. She would threaten to call the police. He would plead. She would laugh at him. He would break things and she would curse him. He would hit her. She would say she wished she could have met Stanley Ketchel and fucked him till she fainted.

Whereupon he would produce a pistol and shoot her through the heart.

And then put the gun to his own head.

W
HEN HE HEARD
of Ketchel’s fatal shooting, Emmett Dalton mused upon the irony by which he himself could absorb a number of large-caliber bullets and two loads of buckshot squarely in the back and still be walking the earth eighteen years afterward, albeit with a permanent limp, while the middleweight champ was done for by a single .22 round.

He would go to California and write Western movies and even star in one of them, would appear on moviehouse stages in a desperado getup, sign autographs for wide-eyed boys. He would gain entry to Hollywood social circles. He would write books, one of which was called
When the Daltons Rode
and was adapted into a popular motion picture, as well. He would become a building contractor and real estate broker and grow richer in those enterprises than he and his brothers could have dreamed of becoming by way of robbing banks. He would take up golf, join a Moose Lodge, become a Rotarian. He would regularly attend church with his wife. At age sixty-six he would die in his sleep. With, according to some, a discernible smile.