To Hell on a Fast Horse (28 page)

“[H]e is today the most dangerous man in the whole Southwest. He is deep and burrows beneath the surface like a mole. He is either an open face-to-face gun fighter or a midnight assassin as the case may be. He is a chief of conspirators and a planner of dark deeds.”

Bush told Curry he had recently learned that a half brother of Oliver Lee said that Miller was Garrett’s killer. “I doubt it,” Bush wrote, “but I do not for a moment doubt that he knew Garrett was
going to be killed.” Understandably, Bush asked Curry to destroy his letter as soon as it was read. Instead Governor Curry filed it.

Disturbing as it was, Bush’s description of Miller was actually dead-on. Miller, who had a reputation as an impeccable dresser, was believed to have killed at least seven men, but the number was generally thought to be much higher. At the age of eighteen, he was arrested for the murder of his grandparents in Coryell County, Texas, although he had never gone to trial for the crime. And he was related by marriage to notorious Texas gunfighters John Wesley Hardin and Mannen Clements. Garrett, as a former lawman and a fair judge of men himself, should have known about Miller and his background because Miller was well known to many El Pasoans. If Garrett did know whom he was dealing with, perhaps it was a sign of his desperation that he was willing to do business with such a shady figure. But then again, Garrett had dealt with many bad men and questionable characters during his career. Everyone had a past.

Questions also arose about the man Brazel was talking to on the road before Adamson and Garrett caught up to him. Adamson testified that he did not recognize the man, and there is no evidence that Brazel ever said who this was. There were rumors that it was Print Rhode. An anonymous letter sent to Annie Garrett accused Rhode of having played a role in the murder. Mailed from Las Cruces, the mysterious letter was handwritten using all capital letters:

As far as is known, the “friend” never revealed his (or her) identity to the Garrett family.

Bill Cox of the San Augustin Spring ranch was also considered a suspect. The fifty-two-year-old Cox supposedly had a personal friendship with both Garrett and Brazel. Indeed, Cox had forked over the cash for some of Garrett’s substantial debt—at least $3,000—and he had acquired the mortgage on Garrett’s ranch and livestock. The surviving correspondence between Cox and Garrett and, later, Polinaria, is friendly and sympathetic. Yet Garrett’s well-known proclivity to ignore any and all creditors put a heavy strain on their relationship, and the goat deal soured it even more (at least from Garrett’s perspective). Cox was clearly in the Lee-Rhode camp—they were family. Jeff Ake, who had worked at different times for both Garrett and Cox, said years later that Cox was “deadly afraid of Garrett; we all knowed that.” Ake believed that Cox paid Brazel to kill Garrett.

ATTORNEY GENERAL HERVEY HAD
real problems with Carl Adamson’s testimony. He wanted to see the spot where Garrett died, so on the day of the funeral, he located Adamson and asked to be taken to the site. Hervey also brought along Captain Fred Fornoff, chief of the New Mexico Mounted Police. The three rode to the site
in a buckboard, stopping at the place where Adamson said he had stopped his buggy before Garrett was shot. The arroyo’s steep bank rose up on the south side of the road, and to the north there was quite a bit of black brush. The men stepped out of the buckboard, and while Adamson and Fornoff discussed the killing, Hervey walked off approximately thirty to forty feet and found a new Winchester shell casing on the ground. The place where he found the shell casing was not where Brazel said he had shot from. Back in Las Cruces, the attorney general listened to Brazel’s story and became more suspicious. Hervey had been acquainted with Brazel for some time, and although he had only known him casually, he did not think the young man was the killer type. After returning to Santa Fe, Hervey told Fornoff that there was a lot about Garrett’s death that did not feel right to him. Fornoff agreed, but they did not have the money to pay for a full-blown investigation.

Garrett had been a friend of Hervey’s father, and the attorney general freely admitted that he had a personal interest in the case. If there had been a murder, he felt strongly that the culprits should be identified and prosecuted. Consequently, he visited El Paso and met with two of Garrett’s old friends, one being Tom Powers. Hervey described his suspicions and asked if they would help finance an undercover detective to pursue the case for a few months. Much to Hervey’s surprise and disappointment, both men were strangely uninterested in contributing. Hervey returned to Santa Fe and told Fornoff to dig into his meager expense account and find some reason to travel to El Paso and see what he could find. In the meantime, the grand jury convened in Las Cruces and indicted Brazel for the murder of Pat Garrett. The prosecution subpoenaed the Western Union Telegraph Company for all telegrams received or sent by Brazel, Adamson, Miller, Cox, Rhode, and Mannen Clements during February and March. They were taking the conspiracy accusations seriously.

Fornoff returned from El Paso with what he believed was a “real discovery.” He heard that a “wealthy rancher” had paid Jim Miller $1,500 to kill Garrett. The money had been handed to Miller in a lawyer’s office in El Paso, and as part of the bargain, the rancher was to supply a man to take the blame, as well as a witness to corroborate a self-defense plea. But while Fornoff’s “discovery” included some interesting details, it was—like the other conspiracy rumors—derived from gossip on the streets. Hervey needed hard proof that would stand up in court, and to get that he needed time and money.

A few months later, Hervey met with Emerson Hough in Chicago. He hit up Hough just like he did Powers, asking if the published author and some of his Chicago friends would contribute $1,000 to allow the Territory to better investigate Garrett’s murder. And like Powers, Hough declined. Garrett owed Hough a substantial amount of money, he explained, and the author was a little short just now himself.

Then Hough looked Hervey in the eye and said something that stunned the attorney general: “Jimmie, I know that outfit around the Organ Mountains, and Garrett got killed trying to find out who killed Fountain, and you will get killed trying to find out who killed Garrett. I would advise you to let it alone.”

The Garrett murder case finally went to trial the first week of May 1909. Brazel’s defense attorney was the biggest legal gun in the Southwest, Albert B. Fall, who was assisted by Las Cruces lawyer Herbert B. Holt. Mark Thompson, the district attorney, prosecuted the case, and Frank Parker, the district judge who had presided at the sensational Fountain murder trial ten years before, sat at the bench. The trial lasted only one day. Thompson, a friend of Fall’s (keeping on Fall’s good side was a prerequisite for any aspiring attorney in southern New Mexico), made only a halfhearted attempt to convict Brazel. The sole eyewitness, Carl Adamson, was not called to testify, and his name was inexplicably scratched off a list of witnesses subpoenaed by the Territory. Dr. Field, who had reported the findings of his autopsy to Thompson, was dumb-
founded when he took the stand and the district attorney failed to ask him to explain the entry and exit wounds on Garrett’s body. The case went to the jury at 5:55
P.M
., and fifteen minutes later, the jurors were back in the courtroom with their verdict: Not Guilty.

Garrett’s killing of Billy the Kid had made national headlines and so did his own death twenty-seven years later. But the verdict in the Garrett murder trial was mentioned in just a handful of newspapers. It was as if Pat Garrett had already been relegated to a distant past and had ceased to be significant to the present. The Territory, it would seem, had come to feel the same way. Garrett was an anachronism with considerable baggage. Better to get the murder trial over with quickly and not stir things up any more than they needed to be. Even Garrett’s good friends, Tom Powers and Emerson Hough, were resigned to let it go. In later years, Dr. Field often wondered if it would have made a difference had he been allowed to elaborate on the autopsy.

“Who can tell,” he once told a reporter. “Pat had lost his money; he’d lost many of his powerful friends. These circumstances are sometimes just as important as a country doctor’s testimony.”

Out at the Cox place, they held a big barbecue for Wayne Brazel. It was attended by punchers, friends, and ranchers from all over the range.

So who killed Pat Garrett? The standard outlaw-lawman histories go with Wayne Brazel, yet many of Brazel’s acquaintances and friends doubted he did it. When Brazel was pressed about it, he gave conflicting answers. To some he confided that he had not been the killer, but to others he maintained that he had pulled the trigger. “I’m sorry I had to kill a man,” Brazel supposedly told Albert Fall’s wife. “But I’m sure glad he wasn’t a good man.” Decades later, those close to the affair began to open up, albeit to only a select few. In 1954, Oliver M. Lee Jr. admitted to historian C. L. Sonnichsen that his uncle, Print Rhode, was Garrett’s killer. Lee claimed there had indeed been a meeting in El Paso at which Cox hired Jim Miller to do the job (Lee’s
father had been present). Yet before Miller could fulfill his contract, Rhode blasted Garrett in the back of the head with his Winchester that day in Alameda Arroyo. Because Rhode had a family, Brazel agreed to take the blame.

Unfortunately, Lee added, Cox still had to pay Miller to keep the assassin quiet. Toward the end of his life, Bill Cox’s son, Jim, also implicated his uncle Print in an interview with local researcher Herman B. Weisner. “I want to tell you this,” Cox said to Weisner, “I believed in letting a sleeping dog lie, but I want to tell you one thing. Never from the time that Wayne Brazel left Organ…to the killing of Garrett was his old friend and silent partner, Print Rhode, out of his sight.” These revelations by Lee and Cox are in line with the anonymous letter received by Annie Garrett shortly after her father’s death.

The reason Garrett had to die had to do with bad blood and plain fear. There is no question that Rhode despised Garrett, and, according to Oliver Lee Jr., Mrs. Cox was terrified that Garrett would eventually kill both her brother Print and Brazel. Albert Fall admitted as much in a letter to Eugene Manlove Rhodes, written just two years after the murder: “Everybody was afraid that he [Garrett] was going to kill someone and a sigh of relief went up when he was finally killed.” As it turns out, Garrett was right when he said they would get him unless he got them first. He was also right when he predicted, on more than one occasion, that he would die with his boots on. Garrett seems to have shared the view of his friend Texas Ranger James B. Gillett, who once said that, “Men like myself, who spend their lives making enemies of the pests of society, must expect to be killed sometime.”

As for Jim Miller and the thousand head of Mexican cattle, no one ever heard anything more about the cattle. They did hear about Miller, though. He was lynched with three other men in Ada, Oklahoma, on April 19, 1909, for the paid assassination of rancher and former lawman Gus Bobbitt. Carl Adamson, who had not made an appearance at Wayne Brazel’s trial, did make an appearance at his own. In
December 1908, he was convicted of conspiring to smuggle Chinese nationals into the United States. Adamson appealed the ruling to the New Mexico Supreme Court where, on August 21, 1911, he received a sentence of eighteen months in the territorial penitentiary at Santa Fe. Adamson died November 1, 1919, in Roswell, New Mexico. Bill Cox, who became famous as a breeder of fine Hereford cattle, acquired Garrett’s Black Mountain ranch from Polinaria in December 1908. By 1910, Cox’s ranch was larger than the state of Rhode Island. He died of an unknown illness in 1923, and in 1945, the U.S. government condemned over 90 percent of the Cox holdings for a missile test site, known today as the White Sands Missile Range.

Albert Fall continued his political ascension after Garrett’s death, serving in the U.S. Senate following New Mexico’s admission to state-hood in 1912 and becoming the secretary of the interior under Warren G. Harding in 1921. Ten years later, Fall was in prison. His remarkable downfall had come after he accepted “loans”—one for $100,000 in cash—from oil men to whom he had also authorized large federal oil leases. It became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Fall died a broken man in an El Paso hospital in 1944.

At one time, Wayne Brazel wanted to join the New Mexico Mounted Police, and he asked Albert Fall for an endorsement. On February 7, 1908, just three weeks before Pat Garrett was killed, Fall wrote Governor Curry a short letter recommending the cowpoke. Brazel probably never had a chance of being accepted, but the Garrett murder quashed all hope of his joining the force. In September 1910, Brazel married a pretty, young schoolteacher named Olive Boyd. Exactly nine months later, she gave birth to a son, and two months after that, she died of pneumonia. Four years later, Wayne Brazel disappeared without a trace. Not even his brother had a clue as to where Brazel ended up. In 1935, Brazel’s grown son, Jesse, hired a private investigator, El Paso attorney H. L. McCune, to track down his father. After much sleuthing, McCune reported back with an incredible tale:
Wayne Brazel had drifted to South America, where he was shot dead by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Print Rhode and his family moved to Yavapai County, Arizona, shortly after the Garrett killing. He purchased a farm there and leased part of it to a brother-in-law, thirty-six-year-old Henry L. Murphy. The two families were neighbors. In an extraordinary parallel to what had happened in New Mexico, an unknown dispute arose between Rhode and Murphy, with a vengeful Rhode deciding he wanted his brother-in-law off his land. But Murphy was just as determined to hold Rhode to the terms of the lease, even in the face of Rhode’s angry threats. On July 8, 1910, Rhode confronted Murphy on a lane near their homes, pulled a .38-caliber revolver from his trouser pocket, and fired three shots at his unarmed brother-in-law. Only one bullet hit Murphy, but it was enough. He died quickly as his killer looked on, emotionless.