History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Volume I, Part 56

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362

USA > California > Fresno County > History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Volume I > Part 56

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Assassination or Suicide?

Canse celebre was that of Richard S. Heath indicted March 16, 1893, for the alleged assassination of Louis B. McWhirter while entering his home at the rear entrance on the night of August 29, 1892. The case attracted widest attention as it was claimed that the assassination was a political one on account of the division in the Democratic party in the county at the time over the presidential candidacies of Cleveland and Hill. McWhirter was a Tennesseean who a few years before had come to Fresno, engaged in the practice of the law in association with M. K. Harris, made a failure of the law and as an erratic Bourbon reform Democrat was engaged as editorial writer for the Evening Expositor. He had been a reform politician in Ten- nessee which state he left to come west after a homicide, also growing out of political dissensions in the Democratic party. Much feeling was aroused over the McWhirter case here because at the time the Tennesseean wing

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of the local Democracy was in control of the county offices. So intense was the "interest and indignation" over the affair that in addition to the $10,000 offered reward by the citizens for the arrest and conviction of the assassin, the widow, Mrs. L. B. McWhirter, also offered a reward of $10,000 and the Blasingame family into which McWhirter had married made offer of an additional $5,000. The rewards were never claimed because there never was a conviction and dismissals were entered against the two accused. The first trial of Heath before the late Judge Holmes commenced June 12, 1893, lasted for thirty-two court days and ended in a disagreement of the jury. The evidence supporting the assassination theory and Heath's connection with a homicide was largely circumstantial. The plea set up at the trial was that McWhirter had committed suicide. This was one of several construc- tive defense pleas. The trial jury stood eleven for conviction and one for acquittal-Juror J. H. Lane making the declaration that firearms were co- ercively exhibited in the jury deliberation room. Motion for a change of venue was denied and the second trial commenced March 5, 1894, was before Judge Lucien Shaw of Tulare. It lasted thirty days and also ended in a disagreement. Change of venue was granted for a third trial to Los Angeles County but the case never again was taken up. Heath later died in Alaska in the Klondike gold fields. His co-defendant was Frederick W. Polley, a carpet layer, the accusing joint indictment having been found by a grand jury of which the late ex-Judge Hart was the foreman. Polley had one trial, the jury disagreed and the indictment against him was dismissed in October, 1893. Heath was a young man related to the Perrins and employed as a sub-foreman on the "Sam'l of Posen" vineyard, the property of M. B. Curtis and wife. Curtis was an actor who had made a success of the dialect charac- ter acting of the Polish Jew, made a fortune, invested in Fresno real estate and also founded a town near Berkeley which he named after his play. He was impoverished afterward defending himself on a charge of the murder of a San Francisco policeman. Sensational disclosures were made in that prosecution that the defense was predicated on suborned testimony. Heath was defended by a strong retinue of lawyers retained by the Perrins and Mrs. M. B. Curtis, while the special prosecutors were as distinguished attor- neys in the pay of the Blasingame family. Few cases in the county aroused a greater interest than the Heath prosecution, divided as public sentiment was on the question of assassination and suicide and this division made more acute by the political differences of the respective theorists. Known as a barroom politician, Heath was lifted into sudden and unenvied notoriety. McWhirter had made political enemies by reason of his editorial writings and the division in the county Democracy was at the fever heat. However, public opinion was never settled as to whether his end was the result of assassination to silence him politically, or whether an act of self murder. He had his life insured for a large sum and it was known that his financial circumstances were such that but for friendly aid the policies would have lapsed because of inability on his part to meet the premiums due. His career as a lawyer had proven a failure. It was also known that he had spent the marriage endowment of his wife. He had become confirmed in habits of which the wife declared in her testimony she knew nothing about and which in fact she denied. The political stir and enmities that he aroused by his writings obsessed him with the thought that he was tracked as a marked man for assassination. Many believed then and do now that McWhirter took his own life when he realized that he was at the end of his financial career. The widow married a second time and recovered the insurance on the poli- cies which did not contain the suicide clause. If McWhirter was assassinated, it was a cowardly murder by plotters that lay in wait for him to take him at a disadvantage. If so, the case would not have commanded the wide at- tention that it did for the political and personal interests that raised it above the ordinary. The end of McWhirter is one of the unsolved mysteries.

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

Evans-Sontag Reign of Terror

The years 1891-94 have to do with the lurid chapter of the crimes of the Evans-Sontag train robber bandits, their pursuit, bloody and murderous resistance when driven at various times to bay, their final capture and the trials in Fresno. The details are given in another chapter. Chris Evans and John Contant (Sontag) were indicted November 22, 1892, for murder and Evans after a November and December trial of seventeen days was found guilty in 1893 and February 20, 1894, was sentenced to life imprisonment at Folsom. The operations of the gang in California began with the train hold up in February, 1889, south of Pixley in Tulare County. Contant died at the county jail in Fresno from the wounds received when he and Evans were captured after a battle. One Clark Moore indicted as an accessory after the fact on December 2, 1892, was tried on the second of three such charges March 14, 1892, and acquitted. The other charges were afterward dismissed. The newspapers at the time were full of the exploits of the bandit gang, sent special correspondents into the field to tell of the many efforts to capture it, the man hunts, pursuits, final capture and the trials, centering all these activities in Fresno and giving it unenviable notoriety for crime, criminals and the head-hunters fattening on the business of pur- suing marked and proscribed men to capture them for rewards, dead or alive. The exploits of the gang were retold with renewal of the various applications of Evans for parole. One of these applications in January, 1908, inspired an "appreciation" of the bandit by Joaquin Miller, "the Poet of the Sierras," having at least curious interest if nothing else. It was pub- lished in the Pacific Monthly in the course of an article on famous bandits of the early and later days in California. In this "appreciation" at a time when Evans had served thirteen years of his life sentence, Miller made the point that Evans had never been tried for a train robbery, affected to believe that it was only the railroad influences that kept the crippled, blinded and dying outlaw in the penitentiary and introduced his subject with the follow- ing words :

"And now a few pages about the most famous gun-fighter of all ; a well- bred and well-read man; a man with a most bloody record, yet a man who never fired a shot except to defend; so say his hosts of friends."

The publication provoked criticism and indignation in Visalia and those familiar with the unsavory history of Evans in that locality declared the Miller statements to be a tissue of misrepresentations and almost devoid of truth. There was there practically unanimous opposition against the libera- tion of Evans and the effort of the poet, at best an erratic and theatric personage, was little more than attempt to create sentiment through callous misstatements, unseemly and not calculated to inspire confidence even in Miller's veracity. The Times published in answer to the poet a statement that had been prepared on a previous attempt to secure a parole or pardon giving brief history of the many crimes of Evans, including the wanton kill- ing of five men and the wounding or crippling of nine more, clinched by the recital of Evans' boasts of his crimes while yet at large and pursued, and his threats of death for any and all who would give information of his move- ments to the officers of the law. Which recalls also that in May, 1908, after his sixteen years and more spent in Folsom penitentiary and crippled with a limp after the desperate attempt to escape in 1893 after one year's con- finement under his sentence, George Sontag appeared in Fresno looking for work, seeming to think that if he were given employment as a barkeeper the saloon would lose nothing by the advertisement of his presence. After recov- ery from the wounds received in the attempted jail break, Sontag came at the request of Wells, Fargo & Company to Fresno to give state's evidence against Evans. His final release from prison was on the authority of the governor.

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Wooton Mystery

Celebrated case of mystery was the one that grew out of the unac- counted for disappearance "on or about February 1, 1894," as the lawyers would say, of William Wooton, a well to do farmer of near Kingsburg. Murder prosecution could not be instituted because the first link in the proof was lacking-the corpus delicti-proof of death. Wooton's body never was discovered, although there can never have been moral doubt that he was the victim of foul play and the body disposed of in some unknown manner. In one of the proceedings, legal recognition of death was given in a ruling by Judge M. K. Harris in this language of his written decision : "The disappearance of William Wooton last February, an old man and a highly respected citizen of this county, is darkly mysterious. His habits of life, business ,methods, and neighborly associations added to his sudden and utter obliteration from the gaze of man but deepen that mystery." A near neighbor of Wooton was Prof. W. A. Sanders, who was regarded as one of the foremost educators in the county. As a teacher his specialties were arithmetic, botany and chemistry. At one time he was instructor at the Academy which was in the county the only institution where the higher courses could be pursued preparatory for entrance here to the state uni- versity. Sanders was a prolific writer on the subject of botany. He con- ducted an experimental farm and experimented with many foreign botanical importations. He was the man that introduced in this county the Johnson grass as a forage plant. It has become such a pest for the farmer that it had to be legislated against. And it has passed into a saying "that if Profes- sor Sanders was not hanged for the murder of Wooton, he should have been for introducing Johnson grass in the county." Suspicion pointed to Sanders several months after Wooton's disappearance when he presented for negotiation a warehouse receipt for grain in the name of the absentee. Thereupon followed also his presentation of a deed to the Wooton property, fortified by an unlikely story that Wooton had left the country and had vested him with authority to dispose of his property without a power of attorney, and thus he came into the possession of the documents in ques- tion. Sanders was indicted for forgery May 19, 1894, and during his long incarceration several attempts were made to learn from him the mystery of Wooton's disappearance and Tyndall, the mind reader, had interviews with him to worm the secret from him. The interviews never had result, because Sanders never would subject himself to the test but resisted every advance on this line. A fourteen days' trial in June and July, 1894, had no result ; another fourteen days' trial in April, 1895, resulted in his being found guilty and the sentence was ten years' imprisonment. Appeal was taken and new trial granted in a decision of October, 1896. The third trial in January, 1897, resulted in a disagreement of the jury and the fourth of six- teen days in April resulted in conviction with fourteen years imprisonment as the sentence. Sanders served his time and came out of the penitentiary broken in health. He entered it a bankrupt as the result of the long litiga- tion. He died wretchedly an outcast in the county poorhouse. There was some testimony that might have connected Sanders as being in Wooton's company the night before a large brush fire on one or the other's premises about the time of the disappearance date, but it and other circumstantial details were so remote and lacked such definiteness that in connection with the inability to prove the death of Wooton no charge of murder could have been maintained. It was only when he made effort to realize on the Wooton property that he set for himself the trap that he fell into and raised the more than strong moral belief that he was the agency in the removal of Wooton. Various have been the theories how the body was disposed of. One has been that the corpse was buried in some secluded nook and with the lapse of years the place has been lost and all evidences of burial dis-

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sipated. Another was that the body was consumed in fire and still another that chemical means were employed to dispose of it. At any rate no one knows how, when or where Wooton disappeared from the face of the earth. Human bones or remains of skeleton have not been discovered these many years in the vicinity of Kingsburg in a circuit of miles but to revive in the newspapers the story of the Wooton disappearance, and the speculation as to whether they might be Wooton's or not. The latest such revival was in November, 1917, anent the finding of a skeleton on the Fortuna ranch north- west of Reedley. The assembled bones led to the conclusion that they had been buried "about twenty years ago," had been those of a man about fifty- five years of age and about five and one-half feet tall. The solution of the mystery of Wooton's disappearance was taken by Sanders with him into the grave.

Tweedle-dee Tweedle-dum

Sensation was made public in April, 1899, when the city attorney pre- sented before the city trustees affidavit that City Clerk J. W. Shanklin was an absentee from the city and his whereabouts unknown. Examination of the book showed a defalcation but in how much never was ascertained because under the circumstances the fact could not be learned. The office was de- clared vacant and the vacancy filled. The absentee was and remained with- out the state until early the following year when the grand jury indicted him on January 13, 1900, four times for embezzlements of small sums. Shank- lin was learned to be in a small town just across the Oregon line, where he was doing business openly as a potato merchant. Brought back he was placed on trial in May, the jury acquitted him and thereupon the other in- dictments were dismissed and the affair ended in a farce. The sums alleged to have been embezzled were business taxes, perhaps liquor license moneys, that had come into his hands. It was not the duty nor an obligation of the city clerk to receive or make these collections but the task of the city license collector, though the money was receivable at the office as an accom- modation, with the clerk giving receipt. The acquittal was on instructions of the court that no public offense had been committed and no embezzle- ment from the city of public funds. Inasmuch as the money was not pay- able to the clerk, he was not receiving it for the city and if the city did not receive it it was then a matter between the private and unofficial receiver of the money and the person to whom he had given receipt for the money. So ended Shanklin's Republican city political career and Fresno no longer knew him as a resident.

The Case of the Helm Boys

The verdict returned at a late hour on the night of June 19, 1908, by a jury in the city of Stockton, Cal., sealed the doom of the brothers, Elmer and Willie Helm for one of the most diabolical crimes ever committed in this community. The trial was had in Stockton on a change of venue be- cause of the represented prejudice against the boy murderers in Fresno. The verdict was accompanied by recommendations of life imprisonment for both. The verdict saved Elmer from the death penalty passed upon him after con- viction of murder in the first degree in Fresno in June, 1906, on first trial. The younger boy gained nothing by the second trial because after the first in September, 1906, the sentence upon him was life imprisonment at San Quentin. The case of the Helms was one of the most atrocious brought to the attention of a public prosecutor. Their crime was the wanton murder on the evening of October 30, 1905, of William J. Hayes and wife while camp- ing out near a deserted cabin on the Whitesbridge road, about eighteen miles west from Fresno. The murderers rewarded themselves for the double crime with about three dollars taken from the person of the murdered man. Clues to the murderers were meagre. The authorities worked long and diligently

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with little success and they might have been baffled in the end but that the fiends, the elder aged twenty-one and the younger nineteen at the time, were not content with their work but undertook another man killing a few months later. Singularly enough the father of the boys was the one to discover the second murder and to report it. Circumstances directed attention to the Helm boys and they were connected with the three murders. The late Sheriff Walter S. McSwain, then a township constable, made a name for himself in working up a wonderful case of circumstantial evidence. The story of the crimes and the bringing of the youths to justice is replete with incident and detail. The Hayes were an aged couple who lived at peace with the world and no other motive for their taking off could be conceived than robbery. Hayes had been a justice of the peace at Mendota and lived in Fresno. They owned a tract of land on the West Side, which it was their habit to visit at intervals. The murder was on the home coming from one of these periodical visits. At Whitesbridge stop was made to buy hay for their horses and paying with check he received about three dollars in change. They were overtaken by night on the journey home and camped near a deserted Mexican cabin, having food and bedding with them. Horses had been fed and picketed and the evening meal was being prepared when the murderers pounced upon them, shot both to, death and levanted with the paltry booty. Conditions at the camp indicated that the Hayes were taken unawares. The canvas bed lay on the ground as it had been taken down from the wagon and the uncooked potatoes were in the frying pan. Re- mains were discovered next day by a passing traveler. Autopsy showed that Hayes had received gun shot wound, six inches in diameter in the breast and the heart was literally filled with shot. Her wounds were almost identical. Death came to both instantly. A single barrelled shot gun with which the murders were committed was found not far from the scene of the crime, but whose gun was it? Two boys riding bicycles and carrying a package that might have been the shot gun wrapped in gunny sack had been seen on the Whitesbridge road on the day of the murder. But who were these boys? About February 8, 1906, Henry Jackson, a bachelor of over sixty years of age, was surprised in his little cabin home a mile or so out of Fresno and murdered. He had sat at the table and the murderer let loose through the window glass a charge of shot that shattered the old man's neck and almost tore the head from the trunk. The window sill was left powder-marked. The murderer sawed a strip from a near-by board and nailed it over the powder-marked spot. The body was covered in bed quilt and with the aid of buggy axle and two wheels was conveyed to a culvert on the Southern Pacific railroad miles away and jammed therein. The Helm family of husband, wife, daughter and two sons lived only about a quarter of a mile from the Jackson cabin. They were practically nearest neighbors. Helm missed the old man several days, visited the cabin and found it a veritable shambles. He gave the alarm. Days were spent in locating the body and it was found in the siphon, five miles from Fresno near Herndon. There was also a bruise on the head where it had fallen forward on the table after the firing of the shot. Suspicion fastened on the Helm boys. Their reputation was not the best, especially that of the elder. On or about the night of the Jackson murder. Elmer had spent paper money lavishly in Fresno's tenderloin. The youths were taken to prison and the gathering of evidence began. The father was also imprisoned on suspicion but soon re- leased. The owner of the shot gun was discovered, the chain of evidence was started and the links were added. A resident of Fowler, who had been a neighbor of the Helms about the time of the Hayes double tragedy, recog- nized the gun as one that had been stolen from him. Witnesses were found who saw the gun in the possession of Elmer. Paper money identified as part of that he had spent in the tenderloin was identified by denominations and name of issuing banks as money received by Jackson not long before. The 23

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brothers were identified as the pair that was seen on the Whitesbridge road with the package in gunny sack; fabric threads of the sack were found clinging to the gun; the movements of the pair on the day of the murder were traced to the neighborhood of the Hayes camping spot. The formal accusation for the Hayes murder followed and on it Elmer Helm was first brought to trial June 16, 1906. It lasted sixteen days with much difficulty experienced in securing jury. The verdict was guilty as charged and July 16, 1906, the death sentence was pronounced. Willie's trial in September lasted twenty days. It resulted in a verdict of guilty as charged but with life imprisonment recommended as the punishment. Appeals were taken in both cases. The supreme court granted new trials in December, 1907. In the Elmer case a sapient supreme court reversed the judgment though holding that the evidence while circumstantial was sufficient to sustain the verdict. The ruling was against the appellant on the point that the information was void because filed on one of the continuous holidays declared by the governor following the earthquake and the fire in San Francisco. The reversal was on a purely techni- cal ground that it was prejudicial error to overrule good challenge for cause compelling exhaustion of peremptory challenge to be relieved of jurors who should have been excused under the challenge for cause. The alibi defense of the boys had fallen before the strength of the people's case. For the second trial the county roads near and about Fresno were canvassed for declarations of people as to their prejudice for or against the accused. They were used on a motion for a change of venue to some other county because of the prejudice in Fresno against the Helms for their crime. And so it was that the case went to San Joaquin County for the second trial in June 1908 lasting sixteen days. This trial was notable for the unexpected reappearance of chief wit- ness, Charles Molter, for the prosecution who had disappeared after the first trial. Without him the prosecution would have been greatly weak- ened in its case. On account of the notoriety because of his connection with the case, he had concealed his whereabouts and for months had been searched for high and low without locating him. Notable as new evidence was the testimony of Willie Helm's cellmate, one Kaloostian, who told of a con- fession made to him with various threats by Willie as to what he would do when out of the toils. McSwain's evidence was also very material in the tracking of the defendants by the corrugated bicycle tire and a heel-worn shoe. After this second conviction, there was talk of another appeal but it was abandoned and the prisoners left the Stockton jail on their life im- prisonments, Elmer to Folsom and Willie to San Quentin.

Murder of Policeman Van Meter

Policeman Harry S. Van Meter was murderously shot while on duty on the night of February 20, 1907, and died on the following day. He en- countered a suspect at the corner of I and Inyo Streets. Three shots were fired by the night prowler and all took effect. Van Meter wearing a heavy overcoat was unable to open it to draw revolver to defend himself. One Er- nest C. Sievers was arrested suspected of the murder but never prosecuted as the evidence proved insufficient. Van Meter twice identified him as his murderer, the last time on his death bed, but there was no corroboration save in a gray hat such as Van Meter stated the fellow, who had shot him, wore. Sievers claimed an alibi and that at the time of the shooting he was in a certain saloon. This was in part corroborated, but not positively as to the hour. The murder of the young policeman created such a sensation that a public money subscription was raised for the widow. He was a son of City Attorney E. S. Van Meter. Early in December 1909 came a story from Fol- som penitentiary of the murderer of Van Meter in February 1907. One Mack Reed imprisoned under a life sentence claimed to be the murderer accord- ing to admissions to a cellmate. The latter drew the story from him, in- formed a guard and former resident of Fresno of the details, and the

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History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Volume I, Part 56

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858- Publication date: 1919 Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company Number of Pages: 1362

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362