Roads to Quoz

by William Least Heat-Moon

  People witnessing her shocking eruption in the crowded chapel feared the emotion-racked confession revealed temporary derangement. Among those gathered was William’s first daughter, fifteen-year-old Gertrude. Twenty-three-year-old Mrs. Pearl Grayston chose to stay home in Joplin.

  Gertrude Grayston, Springfield, Missouri, 1900.

  6

  God Help the Jury

  YOU’LL RECALL that Q brought reports of this homicide to me while I was reading about the Quapaw Ghost Light before we were to go in quest of it. But I want to keep William’s story together, so I’m going to step ahead in sequence and travel only in time to get you to the outcome before I return to the road leading to the purported Light along the border of the old Indian Territory.

  The murder of Grayston, as far as I could follow it, seemed to have more loose ends than a frayed hawser. Discovering a threadlet here and an inkle there still didn’t allow me to bring them into coherence, and the unraveled strands lay parted and tangled, failing to tie together the century-old interpretation of a crime of passions. The record was replete with incompatible details and cryptic utterances even a master boatswain’s mate couldn’t braid into a plausible line. It wasn’t that something was missing — it was that a full locker of lines looked to be missing.

  For a time, the new information led only deeper into a dead end. Then, a small gleam, a kind of ghostly beacon, if you will, rose above that cul-de-sac to shine and beckon, and behind it were truths waiting for more than a century to come into light.

  The skeleton of the story lay in several newspapers of 1901 and 1902, most of them from Jasper County. I continually had to evaluate political orientations that colored and, at times, distorted reporting: the Joplin Daily Globe was a Democratic organ and the News-Herald and Carthage Press were Republican. While what I’m about to tell you, as much as possible, is evidential fact or testimony corroborated by confirmed events, I’ve still had to referee variations and contradictory details, always trying to discount the overwhelming conjectures and speculations at the trial. I struggled against the loose standards of reportage in that era not far removed from the days of yellow journalism, and I had to weigh obviously biased assumptions and rumormongering presented as truth, especially when they contradicted established particulars. The amount of sheer reportorial incompetence — corrupted quotations, names spelled differently (not just from day to day but within the same sentence) or given entirely wrong (Price changed to Pratt), grammatical errors (“he had threw that away”) — left me confused at one moment and amused the next. And then there were the typesetters’ hooters. Here’s a single line quoting the judge’s instructions to the jury:

  arguments, ou are yhereb nyotified not to.

  Q discovered Grayston had once brought a libel suit against the Republican News-Herald (later dropped for reasons unknown) and also had political clashes with Democrats running the Globe. In a small town with fifty barrooms, William’s Anti-Saloon League lectures put him at odds with influential men and their cohorts who owned and operated highly lucrative establishments, the House of Lords supreme among them (the editor of the Globe held title to the building). Working against relative newcomer Grayston was his belonging to neither lodge nor church as well as his support of issues such as women’s suffrage and pensions to miners’ widows in a town controlled by mining magnates and their associates and underlings.

  One last detail: despite several searches across the state, attorney Q could find no transcript of the trial, State of Missouri v. George G. Bayne.

  On June 30, 1902, from a jury pool of almost sixty men, the attorneys selected twelve, most of them farmers, ages twenty-five to sixty-five, only one from Joplin. In the middle of the growing season, the men were pulled out of their fields and away from their stock to be sequestered for an unspecified period but almost certainly including the Fourth of July, when there would be nothing for men of the open air to do but sit confined in a hot hotel.

  The trial began on July 1 in a filled chamber where “standing room only” meant people at the rear stood on chairs to get a glimpse of the faces and demeanors of the killer and of the Belle of Joplin. A third of the audience was female, among them “two very pretty women, the sister of Grayston . . . attired in deep mourning.” She was the only person present whose grief exceeded her curiosity. “The other of those more than ordinarily pretty women was Mrs. Grayston . . . attired in a soft white wool shirtwaist.” William’s father, the renowned man of the cloth, remained in Christian County. The question for the spectators was not who did it or why he did it — they already “knew” that; what they didn’t know were the terms of his punishment. But, even more, their curiosity wanted to hear somebody break into a steamy confession.

  The state opened with its plan to press for murder in the first degree, a verdict that would require proof of malice aforethought. (When Q read of the prosecutor’s plan, she said, “I can’t believe it! He’s opened and lost.”) Despite numerous denials from the victim himself based on his several investigations, the motive the prosecutor and his three assistants intended to prove was that George Bayne had been intimate with Pearl Grayston while William was traveling. (As Q read on, she said: “What’ve they found that William’s investigation missed?”)

  The defense answered: Grayston was a volatile and “dangerous” person whose several public threats to Bayne virtually forced the defendant to protect himself with a concealed weapon for which he had a permit. Lawyers for the accused held that Grayston was a large, strong, unstable man, and they trotted several witnesses to the stand who alleged they had heard of his being “dangerous” or they had surmised as much, although not one of them himself (they were all males) had witnessed anything beyond a vocal threat to Bayne. Their ex parte testimony being expressed in such similar language suggests considerable pretrial coaching, virtually confirmed by subsequent leading of witnesses. The prosecution did not raise an objection to those tactics or to witnesses throwing out rampant speculations and judgments. In fact, on at least two occasions, the prosecutor’s own witnesses spoke opinions that hardly assisted his argument. He seemed unable — or unwilling — to control their statements.

  Again and again, the defense readily drew from witnesses variations of Grayston’s “reputation was bad” and Bayne’s “reputation was good,” one man citing the time William told an opposing lawyer “to sit down or he’d pull his whiskers.” Another testified he’d heard someone say Grayston “was the kind of man who’d come up behind you and blow your head off.” (William had never owned a gun.) Yet another opined the slain man “was liable to kill anybody.” Dolan, Grayston’s perpetual courtroom foe, told the jury the victim “was one of the meanest men . . . or the craziest” he’d ever known. To all of that hearsay and supposition, the prosecution objected not even once. Judging by accounts in the Joplin newspapers, the first two days were trial by character assassination.

  It was day three before the prosecuting attorney at last raised an objection, but only to Dolan’s “bulldozing” a witness, which drew a rebuke from the judge for using such a coarse term in his courtroom; but he did sustain the objection.

  Assisted by Grayston’s brother, the prosecution team was not undistinguished; if anything, its credentials appear to have outshone those of Bayne’s three lawyers. But even when the legally astute George Grayston took the stand, his testimony was listless and perfunctory, surely leading their sister to wonder, If he won’t speak forcefully for our brother, who will?

  The prosecutors based much of their argument on equivocal statements by three teenage girls who, during elocution practice in the Methodist church across the street from the Payton boardinghouse, alleged they saw from ninety feet away and through two windows a woman who was — or looked like — Pearl sitting on the lap of a man who was — or looked like — George Bayne, the pair “hugging and kissing” while he — or she — was inexplicably holding a newspaper. A woman testified she’d seen Pearl and Bayne riding in a buggy over in Byersville,
to which the defense responded with a witness out of Oklahoma, one Mabel Price (a name to remember), who said it was she in the buggy and that she was sometimes mistaken for Mrs. Grayston; Mabel then stood before the jury in an attempt to show a professed resemblance. Throughout the trial, Pearl herself conferred frequently with the killer’s lawyers.

  At last, the petite beauty in her white shirtwaist took the stand as the crowded court murmured and then grew silent, not to miss a single of her words, every ear waiting for that titillating question. At last the prosecuting attorney asked it: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with Mister Bayne?” Emphatically, Pearl Grayston said, “Certainly not!” The prosecution, as if rebuked, took that line no further and yielded to the defense which then established Pearl was at work on the afternoon the teenage girls claimed to have seen her smooching it up with Bayne.

  The evening Q read the account of the trial, she said to me, “I keep waiting for the prosecution to argue that five shots from a thirty-eight — one while the victim was bending over and another into his back, both aimed at his heart — were hardly a measured self-defense against an unarmed man. Besides, William made no attempt to batter Bayne. It wasn’t a fight.” I suggested she keep reading, but she didn’t, not just then. Instead she said, “If William was so strong and dangerous, the kind to come up behind you, why didn’t he just beat up or shoot Bayne in a dark alley with no witnesses? I mean, he took action on the most public street in Joplin when it was most full of people.” She was getting vexed. “And I’ve got another problem. Does a dangerous man make all his threats in public?”

  She was shaking her head. “His open challenges had to be just a tactic to embarrass Bayne and get him to move away from Pearl.” I recommended she read on, but she said, “Why hasn’t the prosecution found and brought forth the bloody vest to show the jury? Juries don’t easily forget blood. And why aren’t those unethical procedures of that scalawag of a justice of the peace coming out? He had no legal training. He tampered with evidence. He tried to manipulate a key witness. He tried to influence the inquest verdict.” Then she read on, but not before adding, “Where’s any mention of William as an advocate of the Law and Order League? Come on now, this is an all-star prosecution team? A law student could show up such ineptness. It had to be deliberately executed incompetence.”

  Finally, Bayne came to the stand. For a couple of hours, he gave an account that hardly differed from what others had said except in two details: first, he saw Grayston put his right hand into his pocket before hitting him, and second, the blow landed on Bayne’s right jaw. Grayston’s right-handedness made both assertions highly dubious unless you accept that he struck a powerful blow with his left hand while his right was reaching into his pocket. An enraged righty leading with his left? Bayne clearly was trying to use the single testimony — denied by all others — that Grayston appeared to be going for a gun just before he swung his fist. The prosecution raised not one of those questions.

  Of the defendant’s assured testimony, the Globe wrote, “Bayne was decidedly the best witness on either side.” Given the prosecution’s insipid questioning of him, that’s probably accurate.

  After the Fourth of July recess, on the final day, the prosecutors at last seemed to take up genuine pursuit of justice, as each of them spoke in summary to ridicule the argument that unarmed Grayston was a “dangerous man.” The concluding statement, given by the least-experienced prosecutor, nevertheless drew applause from spectators. On reading that, Q said, “I don’t know how, but maybe the all-stars are going to pull it out.” Then she read on to see that the closing arguments for the defense also had effect.

  Just before midnight on Saturday, the fifth of July, the judge gave the unlettered jury his complex instructions: Although Bayne had been tried for murder in the first degree, the jury “could not find in the first degree . . . as the trouble resulting in the murder was not unprovoked.” But, should they find the defendant not guilty as charged but rather guilty of premeditating a crime, they could find him guilty in the second degree. Or, further, if they “find the deed was committed in sudden heat of passion and done of malice,” their verdict could be murder in the fourth degree. If that was their decision, the killer could be considered for the minimal penalty — a fine of a hundred dollars.

  William’s father in Sparta would write:

  God help the jury in this case

  To give our homes a sacred place;

  Without it, life is but a sham;

  To Thee we look, the great I Am.

  And so, off into the night thick with July heat went twelve “thoroughly fatigued men,” cooped up for a week like so many laying hens — farmers kept from the necessary care of stock and crops — to consider forty hours of testimony. On Sunday morning it took them a little more than a hundred minutes to reach a verdict, despite the first vote being ten to two. After brief further discussion, it was eleven to one. Then, although the last juror was still dubious, to keep deliberations from dragging on only to end up with a hung jury, he voted with the majority.

  Monday morning the court reconvened, and the foreman stood to read the verdict in those first half-dozen words known so well: “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty as charged.” George G. Bayne, slayer of William E. Grayston, stood calmly, his assurance now confirmed, as he accepted the congratulations of his lawyers. Three days later the acquitted killer resigned from the Joplin Waterworks to take a similar job in Carthage, and nine months after that he married the petite blonde he’d taken for a buggy ride or two, the woman who testified in support of one of his alibis: Mabel Price.

  The day following the trial, the Carthage Press reported: “One of the jurors remarked afterward that on general principles Bayne should have been given about two years for remaining and courting danger, but that under the law and evidence, the jury could do nothing but turn him loose.”

  And Grayston? Well, he was proven right: his wife was innocent of adultery.

  Robert Ingersoll, the freethinking attorney who had inspired William years earlier, once wrote, “In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”

  7

  A Triangle Becomes a Polygon

  THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with the entire story — not merely justice miscarried but something of even greater import; the evidence simply didn’t fit what the public accepted: a mortal outcome of a marital triangle. A pair of facts kept trying to bend the human geometry into a different shape. But what the devil was the true shape? The first fact was Bayne’s moving out of the Payton rooming house immediately after he was freed on bail the day following the murder, the very thing the victim for eighteen months had been demanding. Second, Bayne speedily married not Pearl but the woman he’d allegedly been glimpsed with during those months. If there was adultery in the Payton place, wouldn’t his future bride also have demanded he move elsewhere? Were he truly innocent of adulterous dalliance, wouldn’t she insist he clear his name?

  Other nettlesome details arose: Why would a man who for months appeared craven and feckless even with a pistol in his pocket finally court a confrontation that would shame him at the most public place in Joplin? Why would a well-paid president and superintendent of a company insist on living a year and a half in an eight-dollar-a-week room in a small and crowded house not far from the honky-tonks of the Kansas City Southern bottoms? Why, three days after his acquittal, would he resign his job with Joplin Waterworks only to take a similar one just twelve miles away? Why would a man whose career was notable for its transience refuse to move even across the street to defuse a threat to his life? Why would a man fearing his survival be so dangerously stubborn?

  I couldn’t leave those questions alone. One night, when Q and I were home again from the Southwest, I began rehashing aloud all we’d learned about the events. Finally, hearing myself, I stopped and apologized for once again flooding her with what I called my obsession for the truth of the murder. “I don’t think you’re obsessed,”
she said. “I think you’re possessed. William’s ghost has you.” I said she knew I believed in only ghosts of the Nodgort kind. She hesitated not a moment. “But you believe big-time in the persistence of memory.”

  Unbeknownst to me, Q soon went to the State Historical Society on the University of Missouri campus to begin cranking more reels of old microfilmed newspapers, trying to read the scratched and blemished and often barely legible words. When she returned, she handed me several sheets of gray photocopies. “You’ve been complaining of the blatant bias in the reporting in Joplin, so I went looking for stories from out of town.”

  As Carthage started planning a massively magnificent courthouse in 1891, Joplin demanded for itself a kind of “annex” almost as impressive, a place to handle criminal cases. Carthage, the “holy city” where mine owners went to live, could house the recorder of deeds as long as Joplin, the “sin city” where miners came out of deep holes to blow their wages, got the county prosecutor. After all, in the competition between the towns, what was litigable in one might not be so in the other. A jurisprudence of convenience — and control.

  I sat down with the Carthage Press account of the murder but found nothing to alter or enlarge what I already knew. I must have read too fast, because a few days later when I went over it again, I noticed the final paragraph, a little piece seemingly tacked on as an afterthought, the kind of thing a compositor may cut off to fit a story onto a page, fourteen lines almost hidden in the shadow of smudged microfilm. If I did believe in ghosts, I’d have sworn they had just inserted the paragraph. Above it in tiny type was this subheadline — INVESTIGATING WATERWORKS — and following were three sentences, the last one a stroboscopic beam:

  It is a fact that W. E. Grayston had been for some time conducting a searching inquiry into the Joplin Waterworks affairs. It is not known that this fact had anything to do with yesterday’s trouble, but it certainly had no tendency to promote pleasant relations between the two men. Grayston charged that the city council had to an extent been bought up by the water company, and that he would shortly divulge some startling facts which would have important bearing on the spring elections.