So: the crime was not a triangle, and maybe it wasn’t even a rectangle. Maybe it was a polygon of more angles than a spectacular billiard shot. The triangle, as presented by both the defense and the prosecution, was (to mix the image) a red herring, a lurid ruse readily comprehensible to a rough-edged populace wanting a smutty tale of criminal carnality rather than one of municipal turpitude. The papers in Joplin had not, in a suspicious silence over eight months, even once in several thousand words mentioned Grayston’s investigations. What’s more, neither did the prosecuting attorney (a Joplinite), although such evidence had motive for murder written all over it.
In search of items that before seemed contradictory, elliptic, unexplained, inconsonant, or downright nonsensical, I took up the murder again, rereading what I’d earlier gathered. No longer did I need a cudgel to beat loose details into a formation because at last they fell into place and marched along like a drill team.
After more than a century, not every piece was still existent, but plenty enough remained to build a ghost outline of the new figure — a polygon indeed. Q and I dug up long-buried news stories, most of them outwardly unconnected to the homicide; we got marriage certificates, divorce petitions, Last Wills and Testaments, obituaries, funeral records, civil suits in two states, minutes of city council meetings, lodge rosters, old maps, and photographs of faces and buildings in turn-of-the-century Joplin and Carthage; we did considerable footwork on the streets, even twice reenacting William’s last steps, once with me playing the victim, and once the malefactor; we went off to find his unremembered and overgrown grave (a search leaving us crawling with ticks). We even later stopped in Illinois to see the mausoleum wherein since 1939 has lain the murderer in his marble sarcophagus.
Despite the sensational nature of the homicide, by the time of our visit more than a century later, Joplin had quite forgotten about it — acquittals reduce significance — but its drama readily drew in librarians and archivists who came up with documents we otherwise would never have found. Some of the records were in deplorable condition. One newspaper account of the murder, which might have shed even more detail, lay within a large, bound book, but the brittle paper was in more and tinier fragments than the Dead Sea Scrolls. And a possibly significant nineteenth-century legal document in Springfield had disappeared forever because it and hundreds of others had been stored in a shed alongside wet snowplows. Administrators in my own county courthouse some years previous had ordered a dump truck to back up under an attic window to catch old records pitched out for a trip to the landfill. (Beyond all that, how much American history everywhere has gone down the gullets of mice to end up as droppings, I can’t guess.)
The Joplin Daily Globe, the organ that in its own way had once covered over the truth, published a story about my quest. For several weeks thereafter, the postman brought to me now and then an envelope of details. A perfect crime was, except in the escape of the perpetrators, no longer perfect.
I believe now, were those people involved in or witness to the homicide still living, Q could retry the case and convict George G. Bayne not of murder in the fourth degree, nor the third, nor even the second, but of murder one, and his directors as accessories to the crime. Yet, without those witnesses and their truthful testimony, my case must today remain circumstantial; but, as you will see, those circumstantials are so numerous and coherent, probability exceeds coincidence.
That little beacon of a paragraph out of Carthage provided new, more consonant interpretations to utterances like one from Pearl’s father, which I’d previously taken as dissembling or as a simpleminded interpretation of a family tragedy: to a reporter’s asking for “the occasion of this affair,” George Payton answered, “If people would attend to their own business and let other people’s business alone, there would not be so much trouble.” He had to be speaking of gossips as well as Grayston’s investigations into the waterworks. And when William, in the letter to his father, mentioned Pearl’s asking him “not to think ahead and borrow trouble, but just to go along and let the world run as it wants to run,” it was now clear she too was talking about his civic investigations.
Grayston’s unwillingness to “go along” with public malfeasance appears also in that last letter to his father, as William asks him to “read between the lines,” some of which address “the awful corruption in Joplin.” He was, one way or another, a proponent for the “clean government” movement just then beginning to take shape in western Missouri, a cause that, a decade or so after his murder, would lead Joplin to experiment with a city-commission system.
He had once mentioned a “conspiracy” but later dropped the word, not because there wasn’t a conspiracy, I think, but because the term, until proven in court, suggests paranoia. No matter who asked it of him, Grayston was a man incapable of letting “the world run as it wants to run” when that meant harm to the public weal and to his daughter. He was, wrote his father, “goaded by more than common strife,” but I’ve found nothing to suggest he knew his challenge was putting the continuance of his days at risk.
8
Though Dead, He Speaks
ONCE I HAD ASSEMBLED ALL THE PERTINENT FACTS I was likely to turn up, here’s what I believe happened in Joplin, starting in the spring of 1901 when the promise of the new millennium was only three months old.
Realizing Pearl’s divorce petition prevented moving his family, Grayston decided to remain in town to investigate further the corruption of East Joplin and the related vice of West Joplin, baneful iniquities now reaching into his own home and threatening his daughter’s future. For a man of an inherited, preternaturally crusading spirit, his decision to challenge those behind the jobbery was the only conscionable action. If not religious, he was indeed ethical and thoroughly philosophical, and possessed of an intellectual underpinning that gave reason and basis for trying to correct rottenness — Spencer’s “dissolutions” — harming public welfare and his family.
But, astute as he was, apparently he did not at first recognize the role Bayne was playing in the corruption, for it was Grayston who suggested the superintendent take a room with his wife’s family. Could William then only have read a quatrain from his father’s funeral ode to him, “Though Dead, He Speaks,” he might have lived longer. The lines confirm David’s perception of the truth:
His home, selected for its lair,
Foul serpent had been coiling there,
Watching to make its deadly spring,
A loathsome, filthy, deathly thing.
Waterworks superintendent Bayne did not move into the Payton home to get cheaper quarters; he arrived as a lackey mole to look for means to force Grayston to shut down an investigation getting too close to him and his confraternity. Most of Joplin knew about the separations of the prominent couple, and every lawyer had heard of voluble William’s hopes for reconciliation and his deep concerns for his daughter. The men who hired Bayne to run the water plant knew Grayston’s vulnerability lay in his devotion to family, and they understood his heartstrings were attached to his Achilles’ heel: his potential for intemperate response. Sooner or later, the oligarchs might be able to pull those strings in a way to rein him in.
Although the stooge Bayne was in the Payton house at first simply to gather information, as gossip developed, his confederates realized they might play rumor into a conclusive manipulation of Grayston. Their first tactic was to incite, pay for, and encourage the divorce petition, while at the same time discouraging Pearl from following through with it. To keep it hanging over Grayston could serve better to force him to desist in his inquiries.
The Lords of the White Tablecloth, shrewd as they could be nefarious, surely also saw they might be able to use against him his reputation for bold confrontation, widely recognized among Joplin lawyers; such volatility in the face of malfeasance could make him susceptible to a cunningly conceived provocation, a ploy to inflame him into irrationality. Here was a man who, said his own attorney, “fought his law cases with a good deal of he
art,” always refusing to back away from public misdeeds.
The protagonist in a blood tragedy must commit a deadly error of judgment, and even the names here seem suited to a drama: a house of lords sending a bane into the home of a man of will and his beautiful pearl. Had Grayston kept his plan silent until actually exposing the culpable, he would have had a protective shield of truth, and it would have been too late to silence him. But, as friends and foes alike testified, William was “quite a talker.”
At last, the lords could not afford to wait longer; there was no more time for a subtle, restrained response. It had come down to Grayston or them, and they decided, if I may phrase it so, to pull the trigger. The hand to do that job was already perfectly placed and the true motive for the homicide conveniently concealed by rumors and Grayston’s public statements of there not being room enough in Joplin for both himself and the superintendent. All the plot needed was something to force William to make the first move, a deed to be forced in broad daylight before dozens of witnesses who would, by their very presence, provide a cover of justifiable homicide. Grayston was too prominent — especially after his announcement — to be taken to a mine shaft and dropped in, a dark exit of some lesser Joplin men.
I believe Bayne’s collaborators, neither thugs nor mobsters, and not at heart murderers, were (to use an old phrase) “just crooked enough to have to screw their hats on,” mere businessmen with lucrative connections bringing in graft and bribes, people fearful of losing what they had connived diligently to get. Their motive, beyond continued greed and retention of their gains and power, was avoidance of prison. With the elimination of a single man, the lords and abettors and even the executioner could emerge innocent, with their ill-got gains intact. Aware that Grayston was a man of frontal assault and not one “to creep up from behind to blow a head off,” they knew he had evidence to make a few heads roll.
The lords selected the hour and the arena and put all the actors in place, got every action ready to proceed as scripted: a gladiator with a derby for a helmet, an overcoat for a buckler, his sword a clenched fist. The crowd would be there when the emperor gave the thumbs-down, and as the man from Sparta fell, the rough-edged throng could almost hear a Hoc Habet! “Now he’s had it!”
The immediate postmortem events and trial went as flawlessly as the perfectly placed bullets:
• The mysterious “doctor” who appeared from nowhere to take William’s pulse and then vanish.
• The sudden arrival of the killer’s lawyer through the milling crowd just as the police seized the murder weapon.
• The unqualified acting coroner getting to the body before it could be taken to the undertaker.
• His manipulation and destruction of evidence.
• His attempt to get motive inserted into the verdict.
• The killer not even for a moment being manacled or placed in a cell but instead taken by a fellow lodge-brother to their hall for supper and then to a comfortable hotel room.
• The absurdly minimal bail.
• Timing the trial for the heart of the growing season.
• Stacking the jury with farmers sure to be restive and eager to get back to their animals and crops, men with no inclination to argue their way into a hung jury that could lead to a retrial and a change of venue, ill-educated men struggling to interpret the judge’s needlessly convoluted instructions precluding any verdict requiring serious punishment.
All of those measures were probably enough. But, given how much was riding on the outcome, the lords took no chances on anything they could control, including the prosecution:
• Its plan to pursue a verdict impossible to win.
• Insistence on trying to establish an adulterous relationship the victim himself had disproven.
• Reliance on insubstantial and refutable testimony from fourteen-year-old girls.
• Refusal to challenge repeated conjectures, speculations, and hearsay.
• Failure to point out that many of the witnesses for the defense belonged to the same secret orders as the killer.
• Failure to put forward that the victim was shot once while bending over to pick up his hat and a second time in the back.
• Failure to demonstrate that the defendant, allegedly intending only self-defense, did not attempt to aim for a leg or an arm or to fire a warning shot or merely to brandish his weapon in the face of an unarmed man.
• Failure to discover what caused Grayston to turn around on Main Street — such as a threat to his daughter — and, after eighteen months of clandestine opportunities, to choose instead the most crowded of public arenas to confront his nemesis, a man who could have prevented the violence simply by boarding a streetcar for a home in lovely Carthage where, after all, he would go immediately following the murder.
But, the most convicting evidence of a corrupted trial is the refusal of the prosecution to introduce Grayston’s sustained inquiry into municipal corruption involving the city council and the editor of the Globe (a man the Carthage Press called “Boss” Barbee when it printed a map showing his private, covered walkway into the House of Lords). William’s investigation established a clear motive for his murder, considerably more convincing than the simple contrivance of a jealous husband who on his own public testimony had exonerated his wife of adultery.
This last failure of the prosecution virtually indicts Grayston’s brother and partner: are we to believe William never discussed with him his extended probings so deeply connected to his life? Given William’s years of studying scientific method and inductive procedures, given his professional awareness of the crucial importance of prima facie evidence, can anyone believe he kept no records to prove the dangerous charges he was about to announce? Who, we must ask, above all else would know about those records and their whereabouts? Who would have last access to them? Where did they go?
There is but a single plausible answer.
If that is not enough, then what are we to conclude from George Grayston’s indifferent, listless, and occasionally slighting testimony supposedly in defense of his murdered brother? What about his comments immediately following the trial? “I desire to express my positive and complete satisfaction with the work of the attorneys for the state. . . . Their work was not only able but brilliant and showed the high order of legal forensic ability possessed by them.” An able and brilliant prosecution with high forensic ability that could not even produce a hundred-dollar fine against the killer of his brother?
Consider a final pair of questions: What’s the implication of the younger Grayston being appointed as city attorney only two years following the murder? And beginning soon after that, what are we to infer from his long professional association with the Joplin Waterworks?
Could I make my summary argument before a new jury, this would be it: William Grayston was descended on, laid into, sold out, and done in. He was set up to be shot down. He died in a political assassination executed so cleverly, the truth lay buried for more than a century, with only two innocent women and their daughters serving a lifelong sentence.
I, fair-minded reader, rest my case. You and all readers who come after you are now the jury.
The aftermath: Brother Grayston later served as counsel to corporations and wealthy Joplinites before succumbing at age fifty-nine — a life twenty years longer than William’s — to appendicitis. The week he died, the circuit court closed for a day to honor him.
George Bayne, the man who refused to move out of a crowded boardinghouse, soon began moving from town to town, getting involved in a water department lawsuit in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and somehow slipping out of that one too, before returning to near his boyhood home in Illinois, accompanied by his new wife, the purported Pearl Grayston look-alike, who there bore him a son. The killer lived into his seventies, dying just three months after my birth (Q: “Did you pass word there wasn’t room enough in 1939 for both of you?”). He died not on a public sidewalk but in his own bed, wife at his side, of a myocardial infarct
ion. The undertaker’s record gives his occupation as “mausoleum owner.” George Grant Bayne, as if fulfilling his surname, at last found honest means to make money from what he was good at: as a minister of death. It is in that mausoleum where he lies today, shielded from the elements, his mummified cadaver safely locked in until the granite walls come down. To the very end, he proved adept at self-preservation.
Mrs. Anna Pearl Grayston worked as a bookkeeper in Joplin for several years before remarrying. Her daughter with William, the little girl whose education and future he was so worried about, a concern which fueled his investigation, became a schoolteacher.
William’s other daughter, his first child, Gertrude, like her mother, was divorced not long after losing her second child at birth. She took her firstborn to Kansas City, San Diego, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and back to Kansas City where he, like his grandfather, became a lawyer, a man once described by another lawyer as “too honest to be a good attorney.” Gertrude worked as a single mother for some years, usually as a manager of large, urban apartment-buildings, until she remarried well in her forties. But the lasting trauma of a father brazenly shot down on a street, a mother’s hysterical coffin-side confession, a stillborn child, and her own growing mental frailty — those demons she fought but couldn’t escape.
Thirty-six years after her father’s assassination, Gertrude began writing more frequently to her mother (who had learned to gain strength from adversity), opening every letter with “Dearest Mother” and often closing them with “Heaps and heaps of love.” But each month revealed increasing expressions of her failing will to live. In June 1937, in words strangely reflecting the last letter her father wrote, she said:
Roads to Quoz Page 26
