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.
ON JANUARY 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.
GOLDIE SMITH 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.
ROLLIN P. DICKERSON 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.
THE 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.
WHEN HE HEARD of Ketchel’s fatal shoot
ing, 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.
EVELYN NESBIT READ Ketchel’s obituary in the New York Times. The report roused a vague memory of their evening together, but then she pushed it out of her mind and hurried off to that morning’s rehearsal. It was a stage comedy in which she portrayed the part of a beautiful girl torn between the true love of a poor but goodhearted farm boy and the lickerish attentions of a rich and randy old man. Over the following years she would have other small parts in other trivial theater works and then play minor roles in insignificant motion pictures. Then be an old and lonely woman for a long time before dying in a Hollywood nursing home in 1967.
JACK LONDON HAD just finished his day’s writing when he got word of Ketchel’s murder. He poured a full tumbler of rye and raised it to his eastward window. “Here’s to you, champ. Ashes, I say, ashes!” Then drained the entire glass in a single breath and coughed until his eyes were pouring tears and his lips were flecked with blood.
Even as he continued to travel about the world and write his daily quota of a thousand words, London’s health would degenerate apace and his luck run poorly. Within the next six years he would be plagued by a worsening insomnia, his wife would miscarry and thenceforth be unable to conceive, his beloved Wolf House would be razed by fire, he would have an appendectomy, he would contract dysentery and pleurisy, he would suffer from acute rheumatism and a severe and chronic nephritis. He would die in bed on the 22nd of November, 1916. The cause of death officially recorded as “uraemia following renal colic,” though in truth it might have been a stroke. Or, as some would have it, an ultimate failure of the heart.
JACK JOHNSON WAS at Sheepshead Bay to race against Barney Oldfield when he was told the news in all its particulars. He did not respond immediately but looked off to seaward and the muscular white clouds rising off the horizon. Then showed his golden smile and said: “Dollar to a doughnut Mr. Stanley was starting to turn around to try and catch that bullet with his teeth…”
The following year, Johnson would marry Etta Duryea, who some months later would kill herself, by some accounts because of Johnson’s relentless philandering. He would own a popular café in Chicago. He would continue his public dalliances with white women and would be charged with violation of the Mann Act, a federal law enacted to combat the white slave trade but also quite useful for the prosecution of bothersome persons who had broken no other law. At the time of his conviction in 1913, he would be married to Lucille Cameron, another white woman. While his case was under appeal he would flee the country and spend the next seven years in vagabond exile. He would wander through Europe and Latin America, live for a time in France, in Germany, Spain, Mexico. He would have great difficulty contracting for matches of much worth. In a span of almost five years after the Jeffries fight, he would be able to arrange but four defenses of his title. The last of them would be on April 5, 1915, in Havana, Cuba, against gigantic Jess Willard, who would batter him terribly and knock him out in the twenty-sixth round. Johnson would afterward claim the fight had been fixed, that he had taken a bribe to lose, that part of the deal was a government promise to drop the charges against him but he was double-crossed. To everyone who was there, however, it was obvious that Willard outfought him. In 1920 he would at last surrender to American authorities. He would be sentenced to a year in Leavenworth penitentiary and be released before the full term of the sentence. He would divorce Lucille and marry yet again. His last ring victory would be a third-round knockout when he was fifty-four years old. He would continue to box exhibition matches into the mid-1940s, the last of them at age sixty-seven.
On June 10, 1946, on a highway near Raleigh, North Carolina, he would be killed in a car crash. The cause of which, according to reports, was excessive speed.
Acknowledgments
For their kind and valuable assistance I am grateful to:
Robin Urban and Richard I. Gibson of the World Museum of Mining in Butte, Montana;
Sharol Higgins Neely of the Springfield—Greene County Library in Springfield, Missouri;
The Tucson—Pima County Library in Tucson, Arizona.
About the Author
JAMES Carlos BLAKE is the author of nine novels. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Southwest Book Award, Quarterly West Novella Prize, and Chautauqua South Book Award. He lives in Arizona.
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PRAISE FOR
THE KILLINGS OF STANLEY KETCHEL
“Unexpectedly elegant. It’s a masterful story, charming for its roguish humor and slightly intimidating with its sharp narrative jabs…. Blake lends poignant immediacy to Ketchel’s life and persona, elevating his scrappy determination to near-mythic proportions without sacrificing the passionate human being at the center of the story…. This book would be hard for anyone to put down. Its playful sensuousness and stoic determination are impossible to resist.”
—Rocky Mountain News (A Favorite Book of the Year Selection)
“Expansive…. This wonderfully written adventure is part biography, part American picaresque novel, part crime story—episodic but compelling, humorous, exciting, and ultimately tragic.”
—Otto Penzler, New York Sun
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel presents us with an America at its most raw…A daring book where deft writing brings an era to full-blooded life…. Unforgettable.”
—Edmonton Journal
“James Carlos Blake is a master at using history to tell a fictional tale, and he’s at it again with The Killings of Stanley Ketchel.”
—Denver Post
“Packs a literary wallop…and brims with violence, sex, and humor.”
—Tucson Citizen
“The novel resurrects Stanley Ketchel, maybe as good a boxer pound for pound as any…. Blake captures Ketchel’s life…in prose so graceful readers may forget it packs the strength of a master…. Killings moves with grace, hits with power.”
—Salt Lake City Tribune (A Best Western Book of the Year Selection)
“Not only the story of a remarkable life but also a paean to the vitality—and brutality—of turn-of-the-century America. [The Killings of Stanley Ketchel] resonates long after the last page is turned.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Terrific…. Reflects the country as it was then: flawed and brutal but dazzling with possibilities for anyone brave enough to reach for their dreams.”
—Arizona Republic
“Blake’s prose is as finely chiseled as sculpture…. [A] master of the taut and tough tale of amoral outsiders…. An earthy, often funny novel.”
—Montana Standard
“A fine work of historical fiction…. James Carlos Blake’s deftly crafted new novel…paces the narrative adroitly…and it’s suitably delivered in his characteristically muscular style.”
—Tucson Weekly
“Ketchel fits the mold of a James Carlos Blake protagonist. He lives on the edge. He is fearless, violent, attractive to women, [and] imbued with the outlaw spirit…. Mr. Blake’s prose is de
ft and hard-boiled, [and] the book packs a wallop.”
—Dallas Morning News
“[[Ketchel] comes out slugging…. A vivid mix of history, myth and fantasy; its language consists of hard-boiled dialogue, period diction and florid description…. Readers who like their action raw and history bloody should find plenty to cheer in The Killings of Stanley Ketchel.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“Hard-bitten, yet surprisingly moving.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Action-packed…. A fascinating tale.”
Publishers Weekly
OTHER WORKS BY JAMES CARLOS BLAKE
Handsome Harry
Under the Skin
A World of Thieves
Wildwood Boys
Borderlands
Red Grass River
In the Rogue Blood
The Friends of Pancho Villa
The Pistoleer
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel Page 26
