Adamson traveled to Garrett’s ranch on February 28 and spent the night, and Garrett sent a note to Brazel that the meeting was still on for the next day. The next morning, a Saturday, Garrett got up early and took what was said to be “unusual care” dressing himself. At about 8:30 A.M., Garrett said good-bye to Polinaria and the children and stepped into the two-horse top buggy with Adamson. He placed beside him a rather unusual folding shotgun manufactured by the Burgess Gun Company of Buffalo, New York. Specifically designed for law officers, the 12 gauge, when folded, fit into a custom leather holster that allowed the wearer to quickly draw the gun and flip up its barrel into a locked position, ready to fire. This particular Burgess bore an inscription that identified the weapon as having belonged to Robert G. Ross of the El Paso Police Department. Ross had died of complications from appendicitis in 1899, and Garrett apparently bought the gun from the man’s widow.
Garrett grabbed the leather reins and slapped them against the rumps of the team, and they scooted off down the dirt track leading away from his ranch. At the Walter livery stable, about a half mile west of the Organ store and post office, Garrett drove the buggy right into the corral and up to the water trough so the horses could drink. The day had begun to warm up, but Garrett was still wearing his signature Prince Albert coat. Garrett spotted the fifteen-year-old Walter boy, Willis, hitching some horses to a box wagon and asked if the young man had seen Brazel. Willis pointed down the road at the wisp of dust still hanging in the air and said he had just left. Garrett waited for his horses to finish their drink and then backed the team up and started them down the road to Las Cruces. Willis watched them for a moment as they drove out of sight and then returned to hitching his horses.
About two hours later, Deputy Sheriff Felipe Lucero sat at his desk in Las Cruces thinking he needed to get some lunch. Suddenly, the office door burst open and in stepped a visibly distressed Wayne Brazel.
“Lock me up,” Brazel stammered. “I’ve just killed Pat Garrett!”
Deputy Lucero laughed at Brazel and accused him of pulling his leg. But Brazel insisted that he had shot Garrett, and Lucero, after pausing a moment to carefully study the man, decided he was serious. After locking Brazel in a cell, Lucero stepped outside to see Adamson, who was waiting in the buggy just as Brazel said he would be. Adamson confirmed Brazel’s story and Lucero retrieved the revolver that Brazel had surrendered to Adamson. The sheriff then put Brazel’s horse in the stable and saddled up his own. Lucero had Adamson follow him in the buggy as he rounded up a coroner’s jury, which was not hard to do, as there were now several excited people out in the street dumbfounded at the news of Garrett’s death. Within a short time, Lucero led Adamson and the seven-man jury out of town, accompanied by Dr. William C. Field. The group rode in an easterly direction toward the storied Organ Mountains, their jagged, serrated peaks like one great claw reaching up to scratch the sky.
After traveling approximately five miles, they came upon Garrett’s body next to the road in the bottom of the wide Alameda Arroyo. Someone carefully removed the lap robe Adamson had used to partially cover the corpse. Garrett was lying on his back, his arms out-spread and one knee drawn up. About three feet from the body and parallel to it was Garrett’s Burgess shotgun, still folded and in its holster. Dr. Field noticed that there was no sand kicked up around the holstered gun, suggesting that it had been carefully placed there. Field and the jury also noted that Garrett’s trousers were unbuttoned, and although he wore a heavy driving glove on his right hand, his left hand was bare. Two bullet wounds were identified, one in the head and the other in the upper part of the stomach.
After Garrett’s body was taken to H. C. Strong’s undertaking parlors in Las Cruces, Field conducted a careful autopsy and found that the bullet to the head entered from behind—the doctor discovered several of Garrett’s hairs pushed into the entry wound. The bullet exited just over the right eye. Field also determined that the bullet in Garrett’s stomach ranged up through his body, suggesting that the bullet had been fired when Garrett was on the ground or falling down. Field found this bullet behind the shoulder and cut it out. One other item of interest was discovered, probably by undertaker Strong as he undressed the body: a check made out to Patrick F. Garrett in the amount of $50 and signed by Governor George Curry.
News of Garrett’s death flashed across the nation’s telegraph wires, with many newspapers running the story in their Sunday editions. These first published reports repeated what both Brazel and Adamson had told the deputy sheriff and the coroner’s jury: Brazel fired his pistol in self-defense when he saw Garrett go for his shotgun. First thing on Monday, Poe Garrett filed an affidavit against Brazel, charging him with the murder of his father. A preliminary hearing took place the next day, with the Territory’s attorney general, James M. Hervey, handling the questioning for the prosecution. There were high hopes that Carl Adamson’s testimony would provide some answers to exactly what had happened that day in the arroyo, but he was somewhat of a disappointment. Adamson testified that he and Garrett overtook Brazel about three-quarters of a mile from Organ. When they first spotted the cowboy, Brazel had been talking to someone in the road, but by the time they caught up to him, he was alone. The three continued on together, with Brazel sometimes riding alongside the buggy and at other times falling behind by a hundred yards or so. At a certain point, as Brazel was riding alongside, the conversation turned to the goats. The talk began calmly enough, Adamson recalled, but soon became heated as Garrett berated Brazel for somehow underestimating his herd by six hundred goats. Brazel tersely repeated his position that unless he could sell all of the goats, the deal was off.
Adamson, who claimed he was driving the buggy, said that Garrett and Brazel argued for about fifteen minutes as he guided the team along at a walk.
“Well, I don’t care whether you give up possession or not,” he remembered Garrett saying. “I can get you off there anyway.”
“I don’t know whether you can or not,” Brazel replied.
At this point, Adamson suddenly felt a need to urinate, so he pulled back on the reins and brought the team to a halt. After handing the reins to Garrett, he stepped out of the buggy on the right side, walked near the front of the team, turned away from Brazel and Garrett, and unbuttoned his trousers. Brazel had stopped his horse a few feet forward of the buggy, reining his horse around a bit so that he was facing Garrett sideways, on the buggy’s left side.
Adamson next heard Garrett say in a high-pitched voice, “God damn you, I will put you off now!”
A second or two later, Adamson was startled by a “racket” followed by a gunshot. He spun around to see Garrett stagger and fall backward. He then saw Brazel, pistol in hand, fire a second shot. The second shot had come, Adamson said, just as quickly as a man can cock a pistol and shoot it.
The team jumped at the sound of the gunfire, but Adamson quickly grabbed the lines and wrapped them around the hub of one of the buggy wheels. Adamson then ran around the vehicle just in time to see Garrett stretch out his body and make a grunting noise. The famed lawman died without saying a word.
“This is hell,” Brazel said. “What must I do?”
Adamson told Brazel he better surrender to him. After covering Garrett’s body and tying Brazel’s horse to the back of the buggy, the two hurried to Las Cruces and the sheriff’s office. Adamson remembered that Brazel “seemed as cool as any man I ever saw as we drove into town.”
In the courtroom, Brazel appeared nervous and uncomfortable. His attorneys chose not to put him on the stand at the hearing, preferring to wait for the grand jury to take up the case. Bail was set at $10,000, which was promptly guaranteed by seven men, among them Bill Cox. Just one hour after the hearing, Brazel was walking the streets of Las Cruces.
Garrett’s body remained in state at Strong’s parlors for six days, where it was “viewed by thousands of people.” The funeral occurred on Thursday, March 6. It had been delayed for twenty-four hours to give two of Garrett’s
brothers time to travel to Las Cruces from Louisiana. Governor Curry and Tom Powers were among the six pallbearers. Powers, the El Paso friend Garrett stuck by at great cost to himself, also read the funeral sermon, which was a eulogy originally delivered by Robert J. Ingersoll, the famed orator and agnostic, over the grave of his brother. This choice for a tribute, as well as the speaker (Powers was also an agnostic), only seemed to confirm many people’s suspicion that Garrett was an atheist.
Nevertheless, few of Garrett’s friends and family would argue with the eulogy’s concluding sentence: “There was, there is, no gentler, stronger, manlier man.” Garrett’s body was interred at the Odd Fellows cemetery outside of Las Cruces.
Before and after the funeral, Garrett’s friends and family fumed about what they considered to be not only a murder, but a conspiracy. It was clear to them and others that Garrett’s death had not occurred the way Brazel and Adamson described it. For one thing, it was obvious that Garrett, too, had been urinating when he was killed—he had been found with his trousers unbuttoned and his glove off his left hand. And Garrett’s assassin, whether it was Brazel or someone else, had shot him from behind because the first bullet, they believed, had been to the back of Garrett’s head. They were also suspicious of the several men connected with the affair, and with good reason. James B. “Jim” Miller had an unsavory reputation as a killer—but not just any killer. Dr. J. J. Bush of El Paso, a friend of Garrett’s, wrote Governor Curry with a chilling assessment of Miller, whom he claimed to have known intimately for years.
“[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:
DEAR FRIEND. WHY DONT YOU OR SOM OF YOUR FRIENDS HAVE PRINCE RODES ARRESTE AND PUT UNDER BOND FOR HELPING TO KILL YOUR FATHER THERE IS NO DOUBT BUT THAT HE WAS WITH BRAZEL AND ADAMSON ON THAT DAY.
HE WAS SEEN COMING FROM THAT PLACE THE SAME DAY HE KNOWS ALL AND SO DO I AND IF I CAN GET HIM UNDER BOND I WILL GET AROUND IN TIME I AM AFRAID TO LET MY SELF BE KNOWN FOR A WHILE YO SURELY KNOW THAT WAS WHY HE WAS IN THAT COUNTRY COME THERE TO HELP DO THE DEED
WHEN THINGS IS RIGHT I WILL MAKE MY SELF KNOWN TO YOU AM YOUR FRIEND. EXPOSE HIM IF POSSIBLE DONT LET HIM SNEAK OUT MORE THAN ONE KNOWS ABOUT HIM BUT FRAID TO SAY SO DONT DOUBT WHAT I SAY AN DO SOMETHING TO LET THE PUBLIC KNOW ALL A PUT UP JOB.
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.
To Hell on a Fast Horse Page 23
