HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILD BILL

5/27/1837 - The tumultuously brief life (out with a bullet to the brain at 39) of one of the Wild West's most famous gunfighters begins in Homer, Illinois (now the city of Troy Grove), when James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok is born.
The Wild One

Too restless to lead the farm life of his parents, William and Polly, at 18, James moves to Leavenworth, Kansas, and begins living the Wild West raw that will make him a legend (believe the stories or not ... I tend to think more were true than false).
1869
1855 - Hickok becomes a "Jayhawker" when he joins Jim Lane's vigilante Free State Army ... as a member of the army he also meets for the first time another budding legend ... a 12-year-old boy that is scouting for the group named William "Buffalo Bill" Cody.
 Cody
1858 - Hickok is elected a town constable of Monticello Township, Kansas.
1859 - The parent company of the Pony Express, Russell, Waddell & Majors, hires Hickok to drive freight from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, Texas.
1860 - While freighting, Hickok encounters a cinnamon bear and her cubs blocking the road he is using ... and the gunfighter kills Ma Ursus with a knife to the throat (the bullet he fires at her head fails to penetrate the thick skull of the beast), while suffering multiple injuries to his chest, shoulder, and arm that keep the gunfighter in bed for four months.
 Bear & Bill
1861 - At Rock Creek Station, Nebraska, a dispute over a property payment not paid causes Hickok to pull his pistol (he's the one in arrears) and kill David McCanles ... the killing, his first, like the others that follow, is ruled self-defense.
1861 - The Union Army in Sedalia, Missouri, takes on a new teamster named Hickok.
1862 - Discharged from the Army for unknown reasons, Hickok vanishes from all public records for over a year ... time many historians believe he spends spying for the North.
1863 - As a provost marshal of Springfield, Missouri, Hickok spends a year arresting drunk soldiers, checking hotel liquor licenses, and hunting down individuals in debt to the Union Army.
1864 - General John B. Sanborn hires Hickok as a scout.
1865 - An argument over a watch taken as collateral for a $35 bet becomes the catalyst for a gunfight in the main square of Springfield, Hickok vs. former Confederate soldier Davis Tutt ... draw and fire from a distance of 75 yards, Tutt misses with his shot, but Hickok doesn't, putting his shot through his opponent's heart.
 Hickok vs. Tutt
1867 - Working as a scout out of Fort Harker, Kansas, for Custer's 7th Cavalry, Hickok claims to encounter a large group of hostile Cheyenne Indians ... that flee when the gunfighter sends ten to their happy hunting grounds with his bullets.
1867 - Tired of risking having his long golden locks hanging someday in a warrior tepee, Hickok moves to Niagara Falls to star in the play, The Daring Buffalo Chasers of the Plains ... he is terrible in the flop production and back out West before the end of the year.
1868 - Working out of Hays City, Kansas, Hickok becomes a U.S. Deputy Marshal.
1868 - Assisting in the rescue of an Indian surrounded group of cattlemen at Bijou Creek Basin, Hickok is wounded in the foot.
1869 - Hickok is elected city marshal of Hays City and sheriff of Ellis County ... and in his first month in office kills two men in gunfights.  Cowboy Bill Mulvey, who has the drop on Hickok, dies when he turns slightly to look behind himself when Hickok yells, "Don't shoot him in the back, he's drunk."  Cowboy Samuel Strawhun perishes with lead in his head in a Hays saloon at 1:00 in the morning when he drunkenly insults the size of Hickok's nose.
1870 - Two drunken troopers of the 7th Cavalry, Jeremiah Lonergan and John Kyle, attack Hickok in a saloon.  A mistake, when the pistol placed against his head doesn't fire, the gunfighter is able to grab his own weapon and go to work ... Kyle dies from two slugs in his stomach, and shot through the knee, Lonergan walks with a limp for the rest of his life.
 Aftermath
1871 - Wild Bill and John Wesley Hardin meet in Abilene, Kansas, where Hickok is the town marshal ... and surprisingly don't kill each other.  Legend has it that during one encounter, Hardin uses the famous "road agent's spin" when Hickok tries to disarm the outlaw. Impressed and wary of each other, the two nonetheless pal around for awhile, drinking, gambling, and whoring ... until Hardin kills Charles Couger in his hotel room for snoring too loud and is forced to flee the city.
 Hardin
1871 - Unhappy that Marshal Hickok has covered the erect penis on the painting of an enraged bull that he has on the side of his Abilene saloon, The Bull's Head Tavern, Phil Coe decides to slap leather against the famous gunfighter and finds out first hand that the talk of Hickok's speed and accuracy with a pistol are very much true.  Sadly, Special Deputy Marshal Mike Williams finds out too ... taking a fatal snap shot slug from Hickok when he runs up behind the lawman to offer his assistance in dealing with Coe's friends.
1873 - Hickok joins Buffalo Bill Cody and gunfighter Texas Jack Omohundro in the cast of the play, Scouts of the Plains ... a success that will eventually morph into Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
1876 - Wild Bill marries a 50-year-old circus owner named Agnes Thatcher Lake in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory.
1876 - Fleeing the constraints of married life, Hickok decides to try his luck at the gaming tables of the gold mining camp of Deadwood, Dakota Territory.  It is his last stop.  Refused his usual seat that allows him to view the room, the gunfighter is enjoying an afternoon session of poker (playing five card draw, he holds what will come to be known as the Dead Man's Hand ... a pair of black aces and eights, no one knows what the fifth card was) at Nuttal &Mann's Saloon on the 2nd of August when a former buffalo hunter named Jack McCall (he will eventually be hung for the crime) walks up behind Hickok, yells "Damn you, take that!" and shoots him in the back of the head.  Instant death ... and immortality as a frontier legend of a wild time in American history.
 The End
177 years ago today ... Happy Birthday Wild Bill!

GENIUS IDIOTS

5/21/1924 - Considering themselves to be the "supermen" of Friedrich Nietzche's philosophy, superior and above the laws crafted by common folk, Nathan Leopold (19) and Richard Loeb (18), two wealthy Jewish teenagers from Chicago with massive IQs (Leopold is 210 brilliant on the test and speaks 27 languages fluently, while Loeb becomes the youngest student to graduate from the University of Michigan), tired that their petty crimes are too easily accomplished and don't seem to warrant the attention of the authorities, for the challenge and the thrill, put into effect their plan to commit the perfect crime ... a random murder disguised as a kidnapping.
                                                        
                             
                            Loeb (L) & Leopold (R) 

Planning their gruesome intellectual adventure for seven months (everything from where to hide the body to good alias names is discussed), on lovely spring Wednesday the two friends (both from the well-to-do Kenwood section of town, the pair meet while matriculating at the University of Chicago and become lovers), the duo takes a rented car (leased under the name of Morten D. Ballard) to the city's Harvard School for Boys, and there, select fourteen-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks as their victim.

                                  
                                                      Franks

The son of millionaire pawnshop proprietor, Franks is Loeb's second cousin and next door neighbor, often playing tennis at the Loeb home (How genius is it to pick a relative and next door neighbor as your "random" victim?).  Thinking nothing awry, Franks seals his fate when he is enticed into the car to discuss his new tennis racket with his relative.  Driven off, the young boy will be struck over the head repeatedly with a chisel and then smothered to death (later, both will say they were behind the wheel while the other did the actual killing).  Murder committed, Leopold and Loeb then dispose of the body near Wolf Lake, Indiana (an area where Leopold frequently goes bird watching ... genius again ... NOT!) ... first pouring hydrochloric acid on Franks' face, genitals, and abdomen to make identification difficult, before dumping the corpse in a culvert near the tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  That task taken care of, the pair then burn their victim's clothes, clean up the blood in the car, and put the kidnapping phase of their plan into motion ... calling the Franks home and sending typed ransom notes to the family (the demand is for $20,000).


                                                                     The Culvert

The perfect crime that will remain unsolved forever the plan, the reality of the duo's actions proves otherwise when Irish-American Detective Hugh Patrick Byrne discovers a pair of glasses near the culvert ... glasses with an unusual hinge mechanism that only three people in the Chicago area have purchased ... one pair being sold to Nathan Leopold (although Leopold will claim he lost the spectacles two days before while birding in the area, they actually hit the ground when they fall out of his pocket while he is muscling the body into its resting place).  One clue to another (the typewriter the pair discarded after writing their ransom notes is soon discovered), the trail eventually leads to Leopold (who has been hanging around reporters and police officers investigating the murder, offering theories about the crime) and Loeb ... who prove not to be Moriarty's of the criminal world, both rolling over and confessing to their actions when they are brought in for questioning on the 29th of May.
                     
                     
                                                  Leopold & Loeb

Heinous crime, culprits caught and confessions taken, the next stop for the pair should have been death row ... and would have been but for the money both families have to burn on purchasing defenses for their sons ... defenses in the form of the finest defense lawyer in the nation, the legendary Clarence Darrow.  Money well spent, Darrow waives a jury trial and in his closing argument to the sentencing judge, Cook County Circuit Court Judge John R. Caverly, gives a 12 hour speech about the wrongs in capital punishment ... a speech so powerful that the judge is moved to sentence the teenagers to life in prison (and 99 years each for the kidnapping portion of the crime) rather than death.

                     
                                         L to R - Leopold, Darrow, Loeb

LIFE IN PRISON!  But not for long for one of the murderers.  In 1936, Loeb will get the victim's perspective on murder when he is savaged by a fellow convict in the shower room of Stateville Penitentiary (former cellmate James E. Day is enraged when his extortion threats are ignored, but gets off when authorities buy into his alibi of the killing being self defense) dying from the blood loss that comes from being slashed over fifty times with a straight razor smuggled into the prison.  Lover and best friend lost, Leopold spends time teaching class at the prison's school, organizing the prison library, writing his autobiography (a pithy tome called Life Plus 99 Years), attending parole hearings, and until the staff psychologists settle him down, screaming in his cell for hours on end.  Humble and regretful about the stupidity of his youth, after 33 years behind bars a parole board lets Leopold out of jail and he uses the time left to him constructively ... setting up a foundation for emotionally disturbed, retarded, and delinquent youths, moving to Puerto Rico, marrying a widowed florist, and working in a hospital as a medical technician.  He dies in 1971 at the age of 66 as a result of a diabetes inspired heart attack.

         
                                                  Illinois Cons - Loeb & Leopold

Gone, yet not gone ... beyond the horde of magazine articles and books about the monsters, the pair now lives on as "entertainments," their story being the basis for the 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton called Rope, Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film of the same name (the director's first Technicolor movie, famous for taking place in real time and being shot in a series of long takes lasting ten minutes each), the 1959 movie adaption of the novel Compulsion, the 1992 movie Swoon, Michael Haneke's 1997 Funny Games film (and its 2008 American remake), the 2002 film Murder by Numbers, and Stephen Dolginoff's 2005 bizarre Off-Broadway musical, Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story. 

                                           

GUNPLAY ON THE STREETS OF BOWLING GREEN

4/16/1931 - The vacation of outlaws Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd and William "Billy the Killer" Miller comes to a sudden end in the college town of Bowling Green, Ohio.

                          
                                                    Floyd

Seeking a respite from the heat that has come their way due to the recent gun murders of the Ash Brothers in Kansas City, the two men and their new girlfriends, sisters Rose Ash (23) and Beulah Baird (21), formerly the amours of the dead brothers, decide to take a "honeymoon" vacation in northwestern Ohio ... one they pay for by taking several thousand dollars out the Mount Zion Deposit Bank of Ellison, Kentucky and the Whitehouse Bank of Whitehouse, Ohio.  Wallets full, then it is time to relax and prove that crime does actually pay by treating themselves to fine clothes, expensive meals, first-class accommodations, and all the "spicy" entertainments the area has to offer.  Living the good life ... and the citizens of Bowling Green noticing they are brings an abrupt end to the outlaw's fun.

                                
                                      Downtown - Site of the Shootout

Checking out a series of tips that have accumulated over a week about a foursome of well dressed strangers driving a sedan with Missouri license plates that are spending money all over town, Police Chief Carl "Shorty" Galliher and twenty-eight-year-old Officer Ralph "Zibe" Castner decide to investigate when they receive yet another call about the visitors.  Taking their squad car downtown, in only a few minutes of cruising the lawmen sight their quarry outside of Main Street's Uhlman's Clothing Store.  Just done casing a nearby bank and having themselves freshened up at a local barbershop, Floyd and Miller are there to treat their girlfriends to one more shopping spree; seeking fancy dresses for a night on the town the outlaws have planned for later that evening.  The gunmen and their girls are just about to enter the store when Bowling Green's finest pull up in front of the dress shop.
                                           
                                                      
                                                            Castner

Always alert to the presence of police officers, Floyd is the first to react when he sees Galliher and Castner exiting their vehicle with their revolvers already in hand.  Quiet Thursday afternoon over in a heartbeat, the outlaw draws his .45, yells, "Bill!  Duck!" and begins firing a split second before the other three men also unload on each other.  In the mayhem that follows as bullets fly up and down the street with pedestrians scrambling for cover, Miller collapses to the ground from the fatal chunk of lead deposited in his belly, Castner crumbles to the pavement with Floyd bullets in his abdomen and right thigh (he will continue firing from a prone position until his gun is empty, dying of his wounds later that night at a local hospital), and a hysterically screaming Beulah is dropped by a ricochet round to the back of her head (she will survive and both sisters will be released from custody after being questioned by authorities).

                                                
                                                           Beulah

Fight ... and flight!  Having assuaged his first instinct to attack, Floyd instantly goes into secondary survival mode when his automatic clicks on empty, and jumping out from the parked car he has been hiding behind, breaks into a full out sprint, bowling over people and dodging between parked and moving vehicles, as he runs for the assumed safety of the car he and Miller have stashed on the nearby street of East Wooster.  A former star tackle for his high school football team, a panting Chief Galliher chases after Floyd but fails to catch the quicker bandit before he reaches the sedan.  Jumping into the car as a last bullet from Galliher pings off its rear fender, the outlaw pushes the car to its maximum performance as he grinds gears, drives up a sidewalk, flies through red lights, careens over a lawn, and then speeds down an alley heading south, leaving Bowling Green forever.



Vanished, vowing never to return to Ohio (a vow he will fatally forget in 1934) ... Floyd's next public appearance will not be until July 20th, when raiding prohibition officers accidentally discover his hiding place above a Kansas City flower shop (and another lawman dies).

                                     

Just another Depression Era thug at the time of his badly ended vacation, Floyd leaves Bowling Green as a notorious Public Enemy with a catchy nickname the public can follow as he forges a legendary and infamous career as an outlaw and murderer.  Still upset about the recent killings of her two sons, when newsmen approach Sadie Ash at the madam's Kansas City home to discuss the Bowling Green shootout, her first response is to ask, "Did they get Pretty Boy?"  Pretty Boy?  A nickname never heard before outside of gin joints and brothels (his closest friends and family call him "Choc"), the journalists are entranced, and Charles Arthur Floyd will be known by that moniker, a name he hates, until the day he dies ... and beyond.