Days of Darkness (37 page)

This incident led to one of the strangest chapters in the Baker saga. McDaniels, Dewey Baker, and Bobby Baker were indicted for the killing of Alf Neal, but when the indictments were handed down, Frank Baker, commonwealth's attorney and son of Gard and Thena Baker, simply stuck them in a drawer of his desk and refused to process them. It was the second occasion on which Frank, a man with an otherwise spotless reputation, failed to perform his duties properly, apparently because of family connections.

The first case concerned his cousin, George Barrett. Even considering family ties, Frank's loyalty to George was puzzling, for George, once called by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover “the meanest man I ever knew,” was not just a killer. He was a crook, a thief, and a swindler. As a boy he got into a fight with a cousin who shot out his left eye, and afterward he wore glasses with one dark lens. A notorious philanderer, he deserted his first wife and married a high school sweetheart, but this time she deserted him, leaving him with an infant son.

George made his living selling stolen watches and diamonds, working most of the time north of the Ohio River or west of the Mississippi. He would buy a diamond ring from a jewelry store, substitute a fake for the real gem, return the ring to the store, get his money back, and sell the real diamond. He also sold stolen guns and cars and at one time boasted of importing stolen diamonds from Mexico. George also bootlegged whiskey when business was slow and boasted that no revenue agent would ever take him. That proved wrong. In 1929 one did. George was wounded, taken to Louisville, fined a hundred dollars,
and sent to prison for a year, the usual sentence for a first-time bootlegger.

When away from home on business, George left his small son with his mother, who lived with her daughter between Manchester and McKee. Returning from a trip to Ohio in 1931, he went by to see the boy. While he was there his mother reprimanded the boy, who was showing off for his daddy, and slapped him across his bottom. This infuriated George, who shouted that no one on earth should touch his son.

“You ain't doin' right by him,” he screamed. “You're supposed to be taking care of him. Well, dammit, do it!”

“I been treating him like I would any grandbaby,” said his mother. “I don't know how to do any better.”

“Ma's been good to the boy, George,” said his sister Rachel. “You oughtn't pick on your own mama.”

This criticism was more than George's tender ego could bear. Pulling his pistol, he shot his mother dead. Rachel rushed to help her mother and George hit her across the head with the gun, laying her scalp open. Blood streaming down her face, Rachel ran for the door, but George shot her before she could make it. But she got to her feet and staggered across the porch and down to the road, where she flagged down a passing rural mail carrier. He took her to a doctor in town.

George rushed into town, reported the incident to Frank, his cousin and commonwealth's attorney, claiming that he had killed his mother and sister in self-defense. Eventually George was arrested and tried. In fact, he was tried twice and twice got a hung jury, partly because Rachel had died in the meantime and could not testify against him, partly because Frank failed to prosecute him energetically. Indeed, the judge, commenting on the case, denounced the manner in which Frank had conducted the case for the prosecution, declaring that the commonwealth's attorney had “sounded as though he was defending the accused.”

Only family loyalty can explain Frank's conduct. Or perhaps it was just that George Barrett poisoned everything he touched. He surely seemed to lead a charmed life. He not only escaped punishment for the murder of his mother and sister, but five months later escaped a hail of bullets from the courthouse at Manchester. Five years later, however, he killed a federal agent and was wounded in both legs during the gunfight. Sentenced to hang, he wept that prison authorities couldn't hang a man who couldn't walk to the gallows. They could. They carried him.

After George's trial, Frank was under a great deal of pressure. A
grand jury had handed down indictments against Dewey Hensley, Little Tom Baker, and Frank McDaniel for burning the warehouse and murdering Alf Neal, but Frank refused to process them, as he was legally obliged to do. Judge Cap Stivers, Pitt's father, and some of the Howards were demanding that he prosecute these cases. The Bakers were demanding that he revive some of the old cases against the Howards and Whites for the killing of Bakers. The strain was beginning to tell, and Frank confided to his mother that he had a premonition that he was about to die. When his brother Ben, the county attorney, became suddenly ill and died that summer, Frank stood by his grave and said, “I'll be with you before long, brother.”

Such was the situation when the September 1932 term of court opened. The Bakers were in town in force for the occasion, staying at what had been the Potter Hotel but now seemed to be the home of Wiley Baker; or he may have been operating it. The Webb Hotel down the street was said to be full of Howards, though it was never clear which ones or why they were there. Were the Howards worried because Frank might prosecute cases in which Howards were involved? If so, which ones? Or were the Howards harboring lingering hatred of the Bakers because of the deaths of Wilson and Burch Stores and the wounding of Bal?

Or was this gathering the work of Big Jim Howard? After all, he had lost almost eight years out of his life and been forced to endure the ignominy of prison, and there is no doubt that he blamed the Bakers, who were in Frankfort at the time of Goebel's killing, for implicating him in the assassination.

The only outstanding Baker death that remained unsolved was that of Bad Tom, and that was not the work of the Howards.

With Frank around the breakfast table on September 18, 1932, the morning court was scheduled to open, were his wife, his parents (Gard and Thena), Wiley and Shabie, Doc Hornsby, Bill Hensley, George Barrett, Frank Young, and Frank Brockman, a nephew of Frank Young who was originally from Breathitt County and was visiting from Cincinnati.

Bill Hensley had argued with Frank the night before, contending that he was making a bad mistake in not acting on the indictments handed down by the grand jury for the murder of Pitt Stivers. He insisted that if the killers were not imprisoned they would kill Frank to keep the indictments out of court. Now Hensley as well as his parents begged Frank not to go to the courthouse. “I swear there are forty-five men in there waiting to kill you,” he said. “And a bunch of Howards among them.”

“I can't help that,” said Frank. “I was elected commonwealth's attorney. I've got no choice.”

So, after he finished breakfast, Frank Baker, accompanied by Brockman and George Barrett (some accounts say it was Jesse Barrett, but most specify George) left the hotel and started across the street to the courthouse. They had hardly reached the sidewalk when a hail of bullets cut down Frank and Brockman. Barrett somehow escaped. Shabie raised the window to call to Frank, and bullets smashed the glass around her head. Thena made one desperate effort to reach her fallen son, but bullets kicked sidewalk splinters into her face and thudded into the building behind her, and she retreated. Wiley ran from the back door and was shot, for some reason, by Dr. Porter, a pharmacist. Frank Young ran with him and was shot in the leg, a minor wound.

Who killed Frank Baker? Again, no one knows. His body lay on the sidewalk for several hours because everyone in the hotel, his mother included, was afraid to retrieve it. By the time his family reached the body, the killers had, of course, left the courthouse. Some people, including Baker descendants, think the fatal bullets came for the rifle of Big Jim Howard, still trying to erase the memory of what happened that fateful day on Crane Creek. As his grandson said, it was not his style.

Four years later, Bobby Baker, Bad Tom's youngest son, who lived in Hamilton, Ohio, came to Manchester on business. He was staying at a hotel at Burning Springs and was having a beer with Lloyd Baker and Ed Manning. Two men at the bar heard Bobby say he was going into Manchester, and they asked for a ride. Bobby agreed, and the three of them started toward town. As they drove into Manchester there was a shot. Bobby slumped over and, as his white-faced passengers tried to grab the wheel, the car slammed into the curb. Bobby Baker was dead. No one was arrested for the killing. One of his passengers was a Garrard.

The Baker-Howard feud was finally over.

But bitter memories refused to die. One day in 1936 Thena Baker ran into Jim Howard on the Town Square in Manchester. Did she suspect Howard of the murder of her son Frank? Had she found the will to forgive him? Jim very studiously ignored her, but Thena blocked his way, looked at him steadily, and said, “Jim, we are getting old. I've found my peace with God, and I'd like to find my peace with you. Can't we all forget the past and forgive?”

Big Jim Howard looked at her coldly. “Get out of my way, you bell-ringing old bitch,” he said.

The feud had produced several outstanding characters, among them General T.T Garrard, Bad Tom Baker, and Big Jim Howard. And Gard and Thena Baker, those kind people who always seemed to be on hand when they were needed.

Thomas Baker lay beside his father, George Baker, in the family plot on Boston Gap. T.T. Garrard was buried not far from where he had spent so many tumultuous years of his interesting, active, valuable life. A village in Clay County bears his name.

And what had happened to James Ballenger Howard? Well, not much really, nothing sensational at any rate. After his release from prison, he returned to his home, his wife Mary, and their three children—James Jr., Earl, and Edna, who soon married and left home. For a while James Howard thought of returning to the family farm at the head of Crane Creek, but he had never been and was not a farmer. He became a salesman of shoes and trees—fruit and ornamental—traveling through the counties around Clay.

“You could see him coming down the hill carrying a big sample case,” former governor Bert Combs recalled. “He was an impressive looking man, the impression of size emphasized by the long, black overcoat he wore.” Stanley DeZarn says that Howard was reputed to carry a “big, black .45” in that sample case, but Combs doubted that. For one thing, he said, Howard was never known to use a pistol, only a rifle. This was not entirely true, either. According to his grandson Jim Burchell:

Grandaddy carried a .45 pistol, but not in his sample case. He carried it in a shoulder holster. Funny thing: One day in Manchester he bent over and that pistol fell out on the street. It took a strange bounce and went off, shooting him in the back or fleshy part under the shoulder. They took him up to the hospital and called Dr. Anderson, who patched him up and said, “Jim, we've got a nice bed here for you until that wound gets better,” and when Grandaddy heard that he jumped out of bed and did a jig, right there in the hospital room. And he told Doc Anderson, “Doctor, I'll see you in a week. Maybe.” He believed that if he lay in bed, his blood wouldn't circulate to the wound and heal it. He was a great believer in exercise, getting the blood circulating. He did what they call now aerobic exercises, four hundred a day. And he drank great amounts of water, kept a tall glass full by his bed, and would drink it if he awoke in the night. He walked a lot. Sure enough, he went back a week later and Dr. Anderson said he couldn't believe it, said the would was hardly blue, completely healed.

Ironically, Jim was in Georgetown, Kentucky, the day his old nemesis, Judge Cantrill, was buried, and was asked if he would like
to attend. “No, thank you,” he said, “but I am willing for it to be known that his funeral has my hearty endorsement.” To the day he died, he denied guilt in the Goebel affair.

“He never talked about it,” Jim Burchell told me, “but he did say he didn't do it. He said the Democrats raised $100,000 to hang him; wasted their money.”

“Grandpa wasn't a violent man,” Jim continued. “I loved him. He was a quiet man, read a lot. Liked to read the Bible. That story of him shooting Baker twenty-five times was crazy. That just wasn't his style.” But he added, interestingly, that Jim said, “I was going to Frankfort to do the job, and was looking for a partner, but when I got there somebody had beat me to it.” That would support the legend, still popular, that Powers offered him a pardon if he would kill Goebel.

We will never know. Dr. Thomas D. Clark, Kentucky's eminent historian, said in 1992, “I doubt if even Jim Howard knew by the time he died. He had lived with the thing for so long, been accused of it, asked about it; I doubt that he could say for sure whether he did it or not.”

Just before he died in 1954, Jim was visited by Allan Trout, the famed reporter for the
Courier-Journal,
who begged Jim to tell him the facts so that history could be kept straight, promising to sequester his remarks as long as Jim stipulated.

“We were sitting on the porch,” said Trout, “and when I asked him that, Jim looked at me for a few seconds, and then looked away for a long time, as if he was pondering an answer. And finally he said, ‘I said all I have to say at that trial.' No one ever got more out of him. But I will say that I wasn't nervous about asking him. He was a very dignified man, very self-contained. But he wasn't intimidating. I didn't sense any violence in him.”

Jim's later years seemed placid. He and his wife usually attended church on Sunday. After she died in 1948, he lived for a while in Marcum's boardinghouse. But people said he seemed lonely, often sitting on the porch or walking around the *own alone, and he finally went to live with his daughter Mary, who had married Toulmin Burchell. (Note that a man named Toulmin had married a Howard woman, as though symbolic of, or perhaps in memory of, the long-dead feud.) He lived there until 1954, when he died and was buried, without fanfare, in the small cemetery not far from the Clay County Courthouse in Manchester.

Surcease