Читать книгу The Last Sheriff in Texas - James P. McCollom - Страница 7

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The man who shot the sheriff was Roy Hines, thirty-four, ex-con, a grifter on his way from Oklahoma to Mexico. The surviving eyewitness, Houston Pruett, the Magnolia station manager, gave the following account.

It was a green Mercury station wagon drove up in front of the station. There was three men in front and a woman and two babies in the back. While I was cleanin his windshield he said would you put me in about two dollars worth of gas? Yes, sir. So I put the two dollars worth of gas in . . . None of em got out. So I went around and said Sir would you like for me to check your hood? He said, please. So I raised the hood and put my head under the hood, you know, fixin to check the oil. And Vail Ennis came from Beeville. You know, he was always stoppin to ask where so and so was . . . if I’d seen so and so. Stop by and get a Coke. He was a good friend of mine. But he pulled up right by the side of me. When I was puttin the dipstick back in, I heard him say: Did you fellers catch a ride with this man? One of em said yes. He said get out, you’re under arrest. The one on the outside was Pittman, the smaller feller. He got out. By that time I’d put the hood down and was watchin em, wonderin what was goin on. The man handed me two one dollar bills. And Vail searched this Pittman real good. Head to feet. Turned around to the big man . . . He wadn’t as big as I am but he was a bigger man than the first one. He said, I told you to get out, you’re under arrest. Vail got his handcuffs and handcuffed the little one and the big one reached him his right arm. I didn’t notice that then until after the shooting. He was left handed. He handcuffed em together and he said to me, Houston, go in there and call Harper Morris. Tell him I’ve got the two men he wanted. Vail follered me in there, right on in there, and them guys follered us in there till they got there to that opening, about four foot over there. He turned around to em and said you boys wait right there, that’s far enough. Just as nice as he could be. I picked up the phone and called Harper Morris and just about the time I was givin the phone to Vail I seen this big one come out with that gun. He told Vail, I said drop that receiver. And drop that gun. And Vail whirled around. And said, wait a minute and pulled his six shooter. But the man emptied his gun in him before Vail came out of his holster with the six shooter. Then Vail levelled on em. Vail emptied his gun in the both of em . . . The big man that done the shootin . . . he turned . . . and acted like he was gonna run outside. The little man caught ahold of the door facing and started coming down and when the big un fell out . . . on his face . . . he pulled the little un out on top of him . . . Vail reloaded his gun. And he shot ’em both again. He turned around to me and said Houston you better get me to a doctor quick. I’m dyin.

Fifty years afterward, people could tell you exactly where they were on the day Sheriff Vail Ennis was shot five times with a Smith & Wesson .38. Wayne Dirks, twelve, was hitching a ride to Tuleta, three miles south, after junior high football practice. He and a friend saw the commotion and jogged down to the Magnolia to see what had happened. “When we got closer we could see all this blood, probably a twenty-by-twenty area. Solid blood. We walked right up to it. The bodies were still there. Someone had covered them up.” The canvas covered everything but an arm with a tattoo—a severed heart, above it the word Deceived, below it the word Laraine. “There was blood everywhere. There must have been a pool of blood twenty feet across. I can see to this day one of the workers at the station taking a hose and trying to wash it away.”

Jack Robinson, later a sheriff himself, was one of the first in Beeville to find out about it. Driving down St. Mary’s Street after work he saw the sheriff’s Hudson Hornet parked in front of the Beeville hospital, the doors open, nobody in it, the police light still flashing. “I just figured Vail had shot somebody again,” he said. Inside the hospital, Cread McCollom Jr. lay on a table in the emergency treatment area, a bandana wrapped around his left hand, waiting for the doctor. He had worked cattle on the ranch at Cadiz that day and ripped a two-inch gash in his thumb. Coal oil and camphor, his grandfather’s usual treatment, hadn’t fixed it. Suddenly the door opened, and there was Vail Ennis, his white shirt soaked in blood. Dr. Edmondson came in and said, “We need that table, Cread. Just lie down on the floor.”

Outside, a small crowd of lawmen and onlookers had formed in the hospital yard. L. D. Hunter and Reese Wade, the sheriff’s hunting partners, were there. Some high school boys came by; they drove to tell others. By nightfall, the yard was crowded. The weather was overcast and raw. The county had seen the first frost of the fall over the weekend, temperatures in the middle thirties, and it had rained almost an inch early Monday. A single streetlight at the corner of St. Mary’s and Jones Streets did little to light the funereal scene, shades huddled against a blackening sky. Inside the hospital, Vail Ennis lay dying at the age of forty-four. No one said it out loud, but they all knew that Vail’s life was meant to end this way. Before today, Sheriff Vail Ennis had killed five men. Now he had killed seven. No other lawman in Texas had killed so many men.

So the gloomy night of November 10, 1947, became the moral high point of Vail’s time as sheriff of Bee County. His death would gray the memory of his own killings. His many enemies would be obliged to show compassion for his widow and small daughter, obliged to join the mourners at his funeral.

Assuming, of course, that he would die.

The American Café that week saw the last gathering of the old-style sheriffs of Texas. They drove in from the neighboring cattle counties to join the vigil. Claude Taylor came from Goliad, Albert Smith from Live Oak, Harper Morris from Karnes. Each was the unquestioned law of his county. Texas, proud of its size, was a small world. Here in the brush country the pioneers had laid out their towns thirty miles apart—the distance a covered wagon could travel in one day. From Beeville it was thirty miles northeast to Goliad, thirty miles north to Kenedy, thirty miles south to Sinton, thirty-two miles southeast to Refugio, and thirty miles west to George West. Distances in frontier Texas were vast but undaunting. A single man on horseback could easily cover fifty miles in daylight.

Standing next to each other, the sheriffs of Karnes and Live Oak counties formed a spectacle. Harper Morris was five feet tall; he wore a size four boot. Albert Smith was a huge, lumbering, rock-hard man. Albert Smith had been sheriff of Live Oak County for two decades. He was almost as feared as Vail. Grifters steered clear of Live Oak just as they steered clear of Bee. And Harper Morris had a legacy that pretty much guaranteed him a lifetime as the law in Karnes County. His father, W. T. “Brack” Morris, was the sheriff shot and killed by the legendary Gregorio Cortez in 1901.

Vail Ennis wasn’t dead yet, but he was close enough for these hard realists to tell the sheriff stories and laugh aloud about them. Most stories were about guns. No one questioned Vail’s skill with a sidearm, but his friends ribbed him about hunting. Around here, bird season—dove and quail—was more important than deer season, and there was much to argue about. Who was the better shot? Who had the better dogs? Vail had bragged about his dogs and bragged about his car, the metallic green Hudson Hornet he said was the heaviest, fastest car in Texas.

At every table, there was expert speculation about what had happened at Pettus. These men knew about guns, knew about the damage guns could do. Was it believable that the sheriff had been shot five times in the belly before he fired back? Who could survive five .38 slugs? Or even .32s? Or even .22s?

The mystery was where the big man got the gun. How had Vail failed to find the big man’s gun when he cuffed him? The gun supposedly was in the man’s boot, but a Smith & Wesson .38 was too big to hide in a boot. No lawman wanted to believe that Vail had searched the big man and missed the gun. Or, worse, that he had neglected to search him at all. The café was full of gun experts, each with a theory:

“It was a .32.”

Another: “Allee says it was a .38. He’s got it.”

Information passed from one table to another. Several men claimed to have been at the hospital when Vail came in. One saw nurses try to put Vail on a stretcher, which he’d refused. “I can walk,” he’d said. There was speculation that Vail had even driven himself from Pettus, but witnesses said one of the station workers had driven, with Vail in the front seat of the Hudson and Houston Pruett, the heavy station attendant, in the back. Pruett had been nicked by a ricochet (either in the back or the butt, depending on the version). Someone said Pruett wanted the stretcher since Vail didn’t. But he was just too heavy.

Such stories would be repeated for decades, with colorful variations: “Vail told the driver that if he didn’t keep the Hudson floorboarded 110 all the way to the hospital, he’d shoot him, too.”

The head table at the American was wherever Captain Alfred Allee chose to sit. The neighboring sheriffs were in Beeville unofficially. But Allee, the famous Texas Ranger, was here to take charge.

Alfred Allee was no stranger to Beeville. During the mid 1930s, he was a regular at the American Café when it was still called the Bluebonnet. That was when Ma Ferguson got elected governor of Texas and fired most of the Rangers. Of all the men in the American, the only one who had known Vail Ennis before he became a lawman was Alfred Allee. Some said he had been in the county since he was sixteen, that he had gone to school in Beeville. No one remembered. No one asked. Most men his age hadn’t finished high school. In Texas a boy had one ambition: to be a man, and most couldn’t wait out high school—there were too many things to do, too much experience waiting.

The Texas Rangers were long past their glory days. The corps had been merged into the Texas Department of Public Safety in 1935. But some veteran Rangers were so famous that the bureaucracy gave them wide range. Frank Hamer was one; he had tracked down Bonnie and Clyde. Lone Wolf Gonzaullas was another. Alfred Allee was the third. The mystique remained. Texas schoolboys knew stories of the Rangers as well as stories from the Bible. They knew about the Battle of Plum Creek in 1840, when fewer than a hundred Rangers beat back a thousand Comanche warriors. They knew about the scrapes in 1845 when 150 Rangers held off the Mexican army during the early days of the Republic. They knew the exploits of Rip Ford in the 1850s, “chastising” the hostiles under Iron Jacket, then riding to the border to take on Juan Cortina, the Red Robber of the Rio Grande.

News from the hospital late Tuesday morning was that Vail had been on the operating table for three or four hours and was still alive. The slugs had penetrated his intestines five times. Dr. James Edmondson had dug two .38 caliber bullets out of Vail’s back. Another slug got him in the right hip and another on the right arm, just above the elbow. He had survived the operation, but his condition was critical. Dr. Edmondson made no prediction. All he said was this: “The next seventy-two hours will tell whether he lives or dies.” The sheriff’s wife, Oncie, took this as a signal for optimism. Alfred Allee patted her hand and nodded. But Allee was a man of hard experience. He had seen more than a few men die of gunshot wounds since he joined the Rangers. He knew that even a man as tough as Vail had little chance of surviving four slugs from a .38 fired at point-blank range.

As far as Beeville was concerned, Vail had come full-grown to the sheriff’s office. So large did he fill the role of sheriff that it seemed that people had always known him. They felt they knew what kind of man he was. Look him in the eye. Shake his hand.

Allee had come to Beeville to serve as deputy under Sheriff J. B. Arnold. He was the sheriff’s enforcer in those years when the Depression and the oil boom ran side by side. Roughnecks and rig builders hit the Beeville bars on Saturday night, looking to see who and what they could break. Allee didn’t deal gently with brawlers, the worst of whom were the Ennis brothers, Darwin and Vail.

Where did they come from originally?

L. D. Hunter knew:

East Texas. I believe it was Nacogdoches. You know they brought in that oil field out in Dinero. They went to work out there. That’s what brought em down here. Oil field. Vail was a rig builder. His brother was a rig builder. And both of em as rough as two bastards could get. They had a fight up on a drilling rig. One of em was workin up on a derrick and the other one was down on the floor. They got in an argument. Ol Vail told Darwin I’m gonna come up there and whip your ass. And Darbo said no I’m gonna come down and whip your ass. They met halfway and they just fought till they give out. Hung on and fought.

Rig builders were the paratroopers among oil field workers. During the week Vail and Darbo fought with the McCumber boys out on the rigs; on the weekends they came into Beeville looking for whatever trouble was available. Allee said he was the one who told Vail Ennis he should go into law enforcement. Allee told the story often that week at the American Café, and men laughed.

“I told him, ‘You know more about hell-raisers than anybody. You might as well be on the side of the law.’”

Vail’s reputation as a tough hombre was well established by 1944, when first he ran for sheriff. Tales of the incredible fistfights had been told and retold. During that first election, some people were already concerned that his temperament was too violent for the job, making the vote count close. Vail didn’t know he’d won until the last box, no. 20, reported at 2:30 a.m. He won by eighty-one votes.

The scene at the American Café was a Celtic wake with stories of hunting and cars. But the conversations couldn’t shy away from the issue that loomed over the sheriff and the town. No Bee County sheriff before Vail Ennis had killed anybody. Vail had now killed seven men. He was still a deputy when he shot the first one, a mean drunk who knocked him down outside a beer joint. There was no question it was self-defense. The second was a big sailor, a black man, who jumped him at the jail. Then there were the Rodriguez brothers.

The talk always came back to the Rodriguez killings. Two years before, in a shootout west of town, Vail had shot down the three Rodriguez brothers—Felix, Domingo, and Antonio, all highly respected farmers. Some people said it was a shooting, not a shootout. They said the Rodriguez boys hadn’t fired a gun.

But even before Vail Ennis went on trial for the murder of Felix Rodriguez, he’d been controversial. Two years earlier, leading citizens had done everything in their power to get rid of the sheriff, including twenty-one who signed a petition to oust Vail Ennis from his office.

The men who fired on the sheriff at Pettus were not respected farmers. Pat Hines and William Raymond Pittman, both thirty-four, had spent much of their adult lives behind bars. Hines, the big fellow with the .38, had served a term in the Oklahoma State Reformatory as a juvenile and later did ten years in prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, for armed robbery. Pittman had been arrested twenty-three times, had spent three years in a New Mexico prison, three more in Huntsville.

Even as the sheriff lay on what might be his deathbed, the First Baptist Church of Beeville prepared to give William Pittman a proper funeral. Six men from the congregation volunteered as pallbearers. Pitt-man was the smaller man who had been sitting by th e window of the Mercury station wagon, the first one out of the car, the one with the tattoo of Laraine and the severed heart on his arm. Pittman’s father, son, and two sisters came to Beeville for the funeral. They came from far away: Odessa. Fort Worth. Pampa. Oak Creek, Colorado. Laraine didn’t come. Hines’s body was shipped by train to Oklahoma to be claimed by his mother.

The deathwatch ended at three thirty Thursday afternoon, when the Beeville Bee-Picayune was delivered to Turner’s newsstand and people read the banner headline.

Sheriff Ennis Narrowly Escapes Death in Gun Battle Monday

The newspaper article gave details of the shooting at Pettus and identified the two dead men as Pittman and Hines, both thirty-four years old, both criminals who had spent their adult lives in and out of prison.

It confirmed that Hines’s gun was a .38.

It confirmed that a worker at the station had driven the sheriff from Pettus to the Beeville hospital.

It confirmed that Houston Pruett, the station manager, had sustained a flesh wound in the back and had been in the car coming back to Beeville. It quoted Pruett: “Seventeen shots . . . as fast as I could count em . . .”

A few days later, Time magazine published the article. It covered an entire page under the heading:

Texas

I am hellbent to keep Beeville cleaned up so a lady can go up the street day or night. I never take but one shot.

Both statements have lisped from the pale, thin lips of Bee County’s Sheriff Robert Vail Ennis. And both statements have been roughly true. Day or night a lady could sashay unmenaced up Beeville’s streets, past the cream stuccoed Kohler Hotel, the Bluebonnet Café, and the two-story buff brick jail where Sheriff Ennis lives with his wife and daughter and keeps evildoers under lock & key.The roughness in the second statement has been more apparent. In the past four years in Beeville (pop. 7,000), a South Texas oil and cattle town, Sheriff Ennis has killed seven people with his .44 Colt revolver and his .45 sub-machine gun—not all, however, with one shot.

. . .

Deliberate Reloading. Last week he almost met his equal—but not quite. He went to the town of Pettus on a tip that two bum-check suspects might be going that way. They were. Vail got them in front of Houston Prewet’s filling station, handcuffed them and pushed them into the station office while he made a phone call. One of them whipped a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster and put four slugs in Vail. That was his mistake. Bleeding but upright, Vail turned from the phone, pulling his Colt from its hip holster; he pumped six shots at the manacled prisoners. Deliberately, he reloaded and pumped six more. When the smoke cleared away, both men were dead . . .

Turner’s newsstand sold its usual hundred-copy shipment in two hours. Another 150 went fast. George Turner ordered 128 more.