02813cam a2200313 4500 516946996 TxAuBib 20210406120000.0 060216s2006||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2006005618 9780896725799 cloth : alk. paper 0896725790 cloth : alk. paper (OCoLC)64390422 TxAuBib Neal, Bill. Getting away with murder on the Texas frontier : notorious killings & celebrated trials / Bill Neal ; foreword by Gordon Morris Bakken. Lubbock, Tex. : Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xix, 308 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-295) and index. In 1916, in the tiny West Texas town of Benjamin, a gunman slips into a courtroom and murders the defendant. In 1912, in Fort Worth’s finest hotel, a young man kills an old gentleman in cold blood in the middle of the lobby. The verdict in both of these murderers’ trials? Not guilty. The explanation? “This is Texas.” Laws passed by politicians in far-off Austin meant little to Westerners living on the Texas frontier. Sagebrush justice relied less on written statutes than on common sense, grass-roots fairness, and vague notions of folk law drawn from the Old South’s Victorian code of chivalry and honor. In this very different time and place, a murderer might go free based on the following reasoning: “The son-of-a-gun is guilty all right, but we must turn him loose. He owes me for a pair of boots, and if we convict him I’ll never get my money.” Inexperienced prosecutors, a lack of modern crime-detection methods, inactive-ability of witnesses, an acceptance of violence in society, and a laissez-faire attitude toward trial tactics all conspired to make guilty verdicts a rarity. In this first volume of a planned trilogy, Neal presents the evidence that shows how easy some folks found it to evade justice in the frontier West. CONTENTS: The Unlikely Saviors of Thomas J. Fulcher | The 1896 Wichita Falls Bank Robbery | The 1890s Wells Fargo Murder Trials | Pardon Me, Please! | More Scandalous Adventures of the Isaacs Family | Murder and Mayhem in the Knox County Courthouse | Strychnine in the Bride’s Flour | . . . And the Perpetrator Walked. 20210406. Trials (Murder) Texas. Criminal justice, Administration of Texas History Sources. Frontier and pioneer life Texas Sources. Texana. https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip069/2006005618.html Table of contents only BTCLS