Part 1Cold Open
Sunday morning. November the thirteenth, 1921.
The light comes up gray over Carter County, Oklahoma — over the little towns of Berwyn and Woodford, over the creek they called Hickory, over the pecan groves along its banks — and an old man is going hunting.
His neighbors call him Uncle Bill. He is about sixty. Quiet. Good-natured. Well thought of through the county — the sort of man who never had trouble with anybody. He has a wife. A daughter, adopted. A large family, they say. He used to live in Berwyn; a couple of years back he moved out to the Woodford community, to a place on the creek.
He walks out with a younger man — the one who has been staying in his house for a couple of weeks. Helping him pick pecans. Eating at his table. Gathered up what they could and sold it in Ardmore, the Thursday before, and Uncle Bill gave his share to his wife to keep.
They leave about sun-up, to work the grove down along the creek. It's the season for it. A normal morning in a normal life.
About half an hour after they left — five shots ring out.
Down by the creek. Heard by people at a house close by. Five shots, in a country where a gun could mean anything at all — somebody listens a moment, and goes back to their Sunday. Nobody goes to look.
At about ten o'clock, girls crossing the bridge find the body.
Uncle Bill. Lying face down, in the bed of the creek.
Five bullet wounds. The doctors will say the wounds' point of entrance was in the back — that the shots came from behind — and that death was almost instantaneous.
And the ground around him tells its own small story. Tracks. Two men stood there — for several minutes, the prints said. One of them wore hobnailed shoes. Uncle Bill was wearing a common, light shoe — a shoe that could not have made those tracks.
Five shots in the back of a man who never had trouble with anybody. Heard. Not seen.
And the other man — the one who walked out with him, at sun-up, in the chilly morning — is gone.
This is a murder nobody saw.
The law will come up that road, and it will prove a great many things. It will prove the tracks. It will prove the missing man. It will prove the gun — a small automatic revolver, handed to a jailer. Similar to the gun, the report will say, very carefully. Similar.
But what happened in that grove — between the sun-up and the shots, between the two men and the five bullets — no one ever saw. Somebody heard it. Nobody looked.
And of the two men who walked out that morning — only they could have said what happened.
One of them had been dead since before ten o'clock.
The other one was gone.
What happened in the pecan grove?
That is the story.
Part 2Show Introduction
Welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the show that tells the stories the law has finished with — and the world has mostly forgotten.
Today: a murder that happened so quietly, in a place so small, that it has sat in the dust of an Oklahoma courthouse for a hundred years.
On a Sunday morning in November of 1921, in the pecan groves along Hickory Creek, south of the little town of Woodford, an old man was found dead. Face down, in the bed of a creek. Five bullets in the back.
His name was William Childress — but the county didn't call him that. The county called him Uncle Bill. He was about sixty, a quiet, good-natured farmer who never had trouble with anybody, a man with a wife, an adopted daughter, and a good name — the kind of man a whole county says they loved.
And the first suspect the law found — the only suspect — was a young man who had been living in Uncle Bill's house. Eating at his table. Helping him pick pecans. The young man left the house with him on that Sunday morning, at sun-up.
Two days later, he was the most wanted man in Carter County — and he was gone.
Now, here is the strange part of this one. Most murder cases end the way the law promises they will: a suspect, a trial, twelve people, one answer. This case — this case was a courtroom case. More than once, the county of Carter sat down and did its duty, and more than once it believed it had done everything right. And the law, for a while, seemed to be the only thing alive in the whole story.
But on this case, the law would do something you don't expect: it would keep going. It would try. And try again. And the answer to that one question — the only question that matters — was the one thing it could never get.
What happened in the pecan grove? Nobody saw it. You're about to spend an hour not seeing it — watching instead as the county did everything right, and the mystery refused to close.
That's the story. A whispered murder. A hauled-into-court suspect. And a case with no ending — the way we'd all like endings to be.
Before we start: this is history, told from the record — newspapers, court papers, cemetery stones — and I should say plainly: when the record goes quiet, so do I. Some scenes are recreated; the facts, the words people actually said, and the dates are as printed, and when they aren't, we'll tell you. This is a story about dead people, decided by living ones. Listener discretion is, as always, a courtesy we both deserve.
And the deeper you get: the case file, the sources, the whole hundred-year trail — lives at Section 29 dot com. That's S-E-C-T-I-O-N-29.com.
So. November 13th, 1921. Sun-up. A house on Hickory Creek.
And an old man going to pick pecans.
Part 3The Country 1921
To find this story, find the place first.
This is south-central Oklahoma — the red rolled country east of the Arbuckle Mountains, running down toward the Texas line. In 1921, it is everywhere young. The state itself is fourteen years old, grown up in a hurry on oil and cattle and cotton, still wearing the sweat of the turn of the century and the Chickasaw land that came before.
Carter County holds two kinds of world.
There is Ardmore, the county seat — a town with an oil boom's appetite, streets full of money and men who wanted more of it, a newspaper masthead that announces itself as "The Home Paper of Southern Oklahoma." Ardmore just built a junior high school for $300,000 — a building to hold a thousand children — and the town's own paper says of it: It takes a progressive city to build like that. Ardmore is proud. Ardmore is going somewhere.
And then there is the rest of the county.
South and west of Ardmore the road drops through small places with small names. Berwyn — a crossroads with a railroad, a store or two, and a cemetery where the old families rest; a town that would one day be remembered mostly because a singing cowboy made its name famous in another century. Woodford — even smaller, an unincorporated settlement that has been there since the 1880s, a place so small it goes in a book they'll write later called Ghost Towns of Oklahoma. A community with its own school, its own way of knowing everybody's business. And Provence — the farmland between, scattered farms and family cemeteries, house by house, clan by clan.
Between them runs Hickory Creek — a real creek with a real name, an old surveyor's name, crossing country roads on old county bridges. There is a stone bridge over it that still stands to this day — if you ever go looking, it's still there, quiet, in the trees. The papers of the day put a murder near it, by a bridge they called the McCann bridge. A creek like this one — the kind a man could cross at a walk, and lose sight of in the brush five minutes later.
Along the creeks, and along the roads, and through the little valleys: the pecan groves.
In the fall, in this country, the pecans are money. They drop from the wild trees, and you can gather them in sacks and sell them in Ardmore for cash — a little cash, maybe, but real. A man might spend a fortnight working the trees, saving up, taking a day to haul the bags to town. The season is short. The work is quiet. The whole county moves through the groves every November like it's part of the year itself.
The roads connecting all of it are country roads — red dirt and gravel mostly, wandering from farm to farm, crossing the creek, passing a house here and a grove there. A county attorney would later say the thing plainly, in front of a jury: cars seldom pass in the neighborhood.
Remember that. Nobody's sure yet, at this point in the story, why it will matter.
And on this map — down a back road, south of Woodford, on a piece of the creek bottom — there is a farm. A small farmhouse, lived-in, surrounded by the groves it grew from. A man named Childress lives there with his wife and their adopted daughter — quiet people, so much a part of the place that nobody thinks about them at all. And in a spare room of that house, on the morning this story begins, there is a young man — working for the season, sleeping in the warmth of a stranger's home.
In a few hours, every name on this map — Berwyn, Woodford, the creek, the road that cars seldom pass — is going to be about one question.
That's where our story lives.
Part 4Uncle Bill
Let this be known about him first.
His name on a piece of paper was William Childress. But in Carter County — out on the farms, in the storefronts, down in the groves — nobody called him that.
They called him Uncle Bill.
Maybe you've known somebody like that. The old man every kid in the neighborhood waved at. The one the whole place claimed as its own. "Uncle," in a small country, doesn't mean blood — it means belonging. It means he was the kind of man whose porch you could sit on without asking.
Here is what the record says about that kind of man.
He was a quiet, good-natured man and never was known to have had trouble with any one, so far as his wife or his neighbors knew.
That is the county talking about him, in print, at the worst week of its life. Quiet. Good-natured. No trouble. And this, in the same breath: he was well known over the county, and well thought of.
About sixty years old at the end — born around 1861, in a different world — a farmer. The papers call him "a well known farmer living on Hickory creek, southwest of Woodford."
He'd spent years at Berwyn — the little crossroads with the railroad and the cemetery — before moving, about two years before this story begins, down to the Woodford community, to the creek-bottom farm. We don't know why he moved. The papers don't say. Better land, maybe. A wife who wanted to be nearer something. A man's own reasons. What we know is that he did — and that Berwyn stayed his "home," in the papers' own word. The place he belonged. The place they'd bring him back to.
At that farm with him: his wife — the papers call her Mrs. Childress — and their adopted daughter, who lived with them. A family that came in and out, papers say "a large family" — brothers and cousins and the web of names that a sixty-year-old man in this country makes around himself. But the two under his roof, day to day: the woman who kept his house, and the girl they raised.
And the work that filled his years this fall — the groves. The pecans along the creek, the sacks, the season. It was a hard time of year and a good time of year, and in November of 1921 the old man was out there in it, like always.
This year, he had help.
A young man from over around Provence — somebody to climb, somebody to carry, somebody at the table with him and his wife and the girl in the evenings. The county counted the days and never made them agree: two weeks, the first paper said. "Something over a week," said another. Eight or ten days, the young man himself would testify two years later, by then a defendant. Different numbers. Same table.
But here is the detail about Uncle Bill you keep. The one that tells you the shape of the man in a single line.
Thursday, the tenth of November, 1921. The pecans they'd gathered, the young man took to Ardmore and sold — and came home, and the money was divided, and Uncle Bill gave his part to his wife to keep.
That's it. That's the whole sentence, from a county newspaper, remembering him.
A man of about sixty, in a country where cash was a thing you dug holes for — sold his season's work, split it straight, and handed his half across the table to his wife.
Not to a pocket. Not to a jar in the barn. To her. To keep.
If you ever doubt what kind of man they buried in that Berwyn ground, remember that line.
The last ones to speak of him, in print, would be his neighbors — the people who sat on that porch. And this is what they would say, when everything was over:
Neighbors of the dead man say they know of no ill feeling between the men.
Keep that. It's going to matter.
Sunday morning, November the thirteenth, 1921.
The light comes up over the creek. Uncle Bill gets up — and the young man at his table gets up with him — and the two of them walk out the door at about sun-up, down toward the groves, to the pecans.
Three days after the money. One half-day of walking, and the season's work.
They won't come back together.
Part 5Sunday the 13th
Sunday morning, the thirteenth of November, 1921.
The house down on the creek: the woman is awake, the daughter is awake; and the two men are at the door. Uncle Bill, about sixty; the young man who'd been staying — eating at the table, sleeping in the spare room — the man who'd carried the sacks to Ardmore three days before.
They leave about sun-up, to hunt the grove along the creek, the young man beside the old man on the path. One paper will eventually put the time at about seven o'clock in the morning. Another will just say daylight. Left the house together — that every paper agrees on.
The grove they were headed for — the young man would say this himself, later, from a witness chair — was a new place. A different piece of the creek from where they'd been working. New ground. Why? Because the old ground wasn't paying. The prospects were discouraging. It was late in the season, and the pecans along the creek come down a few at a time, and a man goes looking for the tree that hasn't been stripped yet.
That's the day. That's the ordinary. A man and his hired help, walking down a path, in the middle of November, to look at trees.
A little after they set out — the papers would muddle the exact time for years — the shots.
Five.
Down by the creek.
Heard — by a party of a house close by. A house with people in it, close enough that the sound came through the walls, close enough that a person could count them: one. two. three. four. five.
And nobody did anything about it.
That sounds like a failure, and maybe it is. But listen. In that country, in that season, a gunshot was a noise a person was used to. Squirrel. A dog. A boy with a rifle he shouldn't have. You hear it; you go back to what you were doing. The people in the house close by heard the five shots and thought nothing of it.
The morning goes on.
The sun climbs above the wood. Somewhere in the little valley, down by the creek, there is no sound at all.
At about ten o'clock, on the bridge that crosses the creek near where the old man lived — girls. Some account says three young women, who were going to join the men in the grove later that day — the party that was to come along, the third pair of hands. Another says simply: some girls, crossing the bridge, going about their Sunday.
However it was, this is how they came upon him.
They crossed that bridge, and they looked down — and there, in the bed of the creek, by the bank, lay Uncle Bill.
Face down.
The girls had to get word back — walk it, run it, spend the rest of a Sunday on it. It was the sheriff's department that finally came — Sheriff Garrett, his men — at noon that Sunday, the report says, on the scene.
What they found doesn't change, no matter how many times it's told. Five bullet wounds in his body. The doctors would examine the wounds and fix the record: the point of entrance was in the back. The shots came from behind. The old man was face down when they found him, and the doctors believed death had been almost instantaneous — that the whole of it had happened in the time it takes a man to forget a noise.
They thought it was a .32 calibre revolver that had done it. The papers say that's what the doctors thought.
And then they looked at the ground.
Tracks about the scene — the report would be built on them, year after year, trial after trial. The ground told them that two men had stood there, in that spot by the creek, for several minutes. Not one. Two. Standing together — the prints said — for minutes, at the very place where the man fell with five bullets in his back.
And here is the part that always troubled the people who made the case:
One of the two men had worn hobnailed shoes.
You could see the marks — the iron nails in the heels, the kind of shoe a man wears to work on country ground, to climb, to dig, to carry.
And the other set of tracks — the old man's.
Uncle Bill had been wearing a common, light shoe. The kind that makes a mark in the dirt and disappears. The kind that could not have made the hobnail prints by the body.
Two men stood together for several minutes at the killing spot. One pair of shoes wore iron. The other was a light, common, harmless shoe.
And one of the two men — was dead.
By the time Sheriff Garrett and his men were on the scene that noon, the other man was gone — the path home empty — and the county began to go over the only inventory it had: an old man shot from behind, a grove with no answering witnesses; a house close by, and five shots, and nobody who looked; two sets of tracks, one iron; and a boarder who'd eaten in the man's house for two weeks, went out the door with him at daylight, and was nowhere.
The sheriff went and talked to the dead man's family.
Mrs. Childress and her adopted daughter — who told him, in the worst hours of that day: there had been no trouble or quarrel between the young man and Uncle Bill — so far as they knew, no reason — they could not conceive of any reason why the young man, or anybody, should have shot the old man.
No quarrel. No reason. Just the walk in the morning, the five shots, the tracks.
The county paper, that week, put the whole thing in a sentence — the sentence the county would spend three years trying to disprove, and never manage:
The only clue as to who killed him is the fact that he and Holly left his home so soon before the shots were heard, and the fact that Holly has disappeared.
That's it. That was the case, on the first Sunday:
An iron shoe, a light shoe, a dead man, and a gone one.
Part 6The Disappearance
On Monday, the day after the body was found, they buried Uncle Bill.
Interment at the Berwyn cemetery. The county paper gives it a line: buried on Monday at Berwyn — his former home. The town he'd lived in for years, the one he'd moved away from, the one that stayed his in the papers' word. His wife was there. The adopted daughter. The large family — whatever that web of names and mourning meant, it was there, standing in the cold. A small town burying an old man the whole county called Uncle.
The man who had walked out with him was not there.
By Tuesday, the county had done what counties do. It named him.
The Daily Ardmoreite, November 15th, 1921: Leslie Holley, about 28 years old, is being sought, charged with the shooting.
There it was — the first time the name was in the paper. Leslie Holley. About twenty-eight. The young man from Provence, the helper with the table, the one who'd sold the pecan haul and come home and divided the money.
And here is something about that name you should notice, because it will follow this case around for the whole three years, like a broken axle on every road it takes. The papers could never keep it still.
November 15th: Leslie Holley.
November 17th, the weekly: Leslie Holly — no e.
December: Less Holley.
One dispatch in December: Lee Holley.
And the court records, and the April papers — Jess Holley.
Five spellings. Two names. One man. The county spent years looking for him under different letters. Half the trouble this case ever had finding its own defendant was that the county couldn't decide what to call him.
But in those first days, the county had more than a name. It found the family.
Relatives right there in Ardmore. And a brother — a brother living near Berwyn. Deputies went to them. And here is the strange part: the family's answer matched the neighbors' answer. The brother, and the people in town, knew of no trouble or disagreement between the young man and old Uncle Bill.
No quarrel. No reason. No warning. Just — the old man dead, and the young man gone.
And gone — actually, truly, completely gone.
The county looked. The papers would say it plainly: Holley was then looked for — but up to the time this is written, he has not been found.
Go back and read that sentence again. It was printed a week worth of county effort after the killing. Not "he was captured" — not "he was cornered in the woods" — not "he slipped the cordon." He simply had not been found.
In five weeks, the record doesn't show a single posse spotted him, a single report of him in a railroad station, a single man who remembered selling him a meal. A twenty-eight-year-old farmhand — a man who worked the country for wages — walked off a creek bank on a Sunday morning, and this county, with its roads and its gossip and its daily paper, could not find him.
It could only find the questions.
Because here is what had to be sitting in that county's mind — and this is the part you should carry:
The neighbors said there was no ill feeling between the men. The wife, in the worst hours of that day, said she could not conceive of a reason. The brother said he never heard a word of trouble.
So. If there was no quarrel — then the five shots were... what? Theirs were the only conclusions a county could draw, and never mind that both of them were terrible:
Either there was something between those two men that nobody — not the wife, not the neighbor, not the brother — had ever heard about.
Or there was nothing between them at all.
And the dead man was dead for nothing. For no reason. For the ordinary morning that went wrong.
Ten days later — ten days — the county would make an arrest, of sorts. But that's the next part of the story. This is the week between: the money sitting in the house, the widow at the stove, and a county waiting for one of its two terrible conclusions to walk up the road.
Monday, the funeral. Berwyn, the former home, the family, the cold.
Tuesday, the name.
And the county, with a name and a family and no man — waiting for one of those two terrible conclusions to walk up the road.
He wasn't found this week. Or the next.
Not until the last week of December.
Part 7The Five Weeks
Five weeks.
That is how long Carter County held its unanswered question. The old man, the five shots, the man who walked out with him — and nothing. Five weeks of a county watching its own roads, an item in the Ardmoreite now and then, and a name in type: Leslie Holly, being sought.
And here is the strange thing about December of 1921 in Ardmore, Oklahoma.
The county had a quiet murder — a thing of creek beds and shoe prints — and nobody was looking for the man who did it. And at the same time, over the same weeks, the county seat was screaming about a murder wave that had nothing to do with it.
This is the other case. You should hear about it, because it's the weather Ardmore lived in while our man went missing.
The night of December 11th, 1921. The town of Wilson, in Carter County. A band of masked men. A grocer named John Smith, dead. A farmer named Joe Carroll, dead. An Ardmore policeman, C. G. Sims, found dead. A meat cutter, Jeff Smith, left with a bullet in the leg — alive, to carry the telling.
By the second week of December, the county jail in Ardmore held sixteen men arrested in the affair. On the 17th, a dispatch went out on the wires: With seven prisoners, five of them charged with the murder of Joe Carroll and John Smith at Wilson… Sheriff Buck Garrett is keeping a close guard at the Carter county jail tonight. And the reason for the guard — Late today Sheriff Garrett received a letter signed "Clan No. 7, Ardmore, Okla."
A letter. From a town. Signed "Clan No. 7."
On the 21st, the New York Times had it: Ardmore citizens asking the governor for martial law. The governor ordered the state attorney general into the county, who said the county would get justice — "no citizen or officer who is interested will be done an injustice, and no citizen or officer who is guilty will be whitewashed."
That is the town December 1921: masked men, a guard on the jail, a clan letter, eight-page papers full of it, and a community between two kinds of fear.
Hold that picture — because the county's OTHER case, the quiet one, has been sitting in the corner the whole time. And it's about to walk into the middle of all this.
On the night of the twentieth of December — a Tuesday — in the deep middle of the darkest week of that December — a man walked up to the Carter county jail.
He wasn't one of the sixteen. He wasn't Wilson. He wasn't a masked man and he didn't come with a letter.
He was the question the county had been asking for five weeks.
And he came in, at about nine o'clock, and gave himself up.
Part 8The Night He Walked In
Before we open the door on this, you should know what kind of building he walked into.
Every small-town county jail in 1921 is the same building: a stone house, a cage of cells, a sheriff's office in the front. But the Carter county jail that December was built of something else. It was a guard post. The sheriff and his men, armed, around the clock. Seven prisoners on the Wilson cases inside, five of them murder charges. And a letter — signed "Clan No. 7, Ardmore, Okla." — sitting in the office, saying the town's own concern about its own jail out loud.
That is the door that opened for him.
He was not from Ardmore, exactly. He was from Provence — the farmland between. Some papers said his home was even farther off, up toward Pauls Valley. The one thing the county knew for sure was he'd been staying in the Childress house, on the creek, for nearly two weeks, gathering the pecans with the old man, eating at his table, helping sell the haul.
The county had been looking for him for five weeks. And here he was, at about nine o'clock on the night of December 20th, 1921.
Gave himself up. The record says it flat and plain: Holley went to the sheriff office last night and surrendered. Not captured. Not dragged in by a posse. Not run down in a railroad yard by a bloodhound pack.
He walked in the front door, at night, into a guarded jail, and gave himself up.
Now — this is where the case does its first wonderful, maddening thing.
On the morning the papers hit the streets — Wednesday, December 21st, 1921 — the Daily Ardmoreite ran this, on the front page, in big capital letters:
HOLLEY CONFESSES TO THE MURDER OF WILLIAM CHILDRESS.
There it is. The word. The thing every good case is supposed to have. "Confesses." You can practically hear the town in the morning, passing the paper around, reading it out loud.
Keep reading.
Holley refuses to make a statement as to his whereabouts since the shooting, saying that he had nothing to say at this time.
That's the body of the story. The front page tells you he confessed — and the front page's own article tells you he said exactly nothing. Not one word. The headline was the whole case's first — and best — lie, and it was printed in the same ink as the truth.
Read the whole article and you get the day's inventory: that he and Childress went out to gather pecans; that the shooting was heard by a party of a house close by; that Childress was found; that Holley had been at large until he surrendered.
Nowhere — nowhere in the article — is there a single sentence in which Leslie Holley confesses to anything. He surrendered. That's the fact. And then, the same morning, the Ardmore Daily Press gave the county its own version: He says that he has been in Arkansas for the past three weeks.
Two papers. Same morning. One said he wouldn't tell. One said what he told.
That's the first note of a tune this case will never stop playing: the county was never able to get from him two answers that matched. Whatever else was true — and we will spend the rest of this episode trying to find out — from that first night there were two stories with one mouth: Arkansas. And nothing.
The sheriff took him in. And the county did what the law does. That same morning, County Attorney Mathers filed information in Justice Butcher's court charging Less Holley with murder.
No preliminary date set yet. Just this: an old man in a creek bed; five weeks of nothing; a man at a jail door at nine o'clock, saying he'd been in Arkansas; a county attorney; a charge; and a headline nobody spelled right.
"Holley confesses."
He refused to make a statement as to his whereabouts, saying that he had nothing to say at this time.
Both of those things are true. Both went to press the same morning.
Hold onto both — because the county was about to find out what kind of case it really had — and it was about to be the kind of case that a jury in a county courthouse could argue over for the next three years.
Part 9The Case Against Him
So. The county had a man. What did the county have against him?
Let's go through it, the way the state would lay it out about two and a half years later — because this is the case as it would finally be made, and you should hold every piece of it, because a lot of what happens next depends on how you weigh it.
First, the body.
William Childress, found face down — lying face downward — with five bullet wounds in his body. The doctors had said the point of entrance was in the back: the shots came from behind. It was thought a .32 caliber revolver had been used. Death was believed to have been almost instantaneous. The old man was shot in the back, five times, and died nearly where he stood.
Second — the ground.
Tracks about the scene of the crime. The record of the ground, after the shooting. And the ground told the exact thing the state needed it to tell: two men had stood there, in that spot, for several minutes. Not a moment. Not a stride. Two men, standing together, at the place where the shots were fired — long enough to be seen, long enough to be remembered by nothing but the dirt.
And of the two sets of prints:
One of the men had worn hobnailed shoes.
That's the shoe with the iron teeth in the heel — the work shoe, the climbing shoe, the shoe that grabs. And the companion print — the other man — was a common, light shoe. The kind you'd wear to town, to church, to sit still.
Childers was wearing a common, light shoe — and could not have made the tracks.
That's not a guess. That's the report. The hobnail prints at the scene had been left by a hobnail shoe — and the dead man's light shoe could not have made them.
Third — the man.
The state had a man who'd been living in the dead man's house — who'd left the house with him, on the morning of the murder, and headed to the grove. A man who was wearing hobnailed shoes — he'd admitted as much — and who had then disappeared for five weeks, until he'd walked into a guarded jail at nine o'clock at night. A man who, at that jail, told a county attorney... no, told the papers a story about Arkansas, and otherwise said nothing at all.
Fourth — and here's the one that never stops being strange — the gun.
The man, coming in to surrender, handed the jailer a gun. An automatic revolver. Small. The state's telling of it — later, at trial, with the whole county listening — was one careful phrase: he surrendered a small automatic revolver to the jailer similar to the gun with which Childers was slain.
Similar to the gun.
Not "the gun." Not "a revolver matching the wounds." Similar to.
And the state, when it got to trial, would lean on it hard and say the way the state does: The state contends that the gun was the same used to kill Childers. The same. That was the argument — and how far "the same" could be proven — nobody ever would. What's in the record is the word the state used: contended.
Fifth — the road.
Remember it, from the map? The man's story was that he'd left the grove, left the old man "near the scene of the slaying," got a ride with an unknown man in a passing auto, and gone on to Berwyn. The county had its answer to that, and it leaned on it hard: It is also contended that cars seldom pass in the neighborhood in which Holley declares he caught the ride.
Cars seldom pass there. That loaded little sentence. A lonely bridge, a creek bottom, and a man who says he caught his ride in a season when, as the county claimed, nothing rode by.
And sixth — the county had nothing else.
No witness. Not one. Somebody heard the five shots from a house close by. Saw — nothing. No face. No gun. No moment. No confession — unless you count a headline that the story's own first paragraph contradicted. No motive. Not a reason, not a word of hate, not a whisper of debt: neighbors knew of no ill feeling between the men; the family could not conceive of any reason; the brother, asked, knew of no trouble or disagreement.
So here's the ledger, as the county carried it into its preliminaries:
A dead man, shot in the back. An old man's light shoe — exonerated from the ground. A hobnail print. A companion who wore hobnails. A companion who vanished. A gun, similar to. A road, seldom passed. And the hole in the middle — the five seconds — nothing.
It was a strong case. Not in the way a strong case is strong sometimes — not with a signed paper, not with a man who talked. It was strong the way a fence is strong: long, and high, and full of iron — out around the edges of a field where nobody ever saw anything happen.
Now — the county had to put all of it in front of a judge and jury. That was the whole trouble. Because the fence was long, and the fence was high, and the fence had a gate in it — and through that gate, the only thing with a face in the case, the only person who could say what happened in the grove, would walk, one time too many, before this case was through.
The old man, shot in the back, five times. The county had a case.
What the county never got — was an answer.
Part 10The Preliminaries
First rule of a court case: nothing starts on the first day you want it to.
The county had its man in jail by the twenty-first of December — information filed, murder formally charged before Justice Butcher, by County Attorney Mathers. And then, nine days later, the hearing.
A city brief of December 29th set the town up for it: The case… will be heard in Justice Butcher's court late today. And — this was the papers' careful expectation — it is anticipated by the attorneys for the state that the defendant will waive preliminary hearing. The state assumed the young man would fold: take the waiver, skip the hearing, head for the district court like a man with nothing worth marching.
The hearing happened Friday afternoon, December 30th. He did not waive.
The county's record of that afternoon is one sentence, but read it slow: The preliminary hearing of Less Holley charged with killing "Uncle Billy" Childress at Woodford early in November was heard before Justice Butcher Friday afternoon and the defendant was bound over to await the action of the district court.
Bound over. He contested, and the county still got its result — the case advanced. But think about the man for a second. The fellow who, nine nights before, walked into a guarded jail and said he had nothing to say — he did not take the easy door. He made the county produce its evidence, in public, step by step.
That same afternoon, the county's other murder defendant — E. A. Wall, charged with the shooting of C. E. Elmore in an Ardmore rooming house — went before the same justice, and a like action was taken. Two killers' cases, same courtroom, same afternoon, same town. It was December of 1921, and Carter County was drowning.
And then — this is where you meet the men who will be beside the defendant for the rest of the story — both defendants, through their attorneys, Champion and George, have filed a petition for habeas corpus that will be heard this week.
Champion and George. Tom Champion and S. A. George. The Ardmore law firm that, in one week, took two murder cases and went looking to get both men out of the jailhouse. What happened with the habeas — the record, as it comes down, is silent. But the firm is now on the case, and the case is now in motion.
January 15th, 1922. The district court opened its new term. The county's paper printed the inventory, and it sounds like a town at war: 54 cases. Of them, ten — ten — are for murder. A judge named Thomas W. Champion — a Champion, in the district judge's chair — would hear all of the county's murder cases.
And somewhere in that docket, this appeared: Link Taylor and Jess Holley — Feb. 3.
Look at it again. The docket's own spelling: Jess.
Not Leslie. Not Holly, not Less. The clerk's books gave the county's most-wanted murder defendant the name they could hold him by. Jess Holley. Of all the spellings this case would wear, this is the one the law kept.
The trial was set — February 3rd, 1922. Cases get set. What the county couldn't have known: that date would come and go a dozen times, in paper and memory, and the case would never — really — be decided in one sitting.
Because here is what happened. And it's the first time this case shows its true shape, so pay attention:
The county tried him. Sometime in that long year — the exact date of the first trial never comes down to us — the county took Less Holley into a courtroom, put its fence of evidence up, and asked twelve people for a verdict.
The jury could not agree.
Upon the occasion of the other trial — the jury was unable to agree, and the hearing was termed a mistrial.
That's the first time. A hung jury. The state's case — the body, the tracks, the iron shoe, the vanished man — and twelve people who heard it and could not decide. Judge Walden would remember that first trial, years later, when the county's money had started to burn: The cost of the trial added to the previous hearing... which also resulted in a hung jury, had cost the taxpayers of the county thousands of dollars.
Thousands. For nothing. For the first time.
The case went back on the shelf. And the county — that town full of murder cases and clan letters and hoods in Wilson — let it sit.
It would sit from that trial until February of 1924.
Two more years.
Part 11The Second Trial - The Stand
February 1924. The Carter County courthouse. Two years since the first hung jury — two years of the case sitting, waiting, being a rumor in the courthouse — and the county has brought Less Holley back.
Tried for the second time. Same town. Same dead man. Same fence of iron and light shoes.
The judge first: Asa E. Walden. District judge of the Eighth Judicial District. A man with a reputation for a certain kind of righteousness — that will matter later — but for now, just the man on the bench.
County Attorney John L. Hodge for the state, and — for the defendant — Tom Champion and S. A. George, the firm that has carried him from a justice-of-the-peace courtroom to here.
And the town: The court room was packed with interested spectators all day yesterday.
Sit in that. A county that has, in the last three years, buried an uncle in a creek bed, seen a murder wave, and been scared half to death by its own secrets — it filled the courtroom. Every seat. All day. For the trial of the man accused of shooting Uncle Bill Childress.
And then — the man himself.
Monday, the 11th of February. A large number of witnesses. The state's, the defense's. And then, across the room, comes the part nobody got up for: Holley took the stand as the opening witness for his side.
He had not told this story before. Not whole. In December of twenty-one he'd walked into a jail and said nothing to say at this time. Now, in a courtroom, in front of the county, he raises his hand — protesting innocence — and talks.
Here is what he said. Piece by piece, because you can hear the case tick while you listen.
He had worked with Childers gathering pecans. Eight or ten days. Not two weeks — eight or ten days. The number he chose, in that room, was smaller than the one the neighbors had used.
And he admitted the other thing, flatly: he was wearing hob-nailed shoes. Admitted. The iron shoes were his. The county's first fact — the one it had been standing on for three years — he gave them without a fight. Yes. Mine.
The morning: he and the old man started out, on November the thirteenth, to the grove. Which — he says — was a new place. A different piece of ground from where they'd been working. The old ground was played out — the prospects were discouraging. So they went to the new grove that morning. His and Childers' last walk.
Then, in his telling: the pecans did not come. New ground, still nothing. And he decided — he decided that the prospects were discouraging — and so, he says, he left Childers a short distance from where the dead man was later found, and walked.
He caught — a ride into Berwyn with an unknown man in a passing auto. An unknown man. A passing automobile. On a road where, the state would say, cars seldom pass.
And then the five weeks — and here, listen close, because this is where the case's axle finally shows itself:
He stated that he remained on an uncle's farm near Berwyn for five weeks before he learned that he was wanted for the murder of Childers — before he learned, he says, that the man had been killed. An uncle's farm. Five weeks. Working. He had no idea a murder had happened — in the county next door to his own life, in the house he'd been eating at, two feet from where a body lay in a creek.
In December of 1921, at the jail, he'd told the county: Arkansas. Three weeks.
Now, under oath, in front of a jury: an uncle's farm. Five weeks. Berwyn.
The county attorney had both stories now. And they had one thing in common — they were the only two stories anybody ever heard him tell.
He goes on. He explains the gun he gave the jailer: he was not in the habit of carrying concealed weapons — and denied emphatically — emphatically — that he had ever carried a gun while working with the old man. The revolver at the jail? His uncle's. He borrowed it — borrowed it — on the day he came in, just before leaving the farm. Borrowed.
Then the state got to the one question it had been building to. The marks near the body. The tracks. Shoeprints matching the ones he'd just admitted were his.
And this is the moment this episode has been waiting for. This is the sentence he gave the longest answer to, and the answer nobody in that packed room saw coming:
He also testified that he had been at the scene of the murder the day before — and that the tracks found there could have been his.
Read it again.
The day before. Saturday, November the twelfth, 1921. The day before the morning he walked out the door with the old man and the old man never came back — he had been at the scene of the murder. The scene. The place where, tomorrow, five shots would be fired, and a man would fall face down in a creek bed.
And the tracks — the only physical evidence the state had — he gave them the answer he never gave anything else: That could have been my marks. I was there. The day before.
He did not say why he was there. He did not say what he did. Whether anybody in that room asked him where he was on the day of the killing — the record doesn't keep. It keeps only the answer he gave, and the answer was: I was here the day before. The tracks could be mine.
He said he'd been there the day before — and the tracks could be his — and that was the whole statement.
The county attorney gave the room his examination. The crowd was packed and quiet. The man stepped down.
And the next morning, the case went to the jury.
Part 12The Hung Jury
Late on the afternoon of the twelfth of February, 1924, the case of Less Holley — charged with the murder of William Childress — went to the jury.
We don't know what was said in that room. We never will. But we know this much:
They took it. And they kept it. Twenty-nine hours.
An hour and a quarter of a day. Two nights, and no words from inside the room. The papers of the day — which tell us everything about this case except this one thing — say only that the deliberation had remained stationary for many hours — that the count didn't move, that the men had dug in, that there was a wall in that room and both sides had built it.
At the end, the members asked that they be discharged.
How it ended — the country's oldest courtroom drama, and this is the part the county knew by heart by now:
The jury returned to court late on the afternoon of the thirteenth. They reported to the judge that they were disagreed — and that further effort to bring about a verdict was useless.
Then the foreman gave the count. And the count is the story:
Ten of the jurors were for conviction. Two for acquittal.
Ten-to-two. Two people in that room who would not say guilty — in a case where the state had handed them every piece of iron it owned. Who they were: nobody ever printed their names. The foreman gave the jury its number. The number is all we have: two people, in a county that had lost a good old man, held out against ten, through twenty-nine hours.
What happened next was the judge's.
Asa E. Walden dismissed the jurymen — after expressing his regret, the paper says, at their inability to decide the case. And then he let the county have it. Both barrels. He pointed out the cost of the trial — the cost, he said, added to the previous hearing granted Holley in the same case, which had also resulted in a hung jury. It had cost the taxpayers of the county thousands of dollars. And the case, he said, was no further along than it had been at the time the charges were first filed.
Read that again — because that is the ache of this whole case, in one sentence. Three years, and the case exactly where it had started.
Then Walden said something that went right into the paper, and the printer lost two words in the middle of it — the paper itself, on the front page, showing its teeth — this is how it came out:
"There is no call for all the unnecessary delay between these hearings," Judge Walden asserted. "It is certainly regrettable that the matter is hanging fire in this manner, costing the county many dollars and apparently reaching nowhere. In all fairness to the citizens of the county, the defendant in the case and the family of the murdered man, the — should be cleared away. It is certain that — jury should be able to reach a verdict either for conviction or acquittal, and it shall be the purpose of this court to proceed with the trial of Holley until some decision is reached in the case without further delay."
The — should be cleared away. How the words were set, we'll never know. The type is your witness. What landed in the paper, and what traveled down the hundred years: a judge, furious, jabbing at an empty syllable — the should be cleared away — and the meaning was never a bit unclear.
And then, the announcement:
Yesterday afternoon Judge Walden declared that the court would open the third hearing in the Holley case early next week — and that if the jurors failed to reach a verdict of some nature in that case, a fourth trial would be immediately held.
Read that again, too. A fourth trial. He had not even held the third yet, and he was already threatening the fourth — one after another until twelve people got it right. It shall be the purpose of this court to proceed with the trial of Holley until some decision is reached.
Until some decision is reached.
Twenty-nine hours, ten-two, twice. That's where the county stood: two trials, all that evidence, all that money, a dead man and a defendant — and a judge who had just promised to keep trying him until the day the county found twelve people, or the county ran out.
Case dismissed is not what happened. What happened was: the judge called it again.
Early next week, he said. A third trial.
Hold that. Because this is the part where — exactly where — the story moves sideways.
Part 13The Date That Never Came
Saturday, February the 16th, 1924. The judge brought his criminal setting of the district court to a successful close yesterday afternoon — that's the county paper, the day after.
Set your calendar. The hung jury's report came in on the 13th, a Wednesday. The judge stood in his court on Thursday, the 14th, and said: a third hearing, early next week. Monday would be the 18th.
And on Saturday — two days later — the whole thing was over.
Here is the county's own report card, and read it slow, because this is the truth nobody was telling themselves: According to court attaches, the present setting has been highly successful. A number of convictions were obtained and several cases disposed of.
Highly successful. The heaviest penalty invoked in the term: Frank Criner, robbery — guilty — twenty-five years in the penitentiary. Frank Smith, a guilty plea on the stolen-property case. Several pleas of guilty were entered. The county's criminal setting — the whole term's job — done. Convictions. Closings.
One murder case was tried, the result being a hung jury.
That's the whole line. One murder case. The county's one — Uncle Bill's — and the result was a hung jury. In a term of convictions, the only murder they'd actually tried was the one that wouldn't come in. Highly successful, if you don't count it.
Monday, February the 18th came. There was no third trial.
The judge had said early next week. The paper had said the case would begin once more on Monday. What actually happened — the record is empty. There is no Monday story. The term had closed on a Saturday, and the man's case went back between the covers of a docket book while the county sent its fines and its twenty-five-year sentence out into the world.
Then — silence. Weeks.
Then April.
Sunday, April the 6th, 1924. The Ardmore Daily Press ran the courthouse roundup for the new setting. Ling — the railway brakeman's case — continued, the man ill. Coffey, the Lone Grove constable, the venue fight coming. And then, and this is where you should sit straight up:
The oldest case of the group, that of Jess Holley, who was tried for the second time at the last criminal setting of the division resulting in a hung jury, will come up for trial on Saturday.
Jess Holley. The oldest case. The one that had already hung two juries — the paper says it: Holley's previous trials have both resulted in hung juries. Will come up for trial on Saturday.
The Saturday = the twelfth of April, 1924.
So it was set. The re-set date. After the failed Monday — a Saturday. The county was going to do it a third time.
And here is where this case does the thing that makes it what it is.
Watch the same week. April the 10th, 1924 — the same judge, the same courtroom, the Coffey case. A packed room. And Walden, on the bench, holding off the mob — a defense attorney stands, charges that the county can't give his man a fair trial because of hatred, unbias[s]ed opinion, and — quote — the Ku Klux Klan faction was influential in drawing the jury panel. The crowd applauds the judge's refusal to move the venue. He turns on them: Government by hand-clapping is over. Then the line he gave, in that room, on the record — a judge of 1924 America saying it to a courthouse:
"The hardest part of the life of a judge is when the mob howls for a man's life. Stronger judges than this one have had to yield to the demand of the mob. Christ was tried before the mob. The question now arises: Does the mob exist?"
That was Tuesday, April 10th, 1924.
Saturday, April 12th, 1924 — the day the county's oldest case was supposed to come up — came.
There is no trial.
There is no verdict.
There is no appeal in any reporter, no conviction in any index, no record of a man doing time. The papers of that term, the ones we can find, carry the Coffey fight and the federal court — and nothing for Jess Holley. And when the April cases are gone through, name by name: he is not there. The oldest case of the group — the case the county swore to try until a verdict came — simply... had left the calendar.
Two trials. Two hung juries. Ten-to-two. Twenty-nine hours. And the third trial — announced, set, printed, promised in the air with all the force a judge could put behind a threat — came to nothing at all.
The county never got its verdict.
Now — the man. Because wait until you meet what happened to the one defendant this case ever had.
Part 14The Man Who Was Never Decided
So who was he — the man who could have said what happened in the grove?
By the time the county stopped trying him, it had used half a dozen names. The docket called him Jess. His brothers called him Less. If his papers ever called him anything, the man was John Lesley Holley — a boy from Mississippi, born in 1888, one of a family of orphans, transplanted to this part of Oklahoma to work. He'd served in the World War — in the navy. And by the time the case got going, he was a farmhand, a boarder, a man who lived at Provence and worked the country for wages — a man the county could not decide about.
There was a brother near Berwyn — a grave marker at Provence, now, remembers J. V. Holley too. There was family in Ardmore. He was part of a county, the way we all are: bound by blood and work and place. Nobody who knew the family ever knew of trouble between him and Uncle Bill.
That is nearly everything the record says about Less Holley's life.
The rest of it is in the ground.
Because here is what the case finally became. Sometime around April, 1924, with the third trial set for a Saturday and the county's attention turned to the mob speech and the Coffey fight, the oldest case in the county's courthouse — quietly — moved to the back of the docket book. No verdict.
And then came June.
Tuesday, June 10th, 1924. Less Holly — the obituary prints the name that way, Less — went hunting.
Not pecans. Not him and an old man on a creek. Less Holly went hunting with his brother Herman — down to the river, the two of them, about 1:30 in the afternoon, walking near each other, gun in Herman's hands — a hunt, two men close together, like the other hunt. Two men. A gun.
And Herman, going through a fence — in crawling thru the fence, caught the hammer of the gun on the wire — and it discharged.
The full charge of No. 8 shot. Striking Less in the pit of the stomach. At close range.
Not a minute of it was anything but ordinary. Down at the river, a brother's gun, a fence wire, one crack of sound. Herman had considerable getting to a phone. It was 3 o'clock before Dr. Rogers reached the wounded man. The wound was dressed. He was taken to a house — the home of A. F. Fertig. The ambulance came. They got him to town, to the Mangum hospital.
And at 1:30 o'clock — the morning of the 11th of June, 1924 — Less Holly died.
In the pit of the stomach. Shot. By his brother's gun. Close range.
Two months after the date set for his third trial. Four months after the second hung jury. Two years and seven months after Uncle Bill Childress was found face down in the bed of a creek.
The Carnegie Herald, up in the next county, ran his obituary on the front of its June 11th paper. It is the most last-word document in this whole case, and read it the way it was written:
HOLLY DIES IN HOSPITAL AS RESULT OF ACCIDENTAL SHOT FROM BROTHER'S GUN.
Less Holly, 38, died in a Mangum hospital at 1:30 o'clock last night following a wound in the abdomen received when a shotgun in the hands of his brother Herman was accidentally discharged while the men were on a hunting trip yesterday afternoon.
Thirty-eight, the obituary says. The stone says born 1888 — which would make him thirty-five. The papers said twenty-eight in 1921. The records disagreed about his age too. It's the last consistent thing about this case: nobody could ever settle the numbers on Less Holley.
And then — the last lines of the obituary. The last lines anyone ever wrote about the defendant in the murder of Uncle Bill Childress:
The body will be taken to Ardmore for burial. Less, Herman and another brother have been batching and farming the Geo. Andrews place east of town. They are orphan boys. Less served in the World War in the navy.
They are orphan boys. An epitaph, for the county's most tried defendant.
You know where they buried him. Provence Cemetery, out near Ardmore — the farmland, the family ground, where J. V. is too. On FindAGrave, the modern memorial site, a record exists for him: John Lesley "Les" Holley. And on that record — stare at this, it's the whole case's last artifact — there is a photograph of the man. The stone, and the portrait. Whoever made that memorial could not bear to let him be only a name — there is a picture of the man the county could never convict.
The place it all finally stops: a fence, a brother, No. 8 shot, and 1:30 in the morning. A man who died by a gun — the thing this whole case was about — on a hunt, close to a friend, with the sound of it the only witness. An accident, the paper called it. A hunt where two men walked out, and one came home dead.
Which is precisely how the other story went, if you remembered the shape of it. Uncle Bill and Less Holley. Sun-up, and the creek.
Less Holley and Herman. One-thirty, and the river.
Two hunts. Two men. A gun. Only two people who could say what happened in the grove — and only one of them ever got buried with a picture on his stone.
The case of Uncle Bill Childress — the murder, the two trials, the two hung juries, the judge's third trial that never came — ended in June of 1924, when the only man who ever stood accused of it died, thirtyish, his name on a county paper, an obituary saying accidental, and no verdict — not guilty, not guilty — ever, ever rendered in his case.
Part 15After the Smoke
And what became of Uncle Bill?
The answer is somewhere in Carter County, and it is one of the strangest things in this whole strange case. The Berwyn cemetery — the cemetery where the paper says they buried him, in 1921, on the day after he died — has been photographed, cataloged, every stone that anyone ever knew about. There is no Childress there. Not in the records, not in the transcriptions, not on any memorial list for any cemetery in that county — Old Berwyn, Woodford, Hickory Creek. A man the county said it loved, called Uncle Bill, well known over the county and well thought of — and there is no grave of his that anyone has found.
Maybe there's a stone that nobody photographed. Maybe they couldn't afford one and the grave went down unmarked. Maybe the name is spelled a way nobody looked for. The county's beloved old man, buried in his former home, has no marker in the books — the books that have a stone and a portrait for his accused.
The two graves, in the end, could not be more different. The defendant: a photograph on a memorial, a veteran's marker, a name with dates on it. The victim: nothing in any book we could open. In the hundred years since, we have found every part of this case — except the one stone.
Now the last questions. Here is everything the county never answered — and we're not going to pretend otherwise, because the not-knowing is what this case is.
Who pulled the trigger in the grove? Nobody saw. Nobody ever said. The state had a theory held together by hobnails and disappearance and a gun similar to the one that did it. The man who could have said — died, at a fence, by his brother's shotgun. No witness in eternity ever made that statement.
The motive? No quarrel. No reason. The neighbors said it, the brother said it, the widow said it. The one thing with money in it that happened — the pecan sale, the split of the money — was three days before. The county never offered a motive, and the record never found one. The only thing we have is this: the man came home, divided the haul, and gave his half to his wife to keep — and then put no quarrel between himself and the friend at his table for the next three days. Or so the only people who could say said.
And the two stories — Arkansas, then the uncle's farm. If ever there was a place this case has a hole in the ground, that's it. One of them was true. The other one was the reason two juries said we don't know.
And that is where it actually stands. The case of William "Uncle Bill" Childress — five bullets in the back, a creek bed, a light shoe, an iron shoe, a man who walked out at sun-up and a boy who walked into a jail at nine and said nothing to say — went to trial. Twice. Went to jury. Twice. The best evidence the 1920s could put forward in a county like that, and twelve people could not be had.
The man died without ever being decided. The case died without a verdict. After the second hung jury, the judge promised a third — early next week, and if necessary a fourth — and he meant it, and it never happened. The oldest case of the group went off the docket.
So we tell it to you the way it really went. Some cases don't end. They just stop.
The full file — every paper, every date, every source we could pin to the ground — is at Section 29 dot com. And if you take anything from this one, take the shoe. The common, light shoe. The one thing the case had on its side the whole time: an old man who never had trouble with anybody. And the question this case leaves is the same question it was born with — a hundred years later, we still can't answer it.
What happened in the pecan grove?