Murder & Mayhem in Nashville by Brian Allison

Author:Brian Allison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hugh McGavock (1) shot Charles Bent (2) outside Cone’s bookstore and pursued him until he fell in an alley on Church Street (X). Author’s diagram.

The second ball hit Bent as he was stepping onto the sidewalk across the street, passing though his right shoulder blade and windpipe and emerging near his breastbone. Bent finally began to run, staggering jerkily up Cherry Street while he weakly begged Hugh not to shoot him again. By that time, it was too late—either wound would have eventually proved fatal.

Bent turned up Union and staggered to the mouth of an alley a short way up the street, where he finally collapsed. Coincidentally, his head came to rest only three feet from the wall of an undertaker’s parlor. A crowd quickly gathered at the scene and stood gawking at the bloody spectacle until his body was taken into the establishment and laid on a bier with a handkerchief over his bloody face.68

Hugh stood quietly by until a policeman approached. When the officer told him he was under arrest, he blinked with apparently genuine surprise and asked why as he surrendered his pistol. As he was carried to jail, a coroner’s jury was summoned to examine Bent’s body. They were amazed to find that the deceased had two guns on him: a .22 Smith & Wesson revolver and a Sharp’s four-barrel pistol. Bent had made no move to draw either weapon during the attack, whether it was due to shock or some other cause. His passive actions during the shooting were “perfectly unaccountable” to witnesses.69 After the examination, a runner was sent to gently break the news of his death to his wife, and his body was carried to their home at 29 South High Street (now Sixth Avenue).

McGavock eventually stood trial in the criminal court but was acquitted and released, returning to a quiet and respectable life. He married in 1889, but the match would last only a few months. After a long struggle with consumption, he died on New Year’s Eve of the same year at the age of forty-five.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.