Murder Mayhem in Houston by Mike Vance John Nova Lomax

Author:Mike Vance, John Nova Lomax [Mike Vance, John Nova Lomax]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), True Crime, General
ISBN: 9781625850560
Google: bo6ACQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2014-10-07T02:48:18+00:00

Houston Press crime reporter Harry McCormick. From the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston Public Library.

At the start of the 1930s, McCormick penned a series of exposés about the prison system, with much of his information passed along via a prison chaplain and fellow Houstonian, Father Hugh Finnegan, a man who would accompany well over one hundred condemned men on their last walks. Among the inmates at Eastham who were funneling information to Harry were Ralph Fults, Raymond Hamilton and Clyde Barrow. Mack considered Fults and Hamilton to be his friends, though he laughed out loud when Raymond told him that he’d bust out of the Huntsville death house and give Harry an interview.167

In fact, Harry’s acquaintance with state and local criminals went back even before 1930. He came to Houston from the Denver Post in the late 1920s and would remain in the city for a decade. Among his early haunts in search of a good seedy lead was Root Square.

In that hectic, bloody Easter week that started April 1934, when Clyde Barrow and Henry Methvin were murdering the two highway patrolmen and Raymond Hamilton was robbing a bank and bringing his hostage to Houston, Harry McCormick received an anonymous letter at his office in the Houston Press building on Rusk. It included a crudely drawn map to a spot on the Texas-Louisiana border and gave details of the abuses happening at Eastham. It also promised that if Mack followed the map, he’d find one of Texas prison boss “Lee Simmons’ chief rats.”168

McCormick, the trusted advocate of prison reform, followed the story to Shreveport, where he and law officers began chasing the clues on the map. It led them to the once-well-dressed body of a man, a body that had been there for three or four days. His skull had been crushed, and he sported several gunshot wounds. In his pocket were sixteen dollar bills and “three pair of crooked dice.”

It didn’t take long to identify the man as W.H. McNabb, an inmate trustee from Eastham. From there, it took a bit longer for the pieces to present a full picture of what happened. Not until Ralph Fults told the story decades later would the final details emerge, and their roots lay in the rule of thumb that it’s never good to be weak in prison.169

Joe Palmer suffered badly from asthma and other respiratory trouble. His frequent incapacitation was the thing that drove Raymond Hamilton to want Joe out of the Barrow Gang so badly he once pointed a gun at Joe’s head while he slept in the back seat of a speeding getaway car. At the Eastham Prison Farm, one guard and one trustee building tender were particularly thorough at beating Palmer to a pulp when he was too sick for work detail. Palmer shot and killed the offending guard when he busted out of Eastham, and now he was after the trustee. It was something Palmer was not about to let go.170

Two months before the anonymous letter to

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.