Shotguns and Stagecoaches by John Boessenecker

Author:John Boessenecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Bill Evans, who was sentenced to life in San Quentin for the murder of Mike Tovey. (California State Archives)

Once again, Milt Sharp was suspected. Charles Aull, former Wells Fargo detective and now warden of Folsom Prison, insisted that Sharp had killed Tovey in revenge. Clint Radcliff doubted that, saying, “I don’t go much on the theory that the man wanted Tovey and not the box. In that case he wouldn’t have shot the horses.” Three months later, Sharp was captured in Red Bluff, in Northern California, after being recognized by an ex-convict. He managed to prove that he had led an honest life since his escape, and provided alibis from his employers showing that he could not have been at the murder scene. Jim Hume believed Sharp and helped get him a parole in 1894.18

Meanwhile, Sheriff Thorn was convinced, due to the similarity of the two attacks, that the same man had murdered Mike Tovey and Johannah Rodesino. He picked up Bill Evans, an inveterate thief and three-time loser. Evans had been working as a hired hand on a farm in Calaveras County. Thorn used questionable techniques on Evans, including plying him with opium and whiskey, to obtain a confession. On August 1, Evans made a detailed statement, saying, “I did not know Messenger Tovey and did not want to kill him. I wanted to stop the stage and secure the treasure.” Within a few days, however, Evans retracted his confession, insisting that it had been coerced.19

Although the confession was thrown out of court by the trial judge, Sheriff Thorn put together a strong circumstantial case. Clint Radcliff identified Evans, a witness had seen him hiding in the grass near the scene a day previous to the shooting, and Evans had made incriminating statements to others about the murders of both Mike Tovey and Johannah Rodesino. A jury convicted Evans of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in San Quentin. Jim Hume and John Thacker were convinced that Thorn had railroaded him into prison. Despite leading a campaign in the press, they were unable to prove his innocence. When Evans was finally paroled in 1909, it was due to his age and his good conduct in prison. In the end, though doubts remain about his guilt, Bill Evans remains the strongest suspect in the murder of Mike Tovey.20

The ever-modest Tovey left behind no memoirs and no written record, but to this day he is one of the most famous of all shotgun messengers. As Wells Fargo official James Otey Bradford commented in 1893, “He regarded the treasure box at his feet as a sacred trust and the company knew that no robber would ever get a dollar of its money from Mike Tovey as long as the breath of life was in him. His vigilance, intrepidity, and fidelity made him a representative without a peer of the shotgun messenger.” But it was Mike’s friend Clint Radcliff who paid him the simplest but most fitting of tributes: “Tovey was true grit.

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