The Man from the Train by Bill James & Rachel McCarthy James

Author:Bill James & Rachel McCarthy James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER XXII

An Uncertain Set of Names

The population of Florida now is twenty million, but in 1903 it was about 500,000 people, most of whom lived near the northern border of the state, as did the Kelly family—Kelly, or Caffey; we can’t be certain of the name. The village of Cottondale, eight to nine miles west of Marianna, was at that time unincorporated, just a few dozen people living around a rural railroad stop, where two lines met; it would be incorporated as a town two years later. The primary industries of the area were cotton farming, logging, and mining.

Henry Kelly, a black man, was most likely a sharecropper. Of the nineteen newspaper accounts of this incident that we could locate, eleven say that the murdered family was named “Kelly,” four say “Caffey,” two say “Smith,” and two do not give any name. We will use the name “Kelly”; however, the best account of the murders uses the name “Caffey,” so that could be the actual name.

In any case, the family lived in an isolated cabin near Cottondale; Henry, his wife, and three small children. The Kellys were last seen about October 31, 1903. On November 9 Kelly’s mother-in-law, who lived in Marianna, made her way to Cottondale to check up on the family, having not heard from them. The front door was secured from the outside with a padlock and a chain, and she could see blood on the outside of the house. She got a neighbor, and, with difficulty, they were able to break in.

The Kelly family had been dead for several days, and their bodies were already somewhat decomposed. Mr. and Mrs. Kelly were found in bed, their heads crushed by “some blunt instrument.” Their baby was in bed with them, his throat slit, and the young children had been decapitated, their bodies on the floor and their heads on a mattress. An unwashed axe had been left in the room.

Two men, perhaps only boys, also black, were “arrested on suspicion.” Their names were Albert (or Allen) Roulhaes and Joe Gordon (also called George Jordan and George Jerdan. The name “Roulhaes” is probably misreported, as well, since no other person in the United States is known to have that surname). Since there are no reports of a trial, we have to assume that these young men were released.

This is all that is known about the case. The area where the crime occurred was thinly populated with low levels of literacy and essentially no newspaper coverage. There is no indication that anyone from any newspaper ever visited the scene of the crime, and it is unlikely that there was ever any meaningful police investigation of the crime.

We believe that the mother-in-law, who found the bodies, was named “Smith.” The confusion over the other names almost certainly results from the poor quality of long-distance telephone service at this time; the phones were so scratchy and faint that in many cases it was all you could do to make out what was being said by a person on the other end of the line.

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.