Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  Meanwhile, McAndrew had called a meeting for that afternoon about killing Reese, as agreed at the convention. McAndrew instructed McParlan to go to Tamaqua to meet Kerrigan and finalize the plans for the murder of Jones; Kerrigan, in turn, would find men to eliminate Reese. The meeting and its aftermath—with Hurley as a constant shadow—meant that McParlan once again did not have the opportunity to send a message about Jones, Reese, or, most urgently, Sanger. “I am in the fix,” he wrote when he finally was alone. “I do not know where to find Linden, and it would cost me my life to despatch as you may also see it takes all my time to get a chance of writing, although they have no suspicion of me so far, but it dont take much to make them have one, and neither man nor woman of them will spare a man, if they get a chance on him.”7

  This report to Franklin—not previously seen for almost half a century because it is held privately—is revelatory. While many critics portray McParlan as supremely confident, too clever by half, priding himself on his ability to spin lies into a web of deceit, this shows him as one who saw his task as neither easy nor glamorous, but rather extremely unnerving and dangerous. Additionally, it reveals McParlan’s growing anxiety, and perhaps guilt, as demonstrated by his need to explain his lack of action when the reasons are actually evident.

  It was later questioned (in court and by subsequent writers) why McParlan did not warn Sanger that night when Hurley went home and Doyle had not yet returned. However, both Doyle and O’Donnell had said that the killing would occur by noon, when Sanger came out of the mine, and by evening, McParlan assumed the deed had been done. He had not received a definite report, but “I heard nothing to counteract the intimation I had.” More important, the key reason behind his hesitation was fear: “Hurley remained with me up until it was ten o’clock and it was utterly impossible for me to give any information without endangering my own life.”8

  McParlan later tried to downplay his inaction (and perhaps to assuage his guilt) by testifying under oath in three trials that even if the target had been alive, “I did not know what colliery the boss worked at, or what was the name of the boss.”9 But his report about his discussion with Doyle clearly shows this not to be the case—he did, in fact, know Sanger’s name.

  Hurley reappeared early the next morning and accompanied McParlan to Lawler’s saloon. Shortly before 8:00, five heavily armed and overheated men—the four who had set out together the day before plus Thomas Munley of the Gilberton lodge—showed up. “We made a clean job,” announced James O’Donnell, “we killed two, we only intended to kill one.”10 First they downed whiskey as well as a pitcher of water, and after catching their breath from a hard run, they excitedly told of how, after spending the night at the home of Dennis “Bucky” Donnelly, the former bodymaster at Lost Creek, they had exchanged clothes and hats and then lurked around Heaton’s Colliery—which was actually comprised of a number of small collieries in the same area, all owned by Robert Heaton—as if waiting to see if they could find work.

  When Sanger, the thirty-three-year-old Cornish “inside boss,” and William Uren, a young Cornish miner who had moved to the United States only three years before and boarded with his countryman, left the Sangers’ house carrying their dinner cans in their hands, the assassins made their move. Charles O’Donnell, Doyle, and McAllister approached a group of men who were waiting for work to start and, “drawing revolvers said, ‘clear out you sons of bitches’ and fired four or five shots apparently at the crowd.”11 As the miners scattered, James O’Donnell, wielding two large revolvers, moved quickly toward Sanger. A shot rang out and the foreman “kind of fell or staggered,” before running toward the back of a house. While one of the killers pursued him, Munley raced up the road and circled around behind the house from the other direction; he blocked Sanger’s path and shot him just as he was going for the door of the house. Sanger fell to his hands and knees, and Munley pushed him over and fired again at close range.12 Meanwhile, James O’Donnell shot Uren as he attempted to go to Sanger’s aid, and the young man died a few hours after his friend. The fatal wound for each was in the groin, near the femoral artery.13

  Heaton, the mine owner, heard the shots, grabbed his pistol, and ran out of his house toward where the murders were taking place, some two hundred yards away. As he reached Sanger, the fatally wounded man gasped, “Don’t stop for me, Bob, but give it to them!”14 Heaton then chased the fleeing assassins and fired five shots at them, but hit no one. The men returned fire, disappeared behind a breaker, ran through the mule yard, and escaped unscathed along a mountain path, heading northeast.15

  • • •

  Within an hour or so of the shootings, McParlan had heard the confessions of all five killers. However, he was helpless to do anything about it immediately and, moreover, was expected to travel to Tamaqua the following day with Munley, Mike Darcy, and John McGrail to eliminate Jones and bring back two men to dispatch Reese. Hoping to go ahead of the others so that he could tell Linden about both the Sanger murder and the projected one, McParlan again could not shake Hurley and McAndrew nor send out a warning about the dangers facing Jones.16

  The next morning, Munley and Darcy joined McParlan on the train to Tamaqua, but the two had been drinking much of the night, so McParlan led them to Carroll’s saloon, where Mrs. Carroll gave them a bed to sleep it off. Although this freed McParlan to find Linden, it was too late. Linden had already left town, having received a dispatch from Franklin that “a mining boss at Raven Run had been shot dead and another man mortally wounded—for me to proceed there immediately so as to ascertain the names of the witnesses and find out all the witnesses knew . . . I left there immediately on the first train . . . and that is why MacParlan never knew where I went—did not know anything at all about me.”17

  Unable to find Linden, who remained in Raven Run for two days, McParlan went to Columbia House—where he often stayed when in Tamaqua—and wrote to Franklin, recommending that Jones’s house be surrounded in order to catch any would-be killers, while he would try to “hold back the murder of Jones upon some pretext until I could get Captain Linden . . . to come there and gobble up the crowd.”18 Using the excuse that Kerrigan could not be found, he sent Munley and Darcy back—although “I didn’t look for Kerrigan or make any inquiries for Kerrigan. I did not want to see him that I might postpone the murder.”19 Thinking that he had gained Jones a reprieve, he went to Carroll’s that night, only to be told at ten o’clock that “Kerrigan had went to Lansford some one or two days previous with two men, to shoot John P. Jones.”20

  McParlan was again in a fix. He was stunned that events were moving ahead so quickly without his knowledge, when he was supposed to be organizing the Jones murder. But there was nothing he could do, as he had no idea of Linden’s location and no way of safely transmitting a message. He did not even know if Jones had already been killed. So, figuring that “Jones was on his guard,” and being absolutely worn out by the stress of the past weeks, he “went to my hotel, and wrote out my report, and went to bed.”21

  In fact, Jones was still alive when McParlan turned in.22 The previous day, September 1, two men from the Mount Laffee lodge, Edward Kelly and Michael J. Doyle—a different Michael Doyle than McParlan’s roommate—had arrived at Carroll’s saloon, where they had been sent to carry out the job. Carroll told Kerrigan to lead them to Lansford to commit the murder, after which he could guide them back to safety. Unlike Kerrigan’s previous effort, this time it would prove to be anything but a “clean job.”

  That evening, the three made their way first to Campbell’s liquor store and then to Summit Hill, the western terminus of the switchback railroad, where McGehan’s new tavern was located. After McGehan cleaned and oiled two pistols, Campbell, realizing that none of the other three had ever seen Jones and needed to be certain of his identity, “gave them a description of Jones. He said he wore a kind of black hat, and a blue blouse and pants, usually in his boots, and carried a dinner can, and no
bottle.”23

  The next day, Kerrigan, Doyle, and Kelly wandered over to Jones’s neighborhood, hoping to intercept him when he approached Heaton’s Number 4 colliery. However, rather than walking along the tracks as they expected, Jones took the train from the Lansford depot, thereby eluding his killers. They hunted him that day, asking about him at Heaton’s different collieries and waiting for an hour outside of Number 5 colliery, only to be foiled when he followed a tunnel to a different exit.24 They had no more luck questioning his neighbors—even walking into a house they thought to be Jones’s, to find they were mistaken—and returned to see Campbell, who was angry because he “thought we would see him in the morning, and have shot him in the afternoon.”25

  Coincidentally, that night, having decided that the danger had been overestimated, Jones stayed in his own house with his wife and seven children for the first time in weeks. Around 7:00 A.M., he headed down the pipeway for the Lansford depot, half a mile away. Carelessly alone and unprotected, despite numerous previous warnings, he was within one hundred yards of the depot when Kelly and Doyle approached him on the path, and he moved aside to let them pass. Instead, the two men drew their pistols and shot him, Doyle twice. Jones tried to reach the bushes to escape but was pursued, and when the wounded man fell, Doyle, using the same pistol that had dispatched policeman Yost, riddled his body with bullets. Kerrigan and the two killers then fled toward the high woods to the west.

  Before long, a search was organized and accounts of the murder were telegraphed to the towns that the organizers suspected the killers might pass through. Samuel Beard, who was studying law in a local office, had just arrived on the train from Tamaqua when the murder occurred. He followed several people to where Jones was writhing in his death throes. Horrified, he returned to Tamaqua on the next train with rough descriptions of the killers, gained from men who had run toward Jones as the murderers raced off. Knots of men formed throughout the town, discussing what could be done. Beard and a friend, hearing rumors that the highly disreputable Kerrigan had been seen with two strangers at the end of town, went to the Odd Fellows’ cemetery, which was located on a nearby hill, to see if they could spot anyone through a spyglass.

  What they saw was Kerrigan on a mountainside across the valley, waving a handkerchief in signal to two men, who came out of the woods to meet him. Immediately suspicious, Beard raced back to the town center, where a posse was formed. Dividing in two, it advanced up the hill, surrounding Kerrigan and the two strangers—Doyle and Kelly—who were quickly captured while drinking whiskey near a mountain spring. The men were unarmed, but both Doyle and Kelly had AOH badges on their coats and when they were identified as having been in Lansford the previous day, they were assumed to be guilty of the murder. The case against them seemed quickly proven when three pistols were found secreted in leaves beneath the trees surrounding the spring. An ugly crowd formed, hoping “to get hold of the prisoners to hang them without trial . . . they would have been strung up like dogs.”26 To prevent a lynching, the three were taken across the county line to the Carbon County jail in Mauch Chunk. It would not be the last time a mob threatened to dispense its own justice.

  • • •

  The Jones murder and the arrests of Kerrigan, Doyle, and Kelly were the turning point in the saga of the Molly Maguires. Likewise, the nine hours prior to Jones’s murder proved a key period in the development of the image of James McParlan. His failure to warn Jones of imminent danger was harped upon by the defense throughout the trials of the Molly Maguires, as were his failures to provide warnings for Thomas or Sanger. Although such arguments had little impact on the juries, they have been a primary criticism of McParlan more recently, as in Kevin Kenny’s assessment: “The weight of the evidence in the Sanger, Uren, and Jones cases is that McParlan let these killings go ahead in order to accumulate evidence.”27

  In actuality, the totality of the evidence suggests otherwise. This is particularly true if McParlan’s rarely consulted reports for the days prior to the Jones killing are taken into account.28 When considering what McParlan actually knew, his instructions, and his concerns for his own safety, his decisions are not as callous as they have been made to seem.

  McParlan was, after all, working in a vacuum—he did not know what steps his superiors or other agencies were taking and so could not adjust accordingly. It is clear, for example, that in July McParlan passed to both Linden and Franklin indications of a plot against an “inside boss.” His next step—accomplished in early August—was confirming that the target was Jones. However, the steps of actually protecting Jones had nothing to do with McParlan but were determined by Zehner, Charles Parrish of the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company, and Captain T. C. Williams of the Coal and Iron Police.29 As far as McParlan was aware—based on information from both Linden and Franklin—Jones was being protected.

  Moreover, McParlan had been successful numerous times in postponing violence, including having done so only that day, when he sent Munley and Darcy home. Therefore, he undoubtedly felt confident that he could do so again. His first task in this regard was to telegraph Linden, but, not knowing where he was, “I could not dispatch to him, and on leaving Carrolls I found I could not dispatch either to Mr Franklin. The telegraph offices were closed.”30 So he planned to send the message first thing in the morning, only to find out that Jones had already been killed.

  Despite his assumptions that Jones would be protected, and that his own messages could be sent the following day, McParlan has been called to task for not attempting to warn the victim. However, he not only had no obligation to do so—he was a private detective, not a policeman—he was also unaware of Kerrigan’s plans and therefore was liable to stumble into a dangerous position. Moreover, there is no indication that McParlan could have recognized Jones, nor that he knew where his house was. Asking for such information would likely not only have blown his cover, but would have been highly dangerous. This was also true of passing information to local authorities—who could not be totally trusted, as demonstrated by Shenandoah policeman Ned Monaghan, an AOH member who was eventually found guilty as an accomplice in the attempted murder of Thomas.31 McParlan acknowledged this concern when he testified that “I do not wish to cast aspersion upon the civil officers who are good officers, but as a rule, as to detectives, we manage our own business until it comes to a focus.”32

  Such an action would also have violated every agreement that McParlan had made with Pinkerton’s and their employers and might have destroyed the broader goals of the investigation. “He was expressly forbidden to communicate with anybody,” Franklin later testified. “He would have been dismissed at once, and his life would have been jeopardized. He was in jeopardy whenever he spoke to Capt Linden in the coal regions. He was in jeopardy all the time.”33

  That last reason, understandably, is what most dictated McParlan’s decisions. He believed that trying to walk five to six miles to Lansford late at night, in the dark, to warn Jones would likely have “given his game away” and cost him his life. As he stated in later testimony:

  Q: Why did you not go over, yourself, from the Columbia House, five miles, to save the life of a man you knew was going to be assassinated?

  A: My reason was that I was afraid of being assassinated myself.

  Q: You would not take that risk to save the life of John P. Jones?

  A: I would not run the risk of losing my life for all the men in this Court House.

  Q: You were playing the part of a detective and yet you would not take that much trouble to walk five miles?

  A: I would walk twenty, but it was saving my own life I was looking to. . . .

  Q: You would rather see this man Jones sacrificed?

  A: Than sacrifice myself? Decidedly.34

  McParlan’s statement may sound unfeeling, and it is easy for a defense attorney in court or for someone sitting safely at home to criticize him, yet were it to come to the push, many
people would be unwilling to sacrifice their lives for someone they have never met. In fact, rather than showing McParlan to be a demon, these sentiments show him to be very human, for ultimately self-preservation is one of the strongest instincts. It might be overcome by love, honor, ethics, or impetuosity, but the natural human drive is to survive. And McParlan did.

  • • •

  Unfortunately for McParlan, however, there were those who did not want his survival, because he had played his role so well that they thought him deep in the midst of planning the outrages. Even John Reese, the mine superintendent whose life he had attempted to save, told Linden that “an Irishman named McKenna was supposed to have originated, planned, and assisted in . . . the death of John P. Jones,” and that if he showed up in Tamaqua, the residents would turn out by the hundreds to hang him.35

  For much of the public that attitude extended well beyond McParlan—to all those involved in the killings. The night after the Jones murder The Tamaqua Courier asked: “Who can blame the friends of the victims if they demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and blood for blood? Something must be done; that something must be sure, swift, and terrible.”36 Journalists throughout the district agreed, as the rash of murders set off a clamor for rough justice.37 Almost overnight, a specter of vigilante action spread through the lower anthracite region.

  Vigilance committees had already gained national notoriety, starting with a group in San Francisco—first formed in 1851 and reconstituted five years later—that hanged eight people in an effort to control crime and corruption.38 In the next decade, the Jackson County Vigilance Committee, also called the Scarlet Mask Society, was responsible for the violent end of about a dozen members of the Reno gang, which had plagued southern Indiana for years. In four separate incidents in 1867 and 1868, masked vigilantes overpowered law officers transporting or holding gang members—some captured by Pinkerton’s operatives—and hanged the criminals on the spot (one location where men were hanged from a huge beech tree is known to this day as Hangman’s Crossing). In the final episode, vigilantes broke into the jail in New Albany, Indiana, where three of the Reno brothers and one of their compatriots were being held, overcame the sheriff and deputy, and hanged the four men inside the jail.39