The Scarlet Pen

by Jennifer Uhlarik

  “I love that Psalm. And it is a comfort that perhaps Stephen did truly come to know Christ before he died.”

  “Agreed.” Clay caressed her arm and kissed her hair.

  She was quiet for a moment before she pushed herself up, an odd grin curving her lips. “Do you know what else that Psalm says?”

  “Mmm, no. Leastways, I’m not sure what you’re gettin’ at.”

  She twined her fingers between his. “It says that He forms our inward parts and knits us together in our mother’s womb.”

  “What’s that got to do with whether God can reach—”

  “Nothing.” Her smile deepened, and a sparkle lit her beautiful blue eyes.

  “What?”

  Emma pressed his palm to her belly.

  “You’re expecting?”

  She nodded. “I’ve known for about ten days, but we’ve both been so anxious about the hanging, it hasn’t felt like the right time to tell you.”

  A chuckle bubbled out of him, and all the angst of the past weeks fled. “This was the perfect time.” He brushed his hand over her belly, his thoughts flying. Between Richards’s death and this news, he really needed to find a different job—something that would allow him to be home more.

  “You’re happy, then?”

  He pulled her back into his arms, snugged her in close, and kissed her. “You couldn’t have made me any happier, Em.”

  Author’s Note

  Hello, readers!

  I hope you enjoyed The Scarlet Pen. Every story I write has its own unique challenges. The difficulties were many with this story, the biggest being how to tell a tale of such darkness and depravity tastefully, while still bringing in plenty of light and hope. I pray I accomplished the task.

  Much of my research on Stephen Dee Richards came from his own hand. After his capture and before his death, he worked with an anonymous reporter to write out his confession. It was published after his execution and has been reprinted in recent years. While it was a brief and (gruesomely) interesting read, some elements held the ring of half-truths or outright lies. In fact, there is the main confession, then a secondary confession in the same book that contradicts certain elements of the first—so finding the truth in the midst of the discrepancies was tricky.

  Thankfully, I had another source to help me decipher Stephen’s facts from his fictions. My own husband made a career with our local sheriff’s office, spending all twenty-six years of that career working in the county’s jail system. Across that time, he dealt with various serial killers and multiple murderers (Oscar Ray Bolin, Danny Rolling, Oba Chandler, and Edward Covington to name a very few). Through his interactions with them, he has seen the wickedness that must have existed in Stephen. He has described the soulless, hollow eyes of some of the men named above, while describing others as possessing a sheer boyish charm and charisma—a magnetic personality that attracted many. With such experience, my husband was an invaluable source of perspective on Stephen’s confession, the way the criminal mind works, murderers’ behavior patterns, and police procedures in general. With his help, I tried to balance what Stephen said happened with how the facts might actually have played out.

  One of the tough things in writing this story is that it spanned such a large amount of time and space. Stephen Richards’s nine murders spanned three years and occurred in two states—Nebraska and Iowa. To fit this three-year history into eighty thousand words without it feeling disjointed, I found it necessary to adjust the timeline and change locations and the order of certain events. I tried to stick with the basic facts as closely as I could, but for the sake of story, it was necessary to change some things. Areas that I changed were these:

  Stephen’s “lady friends.” In the confession and other sources, Stephen was engaged to a “virtuous young woman,” but her name was not Emma Draycott. It was Anna Milhorne. I could find no information on this woman (Stephen purposely kept his lady friends’ names and details out of the news). “Dolly” was the only name given for the character I named Dolly Gillis, again with no details. Both characters are works of fiction based on brief mentions of women with whom he was associated.

  Mary Harlson. I chose to portray Mary as a flawed but faithful wife, sold out to her husband, Jasper. Her rebuffing of Stephen’s advances toward her worked nicely as a trigger to cause him to kill her. Yet, in my research, I discovered some sources that said Mary and Jasper weren’t actually married but were living together as husband and wife, and once Jasper went on the run, Mary and Stephen began living together in the same manner. The real trigger for killing the Harlson family, according to Stephen, was that Mary had gone through his vast array of letters from various outlaws with whom he’d corresponded, and she knew of his true crimes, so he feared she would eventually run her mouth to the wrong person.

  Roy Munson. There was a counterfeiter friend of Stephen’s who liberally shared the counterfeit notes he made with Stephen. However, I never found a name for this friend from New York, so the character of Roy Munson is a completely fictional one, though based on a true person. I am not aware that the Secret Service ever hunted for Stephen or the counterfeiter in real life.

  The killing of the kittens. Stephen did mention having “brained” a litter of kittens, but in his youth on his family farm, not as an adult.

  The order of the murders. In reality, they were as follows:

  John, the land speculator—Nebraska, fall 1876

  John’s partner—Nebraska, a few days later

  The young man with the horse and buggy—Iowa, October 1876

  Gemge (who was shot, not stabbed, when Stephen awakened him at 3:00 a.m. to start their day of traveling)—Nebraska, March 1877

  The Harlson family—Nebraska, November 1878

  Peter Anderson (concerned citizens actually came to Anderson’s door while Stephen was still in the house, and Stephen escaped them to run back to Mount Pleasant)—Nebraska, December 1878

  The jailbreak. This was a much more mundane event, where a hacksaw or other cutting tool was smuggled into the jail, and Jasper and his accomplices cut their way out. No lawmen were injured in the event.

  The timeline. As noted above, I compressed the timeline down to slightly under two years, with Stephen being on the run after the Harlson killings for almost a year. In reality, he was captured a mere eleven days after killing Anderson.

  You might wonder why I chose to have Stephen return to Mount Pleasant for the Christmas dance, despite the fact that Emma and her family knew of his murders. This was not a contrivance or a plot device. Historical details prove that the real Stephen Dee Richards did return to Mount Pleasant days after killing Peter Anderson, and he was captured while walking across a field in the company of two young women on his way to a ballroom dance. Wanted posters had been circulated bearing Stephen’s likeness, and a couple of men—one of them a penitentiary guard—recognized and apprehended him. Per Stephen’s own confession, he had a feeling he would be caught there. According to him, he considered making a break for it but quickly chose to give himself up since he was in the company of two young women. Whether the real fiancé, Anna Milhorne, knew of Stephen’s crimes is a mystery to me, but I tend to believe she didn’t until the wanted posters were circulated.

  The one element that attracted me most to this story was the ending. As I said above, how do you tell a story of such darkness and depravity while infusing it with light and hope? To a degree, this story had that element built in. Stephen did truly profess salvation through Christ in his final days. And according to the anonymous reporter who helped to write his confession book, the hymn “Precious Name” was sung by the more than two thousand people who gathered to witness his hanging. What I could not find a way to incorporate in the story was a segment of his final letter to a friend, mailed posthumously, which adds a bit more to his profession of faith in Christ. It reads:

  I have prayed for you all since I have been here, for I have been born again. I am a different man to what I ever was before;
I only wish that I could express all of my feelings in words to you at this time. I feel my change so much that I cannot help thinking what a blessing the love of Jesus is to man, and I do love to talk of Him so much more than I ever did before. I do hope and pray that you all may cling more and more closer to the blessed Savior, and meet me in Heaven; I do not consider my sentence just according to law; I am charged with a good many things that I am not guilty of, nor I never thought of doing them in my life; yet I am glad and rejoice to think that I have made my peace with God; am ready to go at any time.

  Perhaps you wonder at the paradox of a deeply flawed, depraved man professing salvation in Christ yet in the same breath lying about his own guilt. While none of us can know this side of heaven if Stephen Richards’s profession of faith is true, I do ask you to consider this: when we receive Christ’s redemption, our spirit man is redeemed in that instant, but our soul takes a much longer time to reflect that glorious change. Stephen was arrested in late December, convicted in January, and hung in April, so if he truly came to salvation during that time, there was only a very short span in which God could redeem his soul to reflect the change outwardly. But know this: If God changed Stephen’s heart, he is fully redeemed and a totally different man in heaven. There is no shred of the cold-blooded, deranged killer left.

  As Clay says in the final scene, if our heavenly Father would welcome the likes of Stephen Dee Richards, there is tremendous hope for all of us. Dear readers, there is hope for each of us in Christ. No matter what struggles you have faced and no matter how far you’ve fallen, I pray each of you will turn to Him and allow His redemption to change your life forever! You will never regret it!

  Jennifer Uhlarik discovered the Western genre as a preteen, when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour Westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a BA in writing, she has won five writing competitions and has been a finalist in two others. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and is a lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, teenage son, and four fur children.

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