The role of Jim Howard in the affair has been debated ever since. The generally accepted theory is that he received a message from Caleb Powers, who was in Frankfort, offering him a pardon for killing Baldy George Baker if he would come to Frankfort and “do a job for us.” Both Howard and Powers denied this to their deaths.
Whatever the truth, Jim Howard went to Frankfort on the day Goebel was murdered, and he had some reason to believe he was going to get a pardon. He arrived on the L&N from London at about 10:30 A.M., went to a hotel across the railroad tracks and about a block west of the depot, and rented a room. He then left the hotel and started toward the Capitol, supposedly to pursue the matter of a pardon. According to his Democratic prosecutors, he went to the Capitol, met with Powers and others, and shot Goebel as he came up the walk toward the Capitol. According to his own version, he had just stepped out of the hotel when he heard the news that Goebel had been shot. At any rate, he remained in Frankfort three days but failed to receive his pardon and returned to Manchester. But the trials of Jim Howard were by no means over.
The Democrats were almost hysterical in their rage at the murder of Goebel. In a haphazard catch-all, police arrested sixteen men and charged each with being in one way or another involved in the assassination. There was, for example, Holland Whittaker, who was jailed for no apparent reason except that he was a Republican with a pistol. Joe Adkins, a known killer and a figure in the French-Eversole war in Perry County, was reportedly seen in the capital on the day of the assassination but was never apprehended. This may have reflected the fact that he was thought to be a Democrat or to have worked for Democrats in the Perry County feud.
Caleb Powers was arrested at once, as was Henry Youtsey, an employee in the state auditor’s office. Berry Howard of Bell County and a cousin of Jim Howard, Garret Ripley, a minor Republican official, and eleven others were indicted over the next two weeks. Jim Howard was indicted much later. Little evidence led to his arrest, except that a witness later said he saw Jim running from the executive office building shortly after Goebel was shot. (Another witness testified that, at the same time, he saw Jim or someone who looked like Jim, standing near the doorway of the building.) When Jim was informed, on April 3—three months after he returned to Manchester—that he was being sought in the case, he sent word that he would come to Frankfort and surrender as soon as he was served the proper papers. He later told reporters that he had seen several Bakers in Frankfort during his brief stay and assumed that they had implicated him.
Eventually, three of those accused turned state’s evidence, two under suspicious circumstances. Five were tried, of which two (Berry Howard and Garret Ripley) were acquitted and three (Powers, Jim Howard, and Youtsey) were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
The trial was little short of a kangaroo court. Judge James Can-trill, who presided over Jim Howard’s trial, had been a Democratic legislator and a strong Goebel supporter and had sworn in Goebel as he lay dying. His instructions to the jury were tantamount to a demand for a guilty verdict, and his conduct was so flagrantly biased that all three of the verdicts were later reversed at the appeals level. Jim was tried three times, and only once was there a single Republican on the jury. In the jury pool of 368 men, 360 were Democrats. Three former aides to Powers swore that Powers had instructed them to bring gunmen to Frankfort to kill Goebel and Democratic legislators, but they admitted that they had been offered immunity from prosecution for their testimony. Another witness admitted that Goebel’s brothers had warned him that he would go to prison if he did not testify for the prosecution. Youtsey, an excitable, obviously unbalanced man, testified that Powers had sent for Howard and that Howard had appeared at the office of the secretary of state, where Youtsey, acting under orders from Caleb Powers, opened the door. Youtsey admitted that he had never seen Jim Howard before and had not heard his voice, but said that the man at the door when he opened it said, “I am Jim Howard.” (He usually identified himself as James.)
Howard allegedly did not ask who Youtsey was or ask to see Powers, who had allegedly sent for him to “do a job.” Instead, according to Youtsey, Howard walked into an anteroom next to Powers’s office and was shown into an adjoining room on the southwest corner of the building, given a Marlin rifle and some special bullets, and left alone to kill Goebel. During the trial, Youtsey screamed, fell in a fake faint, and remained inert and supposedly unconscious for the remainder of the trial. It was apparent from the beginning that the court was more interested in hanging a Republican than in finding the killer.
The prosecution charged that Powers had become familiar with Howard through Howard’s trial in Barbourville for the killing of George Baker (Powers swore that he had never seen Howard) and that he had seen in Howard a cold, ruthless killer and had determined that Howard wanted a pardon badly enough to risk a high-level crime.
According to the prosecution scenario, Jim left his hotel, walked across the railroad tracks and up the sidewalk to the executive building (today the old Capitol Annex), where he located the office of the secretary of state and told Henry Youtsey, who answered his knock, “I am Jim Howard.” Youtsey then took him into an empty outer office of Caleb Powers by a roundabout route so that no one would see them, handed him a rifle, showed him to a corner window from which the walkway approaching the Capitol could be easily viewed, and left him alone. Shortly afterward Howard saw three men coming up the walk, identified one of them as Goebel, and shot him. Seeing that Goebel was properly wounded, he placed the rifle on a table, put on his coat, and left the building by a rear door.
Powers was tried four times, in July 1900, October 1901, August 1903, and November 1907. Convictions in the first three trials were overturned on appeal; his final trial ended in deadlock, and he was in jail awaiting appeal when he was pardoned. Youtsey turned state’s evidence after his first trial, was also given a life sentence, and was not pardoned until 1919.
Jim Howard’s trials were in September 1900, January 1902, and April 1903, the last three years after he was indicted. His third trial lasted thirty-four days; the jury was out half an hour. When Judge Cantrill asked him if he had any words to say before sentence was passed, Jim Howard stood “ramrod straight and without a trace of emotion on his face,” according to newspaper accounts, and said: “I do. I want to say that I will be back breathing the free ozone of the mountains when you and all of you here who have framed me are in hell.”
It is hard to escape the feeling that Jim was, as he said, framed. It takes a considerable exercise of the imagination to believe that Jim Howard, who was neither reckless nor stupid, would present himself to a stranger—Youtsey—of whom he had never heard and whom he had no reason to trust, without either presenting or asking identification. If Powers had sent him word to come to Frankfort and “do a job for us,” wouldn’t he at least have asked to speak to Powers (who, incidentally, was not in Frankfort at the time but on a train to Louisville)? Would he not have asked the nature of the job? Would he not have mentioned the promise of a pardon or asked for proof that the pardon existed or would be presented within a reasonable time?
If Powers was indeed the instigator of the plot, why would he have chosen Youtsey, a near-deranged man who was not even a Powers employee or the employee of a friend, for such a delicate mission? Assuming that Jim was stupid enough to follow the directions of a man he had never seen and who might well have been leading him into a trap, how did he and/or Youtsey know that Goebel was coming to the Capitol on this particular day and at this particular hour? Did they have someone watching the doors to the Capitol? If not, how did they know that Goebel had not already arrived and entered the building? If Jim was left alone in the room, how did he know, when three men approached, that one of them was Goebel? And how did he know which was Goebel? He had never seen the man. It was a cold, blustery day, and all of the three men had their heads bent against the cold.
If Jim Howard did indeed kill Goebel, he must have been the fastest killer on record, to
arrive in Frankfort at or around 10:30, walk down the street and across the railroad tracks to the hotel, obtain and check into a room, leave the hotel, walk down the street and again across the tracks, walk up the walkway to the Capitol Annex or office building, find the office of Caleb Powers, locate Youtsey, whom he had never seen, identify himself, receive the key to the empty office, enter and lock the office so that no one could interfere with the killing, find and load the rifle with the special bullets, select the best window from which to fire—the one offering the best view of the approach to the Capitol next door—pick Goebel from the three men approaching on the sidewalk, and shoot him at 11:15—all this in forty-five minutes.
Furthermore, assuming that Jim spotted Goebel correctly and shot him and left the office, why did he not get his pardon and leave for Manchester as quickly as possible? Why did he stay in Frankfort for three days while all hell broke loose around him and police arrested anyone with any remote connection to the case? And why, if he did the job and waited three days for payment, did he never get his pardon? All the time he was in Frankfort, Republicans were in power, and Taylor, Powers, and others who were supposed to have conspired with him were in office, in a position to grant him his pardon. Why didn’t they?
And if he and Powers were guilty—indeed, if the Democrats in control of the trials did not know that they were innocent—why was it necessary to rig the trials so blatantly? Why did they feel it necessary to threaten witnesses, to give such prejudicial instructions to the jury that appeals were granted in five trials? Why did Cantrill refuse to step down from the bench when he was so obviously biased?
On the other hand, there is one question that was never adequately answered, though it did not concern Jim Howard directly: Caleb Powers, on his way to Louisville by train, allegedly got off the train in Shelbyville and asked the stationmaster, “Have you heard about anything happening in Frankfort this morning?” or words to that effect. What was he expecting, if not the assassination? And why was he on a train to Louisville at such a critical time unless it was to remove himself from an incident he had helped to plan?
In 1906 Jim Howard joined Youtsey and began serving his sentence. Two years later, after Republican Augustus Willson had been elected governor, Jim and Caleb Powers were pardoned. Willson announced that he considered both men innocent and stated his belief that Youtsey was the real killer. The process, however, had cost Howard and Powers eight years of their lives.
Powers returned to Knox County as something of a hero and was soon a candidate for Congress. During the campaign, a man in Middlesboro came up to him and asked, “Caleb, tell the me truth: Did you kill Goebel?”
“No, I did not,” Powers replied.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the man. “I was going to vote for you.”
Powers won and served five terms in Washington. It was his boast that he served longer in Congress than he had served in prison. In his book, My Story, he denied, as he denied to his death, any implication in the assassination. But the question remains: If he did not send for Jim Howard, who did?
Jim Howard returned to Manchester, resumed his job as a clerk in Hill’s store, and later became a shoe salesman, then a salesman of trees, traveling in the six counties around Clay. Gradually public memories of the murders of 1898 dimmed.
Questions about Howard’s role in the Goebel affair and in the feud must always remain. I have never been satisfied that Jim Howard killed anyone except Baldy George Baker, and then possibly in self-defense as well as revenge.
On the other hand (there is always an “on the other hand” in this matter) there is one alleged fact that is hard to rationalize. In June 1992, Ernest Sester told me in a telephone conversation from Manchester that he had talked to Jim Howard when he was “an old man, not long before he died.” Howard, said Sester, asked him where he lived.
“I live in the old Tom Baker house,” Sester told him. Jim Howard looked at him, he said, and smiled.
“Did you ever see that bullet hole there on the porch where old Bad Tom was almost shot?” he asked. Sester said he had.
Jim laughed. “I almost shot the pipe out of old Tom’s mouth,” he said.
That requires second thoughts. Tom was shot the day after the Baker-Howard fight at the rafting site, the same day Jim Howard and George Baker met and reached their peace agreement. The Howards later concluded that Baldy George had violated his trust when he told his son Wiley, “That’s going to be a bad one over on Crane Creek. I’d advise you to stay out of it,” indicating that he knew about the murder plans and did nothing to stop them. (But was he referring to the coming ambush of the Howards or further disagreement over Bal’s debt and logs? And who heard him say this?)
Furthermore, if Jim fired at Bad Tom on the day before the ambush (it is possible that when he spoke to Sester he was referring to another occasion) he also violated his word. And if that was the case, both he and Baldy George had reason to feel guilty and defensive when they met and Baker was killed.
One more question: How did Jim Howard have time to get out to Crane Creek and shoot at Tom? The initial fight on the rafting site had occurred the day before. Jim, by his own account, did not hear about it until the following day, which sounds logical. That same day he made his agreement with Baldy George Baker. Yet it was on this day, the day following the altercation at the rafting site, that Hudge Allen warned Tom that the Howards were “lying in the weeds” to ambush him. And it was on the same day, shortly after noon, when someone shot at Tom as he sat on his porch. How could Jim Howard have found Baldy George, gotten an arbiter, reached an agreement, mounted his horse, gotten a rifle, ridden all the way out to Crane Creek (a distance of ten miles or more), hidden in the woods, and shot at Tom, all in apparently little more than an hour? If it was a Howard who shot at Tom, would it not more likely have been one of the Howards only a mile or so away, at the mouth of Crane Creek where, according to Hudge Allen, they were waiting to kill him? That is another question about Big Jim Howard to which we are not likely to learn the answer.
Big Jim Howard is buried in the cemetery on Anderson Street in Manchester. The stone reads simply: James Ballenger Howard, 1866-1954.
The Feuds Wind Down
While Jim Howard was facing his tormentors in Frankfort, trouble continued at home. During the first week of September 1900, Chad Hall and Abe Gilbert were shot from ambush. Abe was killed; Chad was fatally wounded but lingered long enough for a remarkable deathbed confession.
A note here. In 1984 James Pope Jr., editor of the Sunday Magazine of the Louisville Courier-Journal, received a letter from Colonel E.B. Allen of Totz, Harlan County, referring to the mountain feuds. It was an interesting, literate letter, and the man seemed to know what he was talking about. When the magazine was discontinued, Pope turned the letter over to me, and after several years I discovered it in my files and went looking for Allen. I finally found him building a home near Pine Hill, in Rockcastle County, where he had retired. In his letter, Allen had stated: “An Eastern Kentucky historian wrote that two mysteries would never be solved—the killing of Colin Campbell in Scotland in 1745, and the killing of Bad Tom Baker in Clay County in 1899. I discovered Tom Baker’s killer last fall while talking to his killer’s grandson.”
“Do you really know who killed Bad Tom?” I asked Allen.
“I do,” he said. “I was talking to this fellow, and he said to me, ‘You know, my mother was Chad Hall’s daughter, and she told me that just before grandaddy died, he told her, “There is something I want to tell you. I was the one that killed those five Cawood boys over in Harlan County. And I killed Bad Tom Baker. Wanted to tell you.” And he told her how he did it. He went into Bev White’s house by the back window, and there was a rifle in the front room, loaded, on the bed by the window looking across at the courthouse, and he propped the blind partly open with a chair so he could have a view without being seen, zeroed his rifle in on the door of the tent where Tom was lodged, and waited. When Tom came out and st
ood there, all he had to do was pull the trigger. Then he said he slipped out the back window, went down the bank to the creek, walked along the creek a few yards, then up the bank to the road, and waited till some people passed, walking out of town, and fell in behind them. But when they heard there had been a shot, they decided to go back to the courthouse to see what it was, and he just went with them. And when they got to the courthouse they heard about Bad Tom and tried to go over and see him, but it took him some time because there was a crowd of soldiers and people around.’”
As far as I can discover, Reb Allen was the only man who knew this, although Hall was suspected of several killings, including that of Goebel. His words fit the pattern of deathbed confessions of gunmen at the time, as though by getting the killing off his chest the killer would get it off his record in heaven as well. Incidentally, Hall was wrong about the Cawoods. Only two were killed on that occasion; the other Cawood was not hit, and the man killed with John Cawood was, ironically, a Hall.
But this raises other question. First, who paid or persuaded Chad Hall to shoot Bad Tom? And what motivated him, not only in the murder of Bad Tom but in the Cawood shootings?
The way in which Chad purportedly shot Bad Tom raises speculation as to whether he was the killer of Goebel, who was killed just as he passed a large tree along the sidewalk leading to the Capitol, as though someone had zeroed in on the tree and waited for Goebel to walk in front of it, at which time the killer would need only to pull the trigger. The bullet that went through Goebel’s chest was later dug out of the tree.
At the same time, details of the shooting bring to mind a conversation that former governor Bert Combs had with Big Jim Howard when Combs was a boy in Manchester. “Howard said if you wanted to shoot a man you didn’t aim at the man himself,” said Combs. “That way your gun would be moving when you pulled the trigger and it could throw your aim off. What you wanted to do was to pick a spot he would have to pass and zero in on the spot. Then when he passed in front of the spot, all you had to do was pull the trigger.” That, too, would fit the pattern of the shot that killed Goebel and the one that felled Bad Tom, though Jim Howard was seen in his office when Tom Baker was shot. Was Chad Hall the killer in both instances? No one knows. And how did Jim Howard know that method for killing a man?
Days of Darkness Page 25