by H. H. Knibbs
Foster: “Maybe so, Ben, I don’t doubt it, but I’ve been here twenty-five years, and I haven’t stolen anything yet.”
As Ben talked, Simms testified, he kept “getting more wild and boisterous,” and the two seemed to be backing up toward the wall. It was a narrow place, on a little elevation, “and when he got to this elevation Ben suddenly jerked his six-shooter and stuck it sideways into Foster’s mouth and cocked it.”
Both Simms and Santos Coy testified that at this point the policeman intervened and told Ben to put away his pistol, and at the same time grabbed the muzzle and cylinder. Both also said that Thompson fired the first shot, and that he kept firing as he and Santos Coy and Fisher all fell to the floor. After the first fire, another pistol was drawn, Simms testified. But on a direct question from a coroner’s juryman, he refused to state who had drawn the second pistol. Justice of the Peace Anton Adams, serving as coroner, sustained his objection. Nor was Simms sure whether the policeman fired or not, for Simms “was watching Thompson, and taking right good care of Mr. Simms about that time.”
Constable Casanova testified that he watched the group from a distance, but could not hear their conversation. He said he saw Ben Thompson, with a silk handkerchief in his left hand and moving both hands, “and seemed to be getting excited,” but he could not state positively that Ben had a pistol in his hand. He saw the pistol flashes as he ran toward the group, but “could not see who was doing the shooting.”
Foster stated that he drew his pistol when Santos Coy grabbed Ben’s six-shooter, throwing Thompson off-balance. Foster fired at Ben’s body, he said, and then was wounded in the leg, but kept shooting until the pistol was empty.
Foster later told a newspaper interviewer:
“I then started to pull myself downstairs as best I could with my shattered leg, and bleeding profusely, I got about halfway downstairs when I met Captain Phil Shardein (San Antonio police chief) going up. I asked him to give me some water for God’s sake as my leg was all shot to pieces.”
Police Chief Shardein said he had been standing at Sim Hart’s when he heard a shot, but thought it was part of a play on the stage. Then he heard about eight or ten more in very rapid succession and ran to the Vaudeville. There, he said:
“I saw Bob Churchill, the barkeeper, with a shotgun pointed upstairs. I passed him and went upstairs, meeting Simms and someone else (Constable Casanova) helping Foster downstairs… Someone said, ‘Look out for Billy Thompson, he is coming with a shotgun. I turned and went downstairs, passing Simms and Foster about five steps from the bottom, and as I passed I noticed that each had a pistol in his hand, and Simms called out, ‘Give us protection.’ As I reached the floor, Bill Thompson came into the front door, and parties behind me, I heard, saying, ‘Get out of the way.’”
Bartender Churchill had raised his shotgun and was pointing it at Billy. Shardein, between Billy and the gun muzzle, eased the younger Thompson out to the street, covering him against the gun in the process. Shardein searched Billy and reported he found him unarmed, and then “ordered the house closed immediately.”
An enormous crowd had gathered in Main Plaza, filling the square, within a half hour after the shooting, and while wounded Joe Foster was being carried to his house.
Inside, all was confusion and bedlam. The Austin Statesman said:
“…When your reporter reached the scene, the two bodies were weltering in blood, and were laid out side by side, their faces encarmined with life fluid. The stairs leading up to the scene of horror were as slippery as ice, and the walls were stained with blood and the floor was tracked with bloody shoeprints. The dissolute women, with blanched faces, crowded around with exclamations and broken sobs, asking, ‘Which is Ben?’ and ‘Show me Ben.’ and ‘Is that him?’ Even in his death, amid the garish surroundings, the grim reputation of the man stood forth as strong as ever. Thompson was shot twice through the brain, one ball entering squarely in front through the left eyebrow, and the other just above it. Both holes could have been covered with a half dollar. His face wore a stern expression, and the upper lip is drawn tight across the teeth. The brain is visible through the wound in the eyebrow… Fisher is also shot through the brain, the ball entering the left eye and completely smashing the pupil.… He lay with his arm across Ben’s body…
Justice Adams was summoned, and after viewing the bodies, ordered an inquest at his office on Veramendi Street, between Soledad and Main, just back of Leonardo Garza’s banking house (the site later occupied by the Wolff and Marx department store). But the office was too small, and the inquest was changed to the “Bat Cave.”
There, undertakers Carter and Mullaly had taken the bodies and laid them out temporarily. The San Antonio Express reported:
“… The bodies were laid out in the room adjoining the marshal’s office… Both corpses in handsome metallic cases, the lids of which had not yet been placed on the caskets. The clothing worn by the men prior to their death was in the right hand corner of the room, and was filled with blood. Both had worn boots of nearly the same pattern…
“In Thompson’s hat was a bullet hole, located nearly in the center of the crown, and the lining, which was yellow satin, was spotted with his brains.
“King Fisher had worn a large, broad-brimmed hat, which was also bloody… Both corpses had been attired in handsome black cloth suits, and the hands of both were crossed over their breasts. Fisher’s face wore a placid and peaceful expression, but the ghastly stare on the features of Thompson was a terrible sight to witness.
‘The corpses were placed side by side, and the city prisoners when taken upstairs to be tried by the recorder had to pass between the coffins, and although many of them were hardened and accustomed to sickening sights, they were appalled by the spectacle which met their view.”
In King Fisher’s clothing, the undertakers found a photograph of Ben Thompson which Ben had given him in Austin.
At noon, Billy came for Ben’s body, and took him home on the afternoon train. Deputy U. S. Marshal Ferd Niggli accompanied Fisher’s body on the evening train to Uvalde.
Joe Foster, it turned out, was more gravely wounded than he knew. The bullet had shattered the knee bones and Foster’s leg was amputated. An arterial aneurism, caused by an old wound and of which the surgeon was unaware, brought on a new hemorrhage, and Foster’s condition grew worse. He lay in agony at the house on Soledad Street where Jack Harris had died after he was shot by Ben Thompson. A newspaper reported that “while under the influence of opiates,” Foster spoke “continually of King Fisher in the most affectionate terms.”
Foster lingered for several days before he breathed his last. Then, of the Vaudeville Variety triumvirate—Harris, Foster, and Simms—only Simms remained.
CHAPTER 53
Although Ben Thompson was slain, along with his friend King Fisher, in the presence of hundreds of spectators at a theater performance, the melodramatic windup of his turbulent career remains an unsolved mystery.
Officially, the case was closed by the inquest jury’s verdict, which stated that “Ben Thompson and John King Fisher both came to their deaths on the 11th day of March a.d. 1884, while at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio, Texas, from the effects of pistol shot wounds caused by pistols held in and fired from the hands of J. C. Foster and Jacob S. Coy, and we further find that the said killing was justifiable and done in self-defense in the immediate danger of life.”
The Austin Daily Dispatch two days later commented: “The general verdict in our city is that Thompson was lured into a trap and brutally assassinated, and that the affair was a well laid, coolly prepared plot to murder him. The verdict of the coroner’s jury is simply prepared to suit the case, and is not sustained by the facts. The evidence given before the jury is unworthy of credence and was given merely by those who desired Thompson’s death.… In an interview with Billy Thompson, the brother of Ben, he states that Ben was shot by th
e parties in the boxes or behind the scenes, hired to do the shooting…
In an effort to expose the failure of the inquest to bring out the facts, an autopsy was performed on Thompson’s body in Austin. Probably the most sensational finding of the autopsy proceedings was the report by J. C. Petmecky, identified as a ballistics expert, that some of the bullets removed from the body were fired from a Winchester rifle.
All eight bullets—five in the head—found in Thompson’s body, the autopsy report said, entered from the left side. No wounds were found in the back, on the right side, nor in front, which was a direct contradiction of Foster’s story that he had shot Thompson’ in the breast. Six bullets ranged downward, inward and slightly backward, leading to the deduction that he was shot from above. One bullet entered the upper left side of the skull. An inch and a half below was another in parallel course. A third entered above the left eye, a fourth just to the side of the same eye, a fifth just above the ear, a sixth at the jawbone, a seventh at the outer side of the left arm, passing through the center of the heart. The eighth ball entered the left side above the hip and ranged upward, and a ninth did not enter the body but grazed the shoulder from left to right, leaving a plainly visible crease on the skin. The bullets, other than those from the rifle, were .44-caliber cartridges.
Any one of five of the bullets would have had a fatal effect, the examining physicians declared, and Thompson would have been powerless an instant after any of these struck him. The conclusions of the autopsy, as reported by The Austin Statesman:
“First, that Thompson was shot when standing erect by persons who were above him and who were also a little to the left, armed with both Winchester rifles and revolvers, as shown by the bullets found, and by the same general downward track of all the balls except two, and that he must have been standing still at the time, as is shown by the parallel course of the bullets; and secondly, that five of the balls were fired by different persons and simultaneously, as is shown by the fact that he would have instantly fallen from the effect of any of them, and their courses being in the same general direction. The ball entering the heart and the one shot from the hip upward may have been shot after Thompson fell; the latter must have been so fired.”
For weeks after the Vaudeville slaying, an editorial battle raged among the newspapers of Texas. It was set off by the headline which appeared in the San Antonio Express: “A Good Night’s Work.” The Brenham Banner took this cue and stated: “If the expression of opinion by the press be taken as that of the public, the killing of Ben Thompson was a commendable act, and a patient and long-suffering people have been ridded of a public nuisance.”
The Austin Statesman replied that “The San Antonio Express ought not to commend murder, committed by whom and upon whom it may be, for murder is murder, and is always wrong.”
“The event,” declared the Daily Galveston News, “has created all over the country, and particularly in Texas, a sensation more profound and intense than any Ben Thompson ever originated in his lifetime.”
Some of the comment revolved around the role of King Fisher in the affair, but no facts were adduced to substantiate any of the theories. Newspapers pointed out that Fisher’s pistol was found belted around him, undischarged, and in its scabbard, which was regarded as a circumstance “most remarkable for one so quick in drawing, so skilled in shooting, and so self-possessed when in danger.”
The deeper significance of the Ben Thompson Story was summed up in a Galveston News editorial revealing rare sociological insight. It said in part:
“…Here it may be inquired, was Ben Thompson solely responsible for a career which gave him so widespread a notoriety and made his name synonymous with danger and his presence rife with terror? Let society answer—society, with courts, judges, juries, a public opinion behind these, and all the appliances for the punishment of guilt and the prevention of crime… Had society done its duty to this man and to itself? Thompson, instead of dying the death of a desperado, hated and feared, might have lived a useful citizen, for he was not without native capacity for usefulness and redeeming features of character…
“The man who becomes a desperado does not become so at a bound. Such a character is made by graduation. It is a growth, not a birth. And it is society that lets it grow, and contributes to its growth by surrounding it with favorable conditions.
“Ben Thompson is no more, and we are told that ‘the people of Austin are relieved at the taking off, and happy until his successor qualifies.’ This is the grim humor of common sense; yes, Ben Thompson is no more, but as long as society affords a habitat for such characters, there will be no lack of successors to Ben Thompson. While conditions hold out the hope of achieving, after a fashion, both thrift and fame in a career of murderous violence and professional terrorism, there will always be some persons ready and eager to fill vacancies in the vocation.
“That a whole community should feel relief at the shooting to death, in a private brawl, of a single man—even though that he’d be so distinguished a bravado as Ben Thompson—is a shame to manhood and civilization, and a satire upon law and government. It is only by the cowardice and impotence of the law and its civil agencies, emulating the complicity and indulgence of society, that such men can run their careers and become sore afflictions of terror to any peaceful population.” While the debate over the sensational killing raged in the press and by word of mouth, Ben Thompson’s funeral took place, the procession starting from his residence near the university. The Austin Dispatch reported that it “was largely attended, and a vast concourse of people followed the remains to the silent city of the dead.” The funeral was in charge of Mount Bonnell Lodge Number 34, Knights of Pythias, of which Thompson was an active member.
Colonel Walton undoubtedly echoed opinions widely held when he wrote of his best-known legal client: “Ben Thompson certainly was the author of many deaths. His hand was carmined with the blood of human life to the very tips of his finger’s ends. But did that fact justify, excuse, or palliate the infliction of the ghastly wounds under the circumstances?” Walton recorded that Ben Thompson left about ten thousand dollars in property for his wife and children.
In addition, Ben Thompson also left a scrapbook, full of clippings from newspapers and magazines, most of them unidentified as to source. Some were reports mentioning Ben Thompson, such as the presentation to him by Buffalo Bill of the mounted head of an enormous buffalo killed by Grand Duke Alexis of Russia while on a hunting trip in the United States. Some referred to Billy Thompson. Many of the items pasted in the book were accounts of happenings that seemed to interest him. There were quite a few anecdotes and humorous stories on a variety of subjects, and a generous sprinkling of poems and ballads, mostly of a sentimental nature. Typical was one entitled, “No One Will Keep My Grave Green,” and it may be as revealing as any words or actions of the man himself:
Sadly and lonely I wander tonight,
Battling against the cold storm.
No one to give me a pitying glance,
No one to shelter my form.
But soon I’ll be gone
From all sorrows and care,
No more will my poor form be seen.
No one will care for me when I am gone,
No one will keep my grave green.
Darkness steals over me,
Chilled is my heart,
Blindly I plod through the snow.
Sweet are the memories that steal over me,
Of loves I left long ago.
Sad are the changes long years have made,
Blighted has been my life’s dream.
No one to love me, none o’er me to weep,
No one will keep my grave green.
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