Tag Archives: Texas

THE FORGOTTEN BUDVILLE MURDER

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Ralph Henderson Rainey

Mention Budville, New Mexico, and anyone with an interest in Route 66 will probably think of the murders of Howard ‘Bud’ Rice and Blanche Brown at the Budville trading post in 1967. Some might even recall the murder four years later of Philip Atkinson outside the building, but few will have heard of Ralph Henderson Rainey.

In 1956 Ralph Rainey was a 48-year-old butcher, working as a meat cutter in a retail store in Santa Monica, California.  Born in Kansas in 1907, he had married young when he was 21 and his bride, Bertha Lucille Hilliard, just 16 years old. They had a son Jack, in 1930, followed by twins, Jerry and Jean, three years later. But by the early 1940s the marriage had broken down; In 1946 Bertha married Merle James Ranson in Winnemucca, Nevada, while Ralph remarried the following year to Genevieve Johnson in Carson City, Nevada. That marriage also failed and by the end of 1955, with Genevieve living in Northridge, north Los Angeles and Ralph renting a room in Santa Monica, he had decided to return to Colorado where he had previously lived and where his sons still made their home.

On the afternoon of January 8, 1956, Ralph rang his son Jack, who he had not seen in two years, and told him that he was leaving immediately for Arvada, Colorado. His landlady watched him drive off in his 1955 two-door Pontiac Tudor with some $300 in cash and traveller’s cheques in his pocket.

Travel in the 1950s could be slow and arduous and drivers frequently picked up hitchhikers to stave off the boredom – Genevieve later said that Ralph was in the habit of doing just that. On the day that Ralph left Santa Monica, one Noel Adams had picked up a stocky man at Needles, California, and dropped him in Kingman, Arizona, where Adams was spending the night. The next morning Adams spotted the same hitchhiker by the side of the road but didn’t pick him up again because, he would say, “he made me uneasy”. In light of subsequent events, Noel Adams had reason to thank his instincts. Shortly afterwards, patrolmen Billie Baxter and Alex R Linquist of the Kingman Police Department picked up the hitchhiker and as was their custom, after checking his details and ascertaining he was a transient, escorted a man whose ID said he was Donald Gilray to the edge of town.

Rainey’s car, found abandoned in Utah.

Somehow the hitchhiker made it to Flagstaff where he was picked up by Ralph Henderson Rainey. And that was the last time Ralph was seen alive. One January 10, 1956, State Patrolman Edgar C Bell found the body of man in a deep arroyo on the side of Route 66 near Budville. The man had been dead only a few hours, but two bullet holes in his head made it clear that he had been murdered.

Ironically, the recent World War 2 had made it easier to identify bodies such as the one in the arroyo. Ralph Henderson Rainey had been fingerprinted for the Navy in August 1942 and again when he had applied for a job at the Denver Ordinance Plant in June 1943. Within a couple of days of finding his body, police and the FBI knew who he was – but where was his car?

That puzzled was solved a week later when an identical car was found abandoned 65 miles west of Salt Lake City, Utah, near the tiny town of Low. The front right seat was soaked in blood and had a bullet hole in it and, although the license plates had been removed, it would be identified as Ralph’s Pontiac through a lubrication sticker in the door shut and a card with the dead man’s name and address found in the pocket of a suit in the car. The Pontiac had actually been spotted on Friday January 13, just three days after the murder, when passing tourists had seen a man leaving the car and walking towards the highway where he hitched a ride with a service station attendant.

Kenneth Short who disappeared on his way from Michigan to California.

Meanwhile, New Mexico police had more problems on their hands with the disappearance of electronics engineer Kenneth Short who, after buying a car in Flint, Michigan, had set out to drive home to California and who had last been seen in Tucumcari. While they were searching for both Kenneth’s Buick and the owner himself, in Nevada officers were stopping a Buick for speeding. When the driver’s identification papers failed to tally with his description, he was ordered to drive to the police station. Instead, the driver sped off before wrecking the car and running into the desert. The man then broke into Loren Tracy’s home and held the family at gunpoint; deputies did knock at the home’s door, but Loren was forced to say that he hadn’t seen anyone suspicious before driving the stranger to North Las Vegas.

It didn’t take police long to identify the car as belonging to Kenneth Short. Kenneth had been heading to California to meet his second wife, Mira, and daughter Carol. (He had divorced his first wife, Leola, in 1941, when his son Wayne was 4 and his daughter Myrna just 2 years old, and married Mira in Shanghai in 1946 when he was serving as an electronic engineer with the Navy.) At first, police thought that they were looking for a murderer who had escaped from an Indiana prison, but said escapee wrote to his lawyer to say it wasn’t him, nor was it his fingerprints found in the Short car.

Kenneth Short’s wife Mira and daughter Carol wait for news.

Then, on January 24, in the small town of Caliente north of Las Vegas, Town Marshal Claud Davis and Highway Patrolman Duke Hill arrested a man as he ate breakfast. They said it was on the strength of the description given of the man who had kidnapped Loren Tracy, but Samuel Stewart – as he called himself – denied the accusation, saying he was a hitchhiker from Twin Falls, Idaho. He was held, nonetheless, on a kidnapping charge and soon the FBI identified him from his fingerprints as David Cooper Nelson, a 35-year-old unemployed sheet metal worker from Las Vegas.

Nelson had been born in 1920 in Great Falls, Montana, the fourth son of Levi and Florence Nelson, and life hadn’t been kind to the family. Twin sons, Peter and John, had died at birth in 1912, while Levi passed away in 1928, leaving his widow with eight children, six of whom were under ten. Nelson’s younger brother, Donald, was accidentally shot dead at the age of 15 by a friend, while three years later his older sister Mary Jeanette would die of peritonitis when she was only 24.

By the age of ten, Nelson was in reform school; by 20 he was in a federal road camp in Washington. Two years later he was in Deer Lodge state prison in Montana after being convicted of forgery until December of 1943 when he escaped, only to be arrested in Reno when he cashed a number of cheques that he’d stolen from the prison, representing himself as the chief clerk of the Montana penal institution.

Upon release, Nelson moved from forgery to assault. In August 1947 he pulled a gun on Leroy Larson, the night clerk of the Baxter Hotel in Bozeman, Montana. Larson said at the time; “He pulled a gun. He asked me if I’d split the money with him and he’d tie me up to make the robbery look real. When I said no, he told me to turn my head, then he slugged me.” (Interestingly, he would later omit the offer to split the proceeds and say that Nelson just hit him.) Nelson didn’t even get out of town; he was arrested almost immediately at the Bozeman bus depot. On September 3, 1947, he was sentenced to 12 years in Deer Lodge. Had he served the full term, two and possibly three lives might have been saved.

David Cooper Nelson was sentenced to 12 years in 1947. He served just a third of that term.

Despite initially pleading amnesia, ‘Samuel Stewart’ soon admitted to police that he was David Cooper Nelson. Furthermore he admitted to the killing of Ralph Henderson Rainey and also that of bartender John Valenti in Nevada but denied murdering Kenneth Short, despite overwhelming evidence which included his fingerprints all over Short’s car, being in possession of Short’s clothes and wristwatch and having cashed travellers cheques made out to Short in Holbrook, Santa Rosa and Amarillo.

David Cooper Nelson is arrested.

Nelson told officers that Rainey had picked him up hitchhiking near Flagstaff. When they neared Albuquerque, Rainey pulled over and asked Nelson to drive. Nelson said an argument ensued when he refused and he pulled a 38-calibre pistol out of his bag and shot Rainey. Then, he said, Rainey “was in convulsions and withering with pain as he laid in the front seat. When he appeared to be in great pain, I shot him again.”

Eventually Nelson admitted to the murder of Short and drew police a sketch of a site near Vega, Texas, where they found the body in an arroyo under eight feet of snow. Like Rainey, he had been shot in the head with a 38-calibre revolver.

Police find the body of Kenneth Short.

In April 1956 he was charged with the murder of Ralph Henderson Rainey to which he pled innocent on the grounds of insanity – he had acted like a madman in jail, screaming, shouting and punching a sheriff, which only served to put him in a straightjacket and on bread and water rations. No one believed his act.

 

 

At his first trial Nelson appeared unkempt and unshaven as part of his insanity act.

After a week long trial, the jury took nine hours to declare him guilty of first degree murder and the judge sentenced him to death. The trial transcript weighed 15lbs and the proceedings almost bankrupted Valencia County which had to postpone all jury trials for the next three months.

Nelson filed an appeal against his death sentence, claiming that he had been promised leniency in exchange for a confession. The Supreme Court granted him a new trial which opened on May 19, 1958, with Nelson representing himself. This time it took the jury less than two and a half hours to convict him of murder.

 

Nelson finally exhausted his appeals and the night before his execution claimed that a friend had shot Rainey but he couldn’t reveal his name. But after a last meal of oyster stew and strawberry shortcake, and telling reporters, “I hope and pray that I am on my way home”, he went to the gas chamber just after midnight on January 8, 1960. It was the one and only time that New Mexico used the gas chamber.

 

A clean-shaven smartly dressed Nelson, complete with Bible, at his second trial.

 

The New Mexico gas chamber. It was only ever used once.

 

 

THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF THE BRADLEY KISER STATION

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The Bradley Kiser 66 Super Service Station.

One of the small mysteries of Route 66 is the ‘Bradley Kiser 66 Super Service Station’ in Alanreed, Texas.  The only information that is seemingly available is the notice on the building which reads ‘Built by Bradley Kiser 1930’. So, is there any more to be found? Well, a little.

Sanford Bradley Kiser was born in Tennessee in 1892, to Thomas Sanford and Sara Ann ‘Sallie’ Kiser, one of nine children. Thomas was a farmer and Bradley grew up labouring first in Tennessee and then in Oklahoma.

Miss Myrtle Alpha Boystun before her marriage to Bradley Kiser in 1915.

In 1915 the tall blue-eyed Bradley married Myrtle Alpha Boydstun, a beautiful 20-year-old Texan, and the ninth and final child of Henry Sanford Boydstun. To Route 66 aficionados and ghost town hunters that name may be familiar and that’s because Henry (and his wife Mary) were the first homesteaders in the area of what is now famed as the Jericho Gap. They filed a claim on land in 1887 and it eventually grew to have a post office and a siding for the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf Railway. Now it’s just a name – and one that is technically misspelled!

Bradley and Myrtle had two children, a daughter Joeldine in 1916 and a son, Roy Sanford in 1921. Both children were born in Donley County, Texas, and it seems the family may have flitted between Oklahoma and Texas until 1922 by which time Bradley was farming in his own right with his younger brother, Hoyt, helping him.

Then, at some point, he appears to have diversified into building and running a service station. First thing, is that date correct? Well, maybe… According to the 1930 census, Bradley was indeed a filling station operator. However, census information was often collected for several months before the official ‘census day’ of April 1. It is entirely possible that the service station was already in operation in the late 1920s.

The station stood where two alignments of Route 66 met.

Bradley didn’t stay in the service station business for long. In the late 1930s he became the foreman of the Bruce Nursery, famed for its shrubs and orchard trees. (The owner, Paul M Bruce, built the famous ‘petrified wood’ house of Alanreed in 1925. It still stands six miles north of Alanreed but is now on private property.)

Bradley and Myrtle in later years.

The Kisers then moved a little way north to Kellerville where one of Bradley’s last jobs was as an oilfield pumper (he would have been 60 by now). In 1955 they returned to McLean, living in a little house on North Clarendon, where Myrtle died in 1973. Bradley passed away nine years later in 1982; they are both buried in the cemetery in McLean.

The home in McLean where the Kisers lived in the 1950s and ’60s. Built in 1920, the house is in disrepair and currently for sale.

The station was restored in around 1993 and is in the excellent care of the Old Texas Route 66 Association which continues to ensure its survival.

And then there is one final mystery, one so blindingly obvious that I actually missed it at first – the name ‘Sanford’. It was not only his given first name, but both the middle name of Bradley’s father and his father-in-law and clearly significant enough for him to add it to his son’s name (who, in turn, named his own son Roy Sanford…). Surely this can be no coincidence, but I can find no connection between the families. Yet.

Inside the 66 Super Service Station.

THE MAN WHO DANCED ACROSS ROUTE 66

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The dapper Mr Walker.

Travellers on Route 66 in the early 1960s might have been surprised to see a middle-aged man in a white suit and broad-brimmed hat bobbing and weaving along the road. That man was Lewis Larrimore Walker and, despite the incongruity of his surname, he was dancing across the United States.

Lewis Walker and his twin Lois were born in Childress, Texas, in 1909, to cotton farmers Lee and Lillie Walker. Yes, Lewis and Lois. The Walkers had an interesting approach to names; the twins had an older brother by the unusual name of Akard, another brother called Bernice and a younger sister who was christened Billy…

Lillie Pearl and Lee Walker. Larry said he learned to dance in his father’s cotton fields.

By early 1930 Lewis was working in the oilfields, along with another brother, Rudolph, but it was not a profession that suited him and a few months later he was working in Kitty O’Connor’s Dance Studio (‘above Panhandle Paint and Wallpaper Co’). That didn’t last long and in October 1930 he opened the Lewis Walker Dancing School at the Hilton Hotel in Lubbock, Texas. He would later say that he learned to dance from the black workers in his father’s cotton fields.

There was little scope for men to take dancing classes at Lubbock High School, so Lewis turned to sports. Here he is part of the Bi-District Basketball Championship team in 1928.

Lewis ran a tight ship. In early 1931 he took out newspaper adverts which listed the ten rules to observed in his dancing school that included ‘This is a dancing school, not a loafing school. There are other places more suited to loafing.’ (#4) and ‘Don’t talk crude. This doesn’t help you or anyone else’ (#6).

This was the Great Depression and dancing lessons might have seemed very low on many people’s priorities, but Lewis would trade cakes and pies for classes and often offered free lessons. In 1935 he changed the name to the Larrymore School of the Dance and then the Larrymore School of Fine Arts. He had hated his middle name as a child but adopted it for his business, although, with typical Walker disregard for convention he spelled it with a ‘Y’ rather than as the ‘Larrimore’ with which he and Lois had been born.

That dance studio would move around a bit – Lewis once said that it had had an address “on every street [in Lubbock] from 8th to 25th” – and he also opened studios in Ruidoso and Carlsbad, New Mexico. However, business was paused when Lewis went off to serve his country in 1943. He flew as a glider pilot and then as a gunner on a B-17 in the 8th Air Force, flying 35 missions and being awarded the Air Medal with five clusters. He spent his last months of service at South Plains Army Airfield as a non-commissioned officer in charge of special services on the airfield.

Lewis was discharged on September 30, 1945, after serving 3 years and 9 months; he immediately returned to Lubbock to build a new dance studio. That would grow to three locations in Lubbock in the 1950s with some of his pupils the children of those he had originally taught. (Lewis liked teaching children and teenagers because they were more difficult to train and he liked the challenge.) He never married, although he had been engaged to Nancy Faver, one of his students, in 1933, but that came to an end when she married someone else.

Then in January 1962, he announced the closure of the Larrymore Dance Studio. He moved to Hollywood but then came his next venture – he would dance across America. (He claimed it was to settle a bet made 31 years previously with his friend Harold Gore.)

His penchant for long distance dancing had began early. In 1931 he danced from Lubbock to Slaton, Texas, and back again in a day, a distance of around 35 miles, accompanied by a piano and a phonograph on a decorated truck.

Lewis being partnered in July 1962 by Elaine Dunn who was then starring in ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ at the Hotel Riviera in Las Vegas.

It appears that the cross-country dance started with the intention of a continuous trip, but – probably to the relief of his feet – he soon decided it would be completed in stages. (He had thought he would manage 35 miles a day but the terrain and his age quickly caught up with him and across California he averaged little more than 10 miles a day.) So, on May 2, 1962, he dipped a toe in the Pacific Ocean in California and, with a foam dummy as a dancing partner, headed east. At first he was accompanied by a transistor radio to supply music to which he would do a tango or a waltz, along with a driver and car, although during school holidays his teacher nephew, Robert Vaughn, would join him, driving a motor home.

By July he had danced across the Mojave (getting lost on occasion) and was approaching Las Vegas but it appears that the trip stalled at that point. It resumed at the beginning of the following year: he danced through Seligman, Arizona, spotting a mountain lion, and then had a close encounter with a Hereford bull in Ash Fork. In January 1963, Lewis danced into Two Guns, Arizona, where he was greeted by Fern Rawlinson, the then owner of the trading post, to whom he gave a dancing lesson before moving onto the Hopi House and then to Winslow.

Fern Rawlinson greets Lewis at Two Guns, Arizona, in January 1963.

And so he danced on, through Grants and Albuquerque and across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles By July he was in Kansas with plans to reach New York by the fall. Did he? Alas, I can’t tell you that. I could find no further reports of the ‘Dancing Texan’ after Kansas and if he did complete the trip, then it seems to have gone unreported. However, Lewis’s mother, Lillie, died in August 1963 and it could be that that brought a premature end to the challenge, but I would like to think that Lewis did indeed dance all the way to the east coast!

In a posed publicity shot.

MURDER ON MAIN STREET IN ALANREED

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It was a quiet night in Alanreed, Texas. Perhaps a dog or two barked at the automobile weaving its way down Main Street; cars were still a novel enough sight for the canine population to call attention to each one, but those automobiles provided a living for Tobe Clodfelter who ran a garage in town.

Tobe Clodfelter’s garage in Alanreed.

Given his trade, it was probably Tobe at the wheel that May night, accompanied by his friends, Joe Hayes, a labourer from Alanreed, and Roy Tipton, a farmer who lived a few miles outside town. The trio had been on a trip into the country for what was described as an entertainment – which could be anything from a shoot to a party and was probably both – at which, by all accounts, the three men had been heavily drinking. It would end very badly that night.

For Tobe the trip and the accompanying libations were probably a chance to let off steam, away from the pressures of running his own business and providing for his two young daughters. At 30, he was the oldest of the three men and the only one to be married, having wed his wife Vallie when she was just 14.

The very young and beautiful Vallie Agee, soon to be Mrs Clodfelter.

Vallie and Tobe had both grown up in the Chickasaw Nation of the Indian Territory (the state of Oklahoma would not become part of the Union until 1907) and, in 1900, the Clodfelter family had applied to become recognized as Missouri Choctaws. His mother Mary claimed to be 1/8th Choctaw, making her only son Tobe and his seven sisters 1/16th Choctaw. It is unlikely this had anything to do with ancestral pride and everything to do with the idea that they would be then be able to claim land or money. There were countless fraudulent claims at the time by people claiming to have ‘Indian blood’ in order to be allocated land and it’s all too likely that the Clodfelters were among those. In any event, in 1902 the claim of Mary and her children to be Choctaws was resoundingly rejected.

The Clodfelter family. Tobe is in the centre, flanked by his parents Newton and Mary and his six sisters. It’s likely this photo was taken around 1894 or ’95 when Tobe was about 9. One of the sisters, Lulu (on far left) would die in 1901 at the age of 16 while another, Mildred (‘Birdie’) was born in 1897.

Tobe and Vallie moved to Alanreed after their marriage in 1905 at a time when the town was growing. It had a hotel, a bank, Baptist and Methodist churches, two grocery stores, a hardware store, a blacksmith’s shop and, in 1912, a new two-storey school. In July 1906 their first daughter, Audrie Mae, was born, followed almost two years later by her sister Arble Faye.

26-year-old Roy Tipton was, in 1916, farming with his brother Charles in Gray County, while Joseph Hayes, the youngest of the three men at 22, got by with general labouring work. The Hayes family was still recovering from the death of Joe’s older sister, Sarah, the previous year. Her death certificate stated she had been suffering from pellagra (a nutrition-related disease which was prevalent in Oklahoma and Texas in the early years of the 20th century) for the previous three years. She had died at the age of 30, leaving three young daughters under the age of six.   

In the early hours of Friday May 12, 1916, as the men drove onto Main Street in Alanreed, an argument broke out. We will never know the cause of the altercation – and the fact the men were intoxicated no doubt exacerbated the situation – but Tobe Clodfelter brought it to a swift and savage end by drawing his gun and shooting his two companions. Roy Tipton fell dead, but Joe Hayes was still alive. With the last of his strength he fired back at Tobe Clodfelter. At 3.30am all three men lay dead in the street.

An inquest was held that morning and, at 4pm on Friday afternoon, the three men were buried in Alanreed Cemetery in a single ceremony conducted by the Methodist minister, Rev Howell.

A plain plaque marks young Joe Hayes’ grave.

It seems Joe’s younger brother Tom went off the rails after his brother’s death. Like his brother he had had little education, spending just three years in school. On May 29, 1917, despite pleading not guilty, Tom Hayes was convicted of stealing ‘one cattle’ for which he was sentenced to two years in Huntville prison where he died on November 8, 1918.

Although the gravestone reads November 11, Huntsville prison recorded his death as three days earlier.

He is buried next to his brother although, curiously, his gravestone gives his date of death as November 11. Tom’s older brother Sam also died young in 1935 of pernicious anaemia, a disease, like pellagra, brought on by vitamin deficiency. He was 46 and left two young sons.

Vallie Clodfelter in later years.

Vallie Clodfelter remarried ten months – probably a necessity for a young woman with two small children – to a man coincidentally called Sam Hays. (He was also from Alanreed and the same age as Joe Hayes’ brother but, while it might have made for a better tale, they were not the same man.) The marriage produced Bradford, a half-brother for Audrie and Arble, but ended in divorce within a few years. Vallie married again to JA Jackson on July 15, 1933, but also divorced him shortly afterwards. She moved to Pampa in 1938 where she rented out property and lived there until her death in 1976. Vallie is buried in Alanreed cemetery along with her eldest daughter Arble.

Arble and Audrie Clodfelter married brothers, Philip and Raymond Howard; Arble and Philip’s marriage lasted just a few months and they were divorced in 1922. Arble married again to Harley Hickman but that too ended swiftly in divorce with Harley dying of a coronary thrombosis in 1952, just as her sister’s husband, Raymond, would in 1958. Neither sister would remarry after that.

While Joe Hayes’ grave is marked with a simple plaque and Tobe Clodfelter’s with a simple and possible more modern stone, it is Roy Tipton’s memorial which attracts most attention and that, even almost 110 years later, resonates with the anguish of his family. A tall marble column, it is etched not only with the family name and Roy’s details, but with the stark words, ‘MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD’.

Roy Tipton’s gravestone.