For Sale —American Paradise (9 page)

In the closing days of John Ashley's trial in West Palm Beach, while the jury of twelve listened to attorneys sparring over how a man was killed in the wilds of the Everglades more than two years earlier, another man was killed in Europe.

On June 28, 1914, an angry young man with a gun killed a member of the ruling family of Austria-Hungary and his wife, who were visiting Sarajevo, Austria. The young gunman's name was Gavrilo Princip. Like countless assassins throughout history, Princip, a Serbian, believed that by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, he was striking a blow against a monstrous evil. What he'd actually done, however, was tip the first domino in a sequence of events that would ignite four years of slaughter in Europe.

The carnage that followed the deaths of two people in Sarajevo would change the world almost beyond recognition.

Before the war ended in 1918, more than sixty-
five million servicemen from the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and many other countries around the world would be engaged in the conflict. More than eight million of them would die, along with nearly seven million civilians.

Although the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife was a brutal act, it did not have to ignite the greatest conflagration that the world had ever seen. The war happened because the assassination activated an entanglement of alliances and treaty obligations that quickly divided Europe into two opposing armed camps. In a sense, the conflict that came to be called the Great War happened because honor demanded it. And the weapons the belligerents wielded were frighteningly efficient, modern killing machines—rapid-fire machine guns, powerful artillery, airplanes, battleships, and submarines. It was the first time such deadly weapons had been deployed on so large a scale.

“All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride,” British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in August 1914.

The story of the faraway assassination received prominent play on the front page of the
Miami Daily Metropolis
of June 29, 1914, although the killer was referred to as a “Servian” student. In fact, the newspaper's editors misspelled “Serb” and “Serbian” throughout the story as “Serv” and “Servian.”

On the day that Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were gunned down, the world still moved at a relaxed, nineteenth-
century pace. Four-legged horsepower still was a primary means of transportation. Steam powered the locomotives that pulled trains and powered ships at sea, but there were plenty of sleek schooners that used the ancient propulsion of the wind.

Still, the technology that would change the world in a few years had appeared. Airplanes, primitive though they were, had been around for a decade, and would
play a role in the war that was about to erupt in Europe. Automobiles powered by gasoline-
fueled internal combustion engines were becoming common, although for long trips Americans still used the steam-powered passenger train.

The United States had ratified the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, allowing voters in each state to choose the two senators who would represent them in the US Senate. Before the amendment, US senators had been chosen by individual state legislatures.

But the voters who went to the polls to choose those senators were males only, just like the jury in West Palm Beach that had been unable to come to a decision about whether John Ashley was guilty of murder. Women could not vote, nor could they serve on juries.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 proved to be the undoing of William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. Bryan was a firm believer that civilization was steadily moving humanity to a utopian destiny, when hunger, poverty, and wars would be eliminated. He was horrified as Europe stumbled inexorably toward a massive armed conflict. As Germany and the Central Powers squared off against the Allies—primarily Great Britain and France—Bryan insisted on a policy of strict neutrality toward the belligerent nations.

That was in line with President Woodrow Wilson's stated policy—at least, technically. But while Bryan had volunteered for military service during the Spanish-American War, he abhorred war and wanted to stop the fighting in any way possible, even if it left Britain and France at a disadvantage. And his concept of neutrality was so strict and narrow that he even refused to publicly condemn Germany when a German submarine torpedoed the British passenger liner
Lusitania
in May 1915. The sinking killed 1,198 civilians, including 128 Americans.

Germany claimed that the ship had been carrying war munitions for the Allies and therefore was a legitimate target of war. Bryan didn't dispute the German assertion.

Relations between Bryan and President Wilson became tense. Bryan submitted his resignation on June 8, 1915. He was a private citizen again, free to pursue other interests.

After the mistrial a few months earlier, John Ashley had spent the summer and much of the fall of 1914 behind bars in West Palm Beach, awaiting a new trial. No judge in his right mind was going to allow bail for a prisoner who had eluded cops for two years before turning himself in. Ashley kept his bargain about behaving, however, so he was never handcuffed, and he was allowed to receive home-cooked suppers from his mother while he was in jail.

Ashley's second trial started on November 11, 1914. The courtroom was packed with spectators and men called to serve as potential jurors. Judge Pierre Branning called the courtroom to order, then told the 150 potential jurors that
any of them who were sick or deaf or had urgent business would be excused from duty.

“In an instant there was a rush to the front of the courtroom and about every ailment known to doctors was given out,” reported the
Stuart Times
. “In fact, Judge Branning was surprised to hear of so much sickness.”

About seventy-five jurors—half the pool—were excused. When all of those who remained had been questioned by prosecution and defense attorneys, only two had been chosen. It was abundantly clear that there were not a dozen men in Palm Beach County who were willing to sit in judgment of an Ashley.

The Ashleys didn't need an attorney to tell them that if a jury couldn't be selected in Palm Beach County, the judge would grant the prosecution's relentless requests to move the trial to another county. And a trial in another county in front of a jury they couldn't control either through friendship or intimidation could mean an unhappy outcome for John Ashley.

The Ashleys didn't like the odds. So on Saturday, November 15, Joe Ashley and his clan executed what could be called the “pork chop plan” to free John Ashley from jail.

Court was in session that day, but once again, no jurors were chosen. After the session ended but before John Ashley left the courthouse, Joe Ashley asked his son what he wanted for supper.

“John, do you want some good beefsteak for supper?” Joe Ashley asked.

“Yes,” John answered.

“Wouldn't you rather have pork chops?” Joe suggested in a way that Sheriff Baker thought was a bit odd.

“Sure,” John answered.

John Ashley then left with Robert Baker, a deputy sheriff who was the jailer, and also the son of Sheriff George Baker.

As usual, Ashley was not in handcuffs when he got into an automobile with Baker for the short ride from the courthouse to the jail. It was a dark and rainy night as Baker drove through the streets of West Palm Beach with his prisoner. Still, it wasn't dark enough to prevent Baker from recognizing Joe Ashley and one of his sons standing across the street from the jail.

As Ashley and Baker were walking from the car into the jail compound, Baker's wife called to him from the cottage next to the jail that she shared with her husband. She handed Baker a plate of pork chops that Joe Ashley had left for his son.

Baker and John Ashley walked to the entrance of the jail, and Baker handed his prisoner the plate so he could have both hands free to unlock the gate. He turned and put the key into the lock.

The next thing he heard was the sound of breaking glass, and when he turned around, he saw John Ashley disappearing around the corner. Still, there was a ten-foot fence surrounding the compound. No one could scale that without help.

Baker drew his gun and raced after his prisoner. In the darkness he heard Ashley blindly run into the fence. He fired a shot in the direction of the sound, and then ran to the fence.

Ashley was gone. The fence was intact. It was as though Ashley had simply melted through the wire. Baker took off in the direction that he thought Ashley would have gone, but there was no trace of him.

Sheriff George Baker told the
Daily Tropical Sun
of West Palm Beach that he thought the conversation between father and son about supper was a prear-ranged signal. His father's suggestion that John have pork chops for supper was a signal that it was time for him to break out of jail.

“It is supposed that a skiff or canoe with weapons and provisions had been furnished by his friends and put in some place known only to them and him so that he knew where to go and by this time is a long ways out in the Glades,” the
Tropical Sun
concluded.

John Ashley stayed out of sight for a couple of months after his escape. But in February 1915, with winter tourists and money coming into Florida, the clan came out of hiding.

In 1894, the Florida East Coast Railway built a railroad drawbridge across the St. Lucie River, just north of Stuart. Eventually, seagulls learned that when a passenger train crossed the bridge, there was a good chance that food scraps would be thrown out of the dining car.

Soon Stuart residents could tell when a passenger train was approaching because gulls would alight on the bridge to await the train. They would be on the bridge long before the train's whistle was heard. Residents noted that they never assembled on the bridge in advance of freight trains.

Shortly after sundown on Sunday, February 7, 1915, the gulls settled on the bridge in anticipation of the arrival of a southbound trainload of tourists on the
Palm Beach Limited
. It was the peak of the winter season, and the luxurious Florida East Coast (FEC) Railway train, nicknamed “The Millionaires' Special,” was hauling a load of well-heeled northern visitors—many of them New Yorkers—to Palm Beach. The train included an observation car with an open-air platform, where passengers could watch the tropical vista slide by.

Steam-powered locomotives were required to make regular stops to take on water for their boilers, and the
Palm Beach Limited
stopped at a water tank in Stuart. As the train started pulling away from the tank, but before it could pick up speed, four agile young men wearing masks dashed out of hiding and climbed onto the observation platform. They pulled out pistols and told the passengers to raise their hands.

Some of the women screamed at the sight of the guns, but one of the would-be robbers shouted that they did not want anything from the women. One of the men herded the women into another passenger car.

The bandits started to demand valuables from the men, but someone pulled the emergency stop cord, and the train screeched to a sudden halt. The bandits leapt off the train and ran.

For all of their gun-
waving, they hadn't made much of an impression on the Yankee tourists.

“They were young fellows, and they looked like farmers,” Margaret Wilson, a passenger from New York City, told the
New York Times
. “They seemed frightened.”

Still, an armed holdup of a passenger train full of wealthy tourists made national headlines. “Bandits Lose Nerve and Run from Prey,” read a front-
page
headline in the
Washington Herald
edition of Monday, February 8, 1915.

A sheriff's posse mounted a vigorous effort to capture the would-
be train robbers, and soon had four suspects in custody in Stuart. But the men turned out to be drifters who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they were released.