A Dark and Lonely Place (30 page)

John looked shocked. “Don’t know how he coulda . . . He’s a good boy. I’m sorry, Dan. Can I see ’im before he goes? Please, can I see him?”

Hardie nodded and unlocked the cell door. “He’s asking for you, John. Sorry, I have to do this,” he said, and handcuffed John’s wrists.

Halfway down the narrow stairs they met a breathless deputy on the way up. “Sheriff,” he said, fear in his eyes, “the crowd’s growing! There’s more than a thousand people out in the street now.” He glanced at John. “And the prisoner who killed Hendrickson and the officer—his eyes look glazed and he’s got a death rattle in his throat.”

Hardie rushed John into his brother’s cell moments later.

Too late. Bobby was dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

W
ild rumors that Joe Ashley and other heavily armed gang members were on their way to Miami to avenge Bobby’s death spread with lightning speed. The Ashley patriarch was actually in Palm Beach. But panicky Miamians armed themselves. The mob outside the jail grew, demanding that Bobby be turned over to them.

Sheriff Dan Hardie defused the immediate threat of violence by bringing Bobby out on a stretcher. His deputies carried the body up and down the streets to show the would-be lynch mob that the cop killer they wanted was beyond any earthly punishment.

Young members of the Miami Rifles covered Hardie, who strode grimly behind the stretcher with a shotgun, determined not to lose young Ashley’s body to the mob. It worked. The target of their wrath looked so young and pale in death, his wounds so grievous, that even hard-core agitators lost their stomach for the idea of hanging him from the nearest lamppost, dead or alive.

But Hardie’s worries were far from over. A scrawled note nailed to a tree at the edge of town, further fueled public fears.

We were in Miami when one of our gang, young Bob Ashley, was brutally shot to death by your officers. All of Miami is about to pay for what you’ve done. And if John Ashley is not given a fair trial and turned loose, we will be back to shoot up your whole Goddamn town again, no matter what. We’ll be there. Soon.

Signed, Kid Lowe and other members of the Ashley gang

Rumors that the gang was poised to invade Miami and free John from jail spread through a long and sleepless night.

Sheriff Hardie warned the Ashleys not to send family members for Bobby’s body. “I can’t guarantee their safety,” he told Joe. An out-of-town relative, Edward Rogers, an in-law, risked his own life to take Bobby home. Hardie’s deputies escorted him safely out of Miami. On his own after that, Rogers managed to accomplish his mission and deliver his sad cargo to Palm Beach.

He was lucky. Trigger-happy Miamians were heavily armed, angry, and in most cases, drunk enough to shoot anyone named Ashley on sight. Many wanted John lynched after rumors spread that he’d paid for his defense with the loot from the Stuart bank robbery—despite Bobby’s dying declaration that he and Kid Lowe had split the take after John was wounded.

Hardie was well aware that a mob broke into the county jail, then located in Juno, twenty years earlier. Determined to lynch a man accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy and two residents, they murdered a jailer who tried to protect the prisoner, whom they hanged and left swinging from a signpost at a major intersection.

He’d be damned if he’d let that happen on his watch. Despite bitter protests, Hardie closed the saloons until further notice. Lynch mobs were bad, drunken lynch mobs far worse.

Frightened families packed up and fled the city. Those who stayed stripped the shelves at the trading post and hardware store of all their guns, ammunition, and emergency supplies. Businesses shuttered. Banks closed. The Miami Rifles patrolled and every man and boy was armed and jittery.

A group of leading citizens urged the mayor to ask the governor to send in the National Guard to protect the public and keep the peace. The mayor conferred with Sheriff Hardie, then refused. “The situation is under control and being well handled by our own authorities,” he said, labeling as “groundless” the rumors of lynch mobs or gang members coming for John Ashley. Hardie himself wired the governor, said Miami was in good hands, and urged him to ignore “sensational stories from unreliable sources.”

It was a gamble. Hardie and the mayor didn’t want the world to think they had lost control. Pride was a factor, but the rest was strategy. Hardie believed their refusal to request outside help would assure residents
that mob violence would not rule and the Ashley gang would not raid the city. But he also issued sawed-off shotguns to a dozen extra men assigned to guard the jail.

Sporadic shootings erupted throughout the county. Jumpy citizens with itchy trigger fingers blasted away, as they mistook family members, farm animals, wild animals, and their neighbors for members of the Ashley gang.

The newspapers called for calm. “There probably is no Ashley gang,” opined the writer of one front-page editorial: “If a few members of that misguided body are left, they have fled. The remaining family members are peaceful, quiet citizens who should not be punished by this constant suspicion of all who bear that name.”

“Life is short and full of trouble . . . ,” the pastor read from the Book of Job at Bobby’s funeral, “like a flower that quickly grows, then dies away . . . like a shadow, here for a short time, then gone.”

He did not speak of how Bobby’s short life had ended.

Young Rachel Lummus and her parents were among the mourners as Bobby went to his rest close to home, on the Ashley property. The family feared a grave elsewhere might be robbed or desecrated.

John, under tight security in jail, was denied permission to attend the funeral.

Services for Officer John R. Riblet were held in Fort Pierce, where his wife, the daughter of Florida pioneers, was born. The pastor praised the officer’s bravery in risking and losing his own life trying to take Bobby Ashley alive, instead of shooting him down from a distance.

Hundreds attended the funeral for jailer Wilbur W. Hendrickson at Miami’s Southern Methodist Church. Pallbearers carried his casket from the courthouse to the city cemetery as a band played a dirge. Only a month before his death Hendrickson had warned city officials about poor security at the jail. He had told a reporter for the
Miami Metropolis
that the jail was “dangerous and a disgrace to the county.”

Several days after the story was published, Hendrickson physically overpowered a violent prisoner to thwart an escape.

The jailer may have had a premonition foreseeing his own death. He’d pleaded for help, better security, more manpower or a different job,
but fate intervened. The day he was shot dead, the inmates of his small, overcrowded jail included four accused murderers and three men, including John Ashley, already sentenced to hang.

Like Riblet, Hendrickson was born in Ohio. The son of a Great Lakes steamboat captain, he piloted steamboats in Florida until the railroad arrived, then became a master printer at a newspaper. He quit to wear a badge. A former West Palm Beach marshal, and a deputy sheriff in Miami for six and a half years before he became jailer, he had recently set his sights on and campaigned for the job of Miami police chief. The primary election was held the day before Bobby Ashley pedaled up to the jail with his long blue package. Hendrickson lost. Crestfallen, he told friends he planned to move upstate to grow vegetables on a twenty-acre tract his father-in-law owned.

On that election day before he died, the county commission had agreed, based largely on Hendrickson’s pleas, to levy a special tax to build a bigger, better, safer jail. But he wouldn’t live to see it.

His widow, Marian, recalled later that her husband had warned her that one of the two rifles kept near the front door wasn’t loaded, but in her panic she’d seized the wrong one. Had she only picked up the other, she easily could have killed Bobby Ashley. She had seen the young man with the blue parcel circle the jail earlier, she said, thought it was suspicious, and planned to tell her husband about it when he came home for lunch. But he’d walked in laughing in his big, booming way about something funny he’d seen and began to tell her about it. As they laughed and chatted over lunch, the slender youth on the bicycle slipped her mind until she saw him again, in her living room rifling her dying husband’s pockets.

Officer Riblet’s widow, Madge, had always feared guns and swore on her husband’s grave that she would never allow their young son, now fatherless at age three, to use, touch, or own a firearm.

Her husband, a popular member of the eighteen-man Miami Police Department, was known to be especially protective of young mothers with baby carriages. He’d stop all traffic at busy intersections so they could safely push their precious cargo across the dusty streets.

The Stuart bank’s insurance company wrote the widow, described her husband as a hero who paid the ultimate price “to capture and fatally
wound one of the bank robbers,” and enclosed a one-hundred-dollar reward. City officials pledged to continue to pay her dead husband’s twenty-five-dollar-a-month salary.

The triple shooting touched everyone, including John Ashley. Bobby’s violent and ugly death rekindled a flame that barely flickered in his condemned older brother. John’s malaise and hopelessness vanished like smoke. He suddenly burned to the core with a fiery determination to survive. If he did not, Bobby’s sacrifice would be in vain. John had to live free again, for himself, for Bobby, Laura, and his family. He’d live for Bobby, make Laura happy, and repay his parents for the misery he’d brought them.

He immediately planned his escape. No guns, no outside help. His only tool: a metal spoon. He broke through his cell’s cement floor and used the spoon to dig for more than a month. Each day he’d excavate as much dirt as one can with a spoon, hide the dirt under his bunk, flush it away with water later, or allow it to sift slowly through a tiny hole in his pocket as he strode the corridors during his daily hour of exercise.

While John walked one day, a conscientious jailer searched his cell, discovered the dig, and alerted Sheriff Hardie, who advised the jailer to keep quiet and do nothing—for the time being. Hardie wanted to know if anyone else was involved and, if so, to what degree. He and the jailer watched and waited as John dug for weeks. The project, Hardie thought, would keep the prisoner occupied, too busy to plot other schemes or escapes.

John’s excitement mounted as he inched closer to freedom. Less than two tantalizing feet from fresh air, sunshine, and a sky full of billowing cumulus clouds, he was dragged from his cell and locked into a more secure cage. He refused to talk and concealed his fury, certain he’d been betrayed by fellow prisoner Floriah R. Johnson, a condemned murderer in an adjacent cell. The next time the men passed in the corridor, Ashley lunged, threw Johnson to the floor, and tried to strangle him. Two jailers—Clyde, a husky former farmer from Georgia, and a portly, red-faced, sweaty man named Sutter—rushed to rescue Johnson as he struggled for breath.

“Don’t you choke him!” Sutter bellowed, panting as he tore John’s shirt and waistband in an attempt to drag him off the man. “You can’t kill him, John! We got to hang him!”

“Didn’t do it! Didn’t do it! Wasn’t me!” the man cried. Johnson had used the same defense at his trial. Nobody believed it then; John didn’t believe it now.

Clyde, the farm boy, wrestled John into a headlock. “Don’t do it, John,” he panted into his ear. “We’ll do it for you.” John could have hurt him but didn’t. His appeal to the Florida Supreme Court was still pending. The jailers were decent men doing their jobs, and someday he might need their good will.

John remained the best-behaved, most closely guarded prisoner in Dade County Jail until August 1916, when the high court reversed the judge who had denied him a new trial. He’d just won a new chance at life.

Fear, unrest, and paranoia still roiled in Miami. The politicians didn’t want another controversial, high-profile murder trial for John Ashley. The defense attorneys seized the moment to negotiate a deal. The prosecution would drop the murder charge. There’d be no new trial or future prosecution in the case of DeSoto Tiger. In exchange, Ashley would plead guilty to the Palm Beach bank robbery. He had never denied robbing the bank, had no problem pleading guilty, and was sentenced to seventeen and a half years’ hard labor in the state penitentiary.

Prison officials waited at the gate to welcome John to Raiford in November 1916. Two, in fact, were so delighted to meet and greet their notorious inmate, they posed happily for photos with him. The wardens wore dark, somber suits and traditional ties. One carried a Bible. Ashley wore his black patch, a white tropical suit, a jaunty bow tie, and a bemused expression as he stared directly into the camera. The three could have been at a garden party. The only hint that the occasion had more gravity was the stone wall looming behind them.

During his stay, prison doctors fitted John with a glass, blue-gray artificial eye. As charismatic as ever and, as always, a model prisoner, John was assigned to a chain gang that worked out of a road camp in Milligan. Happy to be outside prison walls in the great outdoors, he even enjoyed the hard work and strenuous exercise, but not enough to stay.

John and fellow bank robber Tom Maddox escaped on a breezy spring night in 1918. They left behind the ankle chains they were required to wear at all times. An assistant warden had helpfully unlocked
the twenty-pound chains after John pointed out the possibility of shackle sores that could cause gangrene.

Bloodhounds and a posse failed to pick up a trail. Lawmen were baffled until witnesses in a nearby town reported seeing two men who fit the escaped prisoners’ descriptions speeding south in a flashy Maxwell motorcar driven by a striking young woman with black hair. Officials later recalled that Ashley’s dark-haired sweetheart, Laura Upthegrove, had recently visited him at the road camp.

Eventually they called off the search.

Ashley was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT