Hard Twisted (30 page)

There are as many versions of the John's Canyon murder story as there were adults in San Juan County at the time of the tragedy. Historical research involves shifting through reams of material and all available versions of any story. When the researcher is ready to write, the facts are presented to the best of the writer's knowledge and belief. The writer cannot state categorically that one thing is true and the other false. Ultimately, only God knows the truth.

I had the unique pleasure of hiking with Doris in and around Mexican Hat, throughout the Valley of the Gods, up on Cedar Mesa, and in John's Canyon itself, and I am deeply indebted both to her and to our frequent hosts Gail L. Goeken and R. Lee Dick, the founding owners of the Valley of the Gods Bed & Breakfast at Lee Ranch, for introducing me to this most beautiful slice of the American landscape. Without them this book could not, and would not, have been written.

A second, tantalizingly brief reference to the John's Canyon murders appears in
Tall Sheep
(1992), Samuel Moon's excellent interview-cum-biography of Harry T. Goulding, the legendary trader, promoter, and pioneer who famously brought Hollywood director John Ford to Monument Valley. It is largely upon this
source, and my visits to Goulding's Trading Post Museum, that the book's depictions of Depression-era life on the Paiute Strip are based. Moon's book was also, along with the late H. Jackson Clark's memoir,
The Owl in Monument Canyon
(1994), my introduction to the truly larger-than-life character Sunshine Smith.

Yet another version of the John's Canyon tragedy appears in Helen N. Shumway's “The Ingredients of Violence in the Murders of William E. Oliver and Norris Shumway” (
Blue Mountain Shadows
1 [Fall 1987]). While this account cannot be squared in all its particulars with that of Ms. Valle, it is nonetheless noteworthy in several respects, including its familial insights and its quotations from the diary of the late William Oliver.

Sheriff Oliver was, as
Hard Twisted
suggests, one of, and perhaps the last of, the legendary frontier lawmen. For my account of his role in the Posey War, I relied upon several sources, most notably Robert S. McPherson's “Paiute Posey and the Last White Uprising” (
Utah Historical Quarterly
53 [Summer 1985]) and Steve Lacy and Pearl Baker's
Posey: The Last Indian War
(2007).

A trove of material describing pioneer life in San Juan County, including firsthand recollections of the John's Canyon murders and the Posey War, resides in the archives of the Southeast Utah Oral History Project, a vast collection of interviews and documents amassed and maintained by the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton, under the direction of Professor Emeritus Gary L. Shumway. I am indebted both to Dr. Shumway and to archivist Stephanie George for allowing me access to these data.

All of these sources, together with multiple visits to the communities of Bluff, Blanding, and Monticello, time spent in the archives of the
San Juan Record
, and trips to the local library,
cemetery, museum, and historical society—thank you, LaVerne Tate—provided the framework on which the book's Utah-based narrative hangs.

John's Canyon today remains little changed from the secluded landscape described in
Hard Twisted
. While the oil company line shack that served as seasonal headquarters for the Seeps Ranch cattlemen is long gone, the Palmer dugout remains. And those of a more adventurous bent can still visit the boulder cave in which Norris Shumway spent his final night, and where he etched his own epitaph, N.S. FEB 28 1935, deep into the Navajo sandstone.

I would be remiss if I did not, before departing Utah, offer a tip of my hat to the late David Lavender, that sage and prolific chronicler of all things Western, upon whom I relied for a rudimentary understanding of the methods and practices of Depression-era sheepherding, gleaned from his own epic memoir,
One Man's West
(1943).

The red-rock country of southern Utah—with its canyons and mesas, its monuments and gorges—is among the most beautiful and, paradoxically, among the least populous regions in all America. That the life of a Texas drifter would, over a few short months, intersect with those of historic figures such as William Oliver and Harry Goulding is a testament to the remoteness of the area. Which brings me to another intersection, not mentioned in the book, but that is worth noting here.

On the same day—March 7, 1935—that the
San Juan Record
first reported the John's Canyon tragedy in a banner headline proclaiming DOUBLE MURDER SHOCKS COUNTY, it also reported, in the adjoining column on page one, the disappearance of a young, unnamed artist who had last been seen in November of 1934 near the Escalante River, where “planes were used to try and locate
the artist's camp and succeeded in finding what they thought to be the pack burrow [
sic
] which he used. No camp or other sign of the lost man have yet been found.”

That missing artist was none other than Everett Ruess, whose disappearance in the Utah wilderness remains one of the enduring mysteries of the twentieth century. Author Jon Krakauer, in his bestselling
Into the Wild
(1996), recounts a conversation with former Escalante River guide Ken Sleight (upon whom Edward Abbey, in his novel
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, modeled the character Seldom Seen Smith) in which Sleight claims to have seen Ruess's trademark NEMO graffito carved into the wall of an Anasazi granary near Grand Gulch, on the northern bank of the San Juan River, some forty-five miles due east of Ruess's last known location at Davis Gulch. (A claim subsequently confirmed to me by Southwest historian Fred M. Blackburn, author of
The Wetherills, Friends of Mesa Verde
(2006), who has traced and compared both the Grand Gulch and the Davis Gulch carvings.)

That discovery puts Everett Ruess less than twenty miles from Clint Palmer's dugout in John's Canyon, and has Ruess headed in Palmer's direction at a time (December 1934) when Palmer was known to have been alone, heavily armed, and dangerously psychotic.

Although reams have been written about the life of Everett Ruess, by notables ranging from John Nichols to Wallace Stegner, no historian has, to my knowledge, yet posited a connection between the disappearance of the man Stegner called an “atavistic wanderer of the wastelands” (Ruess) and the nearby presence of a man who would, a few months later, reveal himself to the world as a ruthless and predatory killer (Palmer).

My journey on the trail of Clint Palmer and Lottie Garrett next took me to the Red River valley, where I visited each of the principal locales described in the book, including Hugo and Roebuck Lake in Oklahoma, and Arthur City, Peerless, Sulphur Springs, and Greenville in Texas.

For an understanding of the events that presaged the John's Canyon tragedy, I relied heavily upon newspaper accounts of the 1935 “skeleton murder” trial of Clint Palmer, in which the testimony of the prosecution's star witness—Lucile Garrett—was thoroughly reported. Of particular utility was the coverage provided by the
Greenville Morning Herald
. For the judicial proceedings leading to and following Palmer's conviction, I consulted all of the extant court records from the Hopkins County District Court, the Hunt County District Court, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

The most informing of all the official Texas records, I found, surprisingly enough, not in the courthouses or archives of the Lone Star State, but rather in Salt Lake City, at the Utah State History Museum. These included transcripts of the grand jury testimony of Lottie Garrett and H. P. Palmer, as well as transcripts of the statements given both by Lottie and Harry Goulding to the Utah authorities who traveled to Texas as part of the John's Canyon murder investigation. My special thanks to Michele Elnicky, historical collections curator, for her invaluable assistance.

Dillard Garrett's remains were discovered in a shallow cave near Peerless, Texas, on December 29, 1934, seven months after his brutal decapitation murder, by a group of young boys out rabbit hunting near the Palmer farm. The skeleton was thereafter placed on public display at the courthouse in Sulphur Springs, which event, combined with the notoriety surrounding Palmer
and Lottie's dramatic capture, resulted in a change of the trial venue to Greenville on the grounds that

wide publicity has been given to the finding of said skeleton and that the same was on exhibition for many weeks in the court house of Hopkins County, and was viewed by thousands of citizens... causing a large amount of discussion... and that the arrest of the defendant was published widely in the newspapers of Hopkins County and on the day of his arrest large numbers of citizens... gathered around the jail of the said county discussing fully the facts or alleged facts pertaining to the cause.

The notoriety attendant to Palmer's trial is best illustrated by the news accounts of the day. They describe a scene in which hundreds of citizens, including a government class from Wesley College, mobbed the courthouse on the morning Lottie Garrett was to testify, such that, as the
Greenville Morning Herald
reported, “it was necessary to lock all doors early in the day, and they were locked until the court recessed for the day late Thursday afternoon.”

Since Palmer's postconviction appeal was prosecuted solely on the clerk's record, and since no reporter's transcript of his trial survives, all of the excerpts that appear in the book are fictive except for the last, which is taken verbatim from the jury instructions given by Judge Berry at the trial's conclusion. Also, since Lottie's subsequent prosecution was conducted in a juvenile proceeding, no public record of her trial or conviction exists. Indeed, only a short newspaper account from May 24, 1935, attests to her sentence, and to her having “left today for the Texas Girls'
Training School at Gainesville” in the custody of Deputy Sheriff Jeff Branom, almost one year to the day from her first, fateful encounter with Clint Palmer.

Readers will be cheered to know that Lottie Lucile Garrett survived the ordeal of her childhood, married at age twenty-one, and raised a son named Dillard. She died on November 21, 1991, in Irving, Texas, at age seventy-one. My thanks go to Lottie's son, Clyde Sconce, and his wife, Linda, for sharing with me, a complete stranger, such a difficult part of their family history.

Clint Palmer was a sexual predator and a career criminal who when he first encountered young Lottie Garrett in May of 1934 was only four months removed from his latest incarceration, a three-year stint in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for kidnapping, statutory rape, and violating the Mann Act. For a physical description of Palmer, I relied both upon a lone photograph that appeared in the July 1936 issue of
Startling Detective Adventures
, and upon the records of the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, which describe him as five feet six inches in height, 135 pounds in weight, and as having size seven shoes. Readers might also be interested to know that Clint Palmer was born in 1897, was a Baptist, had five years of formal schooling, and claimed as his former occupations ranch labor, rodeo, and farming. I thank the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville for these details.

For a complete catalog of Clint Palmer's extensive criminal exploits, I thank the archivists at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, whose records describe a young man first arrested in Texas at age eighteen for rape and assault (two years at Huntsville), then arrested in Oklahoma at age twenty-three for forgery and white slavery (three years at McAlester), in Oklahoma
at age twenty-eight for statutory rape, in Colorado at age thirty-one for rape, in Arizona at age thirty-one for forgery, in Montana at age thirty-two for grand larceny, and, finally, in New Mexico at age thirty-four for white slavery (three years at Leavenworth).

The Leavenworth records also describe Palmer as a manipulative psychotic, a toothless syphilitic, and, most prophetically, a “menace to society.”

As for my efforts to capture the culture, language, and general flavor of the Red River valley circa 1934–35, I am indebted both to the late Bill Owens for his terrific memoir of Texas frontier life,
This Stubborn Soil
(1966), and to Donald Worster for his
Dust Bowl, the Southern Plains in the 1930s
(1979).

Closer to home, I am deeply appreciative of the encouragement and support provided by my dear friends Pati and David Temple of Cortez, Colorado, and of the invaluable feedback I received from my brother Dan Greaves and his daughter, filmmaker Katie Greaves, both of whom were kind enough to read and critique
Hard Twisted
in its early manuscript form. My thanks to you all.

While still in manuscript,
Hard Twisted
was named Best Historical Novel in the SouthWest Writers 2010 International Writing Contest. With the help of my extraordinary literary agent, Antonella Iannarino of the David Black Agency in New York, it was then acquired for publication by senior editor Anton Mueller of Bloomsbury USA, who nurtured it into print. Thank you, SWW; thank you, Antonella; and thank you, Anton and all the crew at Bloomsbury, including, without limitation, Rachel Mannheimer, Nate Knaebel, and Steve Boldt (USA) and Helen Garnons-Williams (UK).

Lastly, I wish with all my heart to thank the inimitable Lynda Larsen, my wife and muse of the last quarter century, who was
there when this long journey began, was there when it ended, and was with me every step of the way.

As there are no hard-and-fast rules for confecting fiction from historical fact, the guidelines I imposed upon myself in writing
Hard Twisted
were these: First, that the story must remain true to the known factual record in all but its most mundane particulars. Second, that no fictional action, event, or depiction appearing in the story may contradict a material fact known to be true. And lastly, that any actions, descriptions, or events created to fill gaps in the historical record must remain true to the general character and behavior of each of the actors to the extent that the same are knowable.