The Bloody Tent: Lincoln County's First Murder, part 1

Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus

 Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo

 

The Lincoln County Oklahoma History is a monumental tome. Weighty, not lap reading to be treated lightly, it tips the scales with the Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary at 1500+ pages. Edited in 1988 by the energetic women of the Lincoln County Historical Society (with a few male assists), it is a labor of loving perseverance. Among my circle of friends and family, I am the only person I’m aware of who owns a copy, outside of a few acquaintances in the Historical Society.

The size of the book suggests no abridgment, yet the story I am investigating here has suffered a drastic curtailment. It forms part of a list of firsts in Chandler, and it occupies a mere seven lines of one column of type on page 70: “The first murder was committed in a tent near Bell Cow Creek in the west part of town. Mr. Redman shot and killed his bride of six weeks. He was the father of six children, the eldest, older than his new bride. He went to the penitentiary for eight years.” Needless to say errors occur in this account, but such is the nature of historical labors. The squamous facts inevitably exceed the historian’s grasp. Any errors in the following account, whatever their cause, will not be due to authorial curtailment. Indeed the author must beg the reader’s indulgence for his verbosity. A better wit would have been capable of greater brevity.

In a stretch of bottom land just west of Chandler, four days after Christmas 1891, Henry A. Redman shot and

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killed his wife (Lou or Lulu) of three weeks in order to keep her from protesting his incest with his motherless daughter Lizzy, fifteen years old at the time of the murder. The killing took place with the killer and his victim alone inside a two-person tent occupied by Henry, his teenage wife Lou, his teenage daughter Lizzie, and a younger daughter of about seven years. At the moment of the shooting, only Henry and Lou were in the tent and thus there were no witnesses to say Yea or Nay when he emerged to tell those drawn by the sound of the shot that Lou had killed herself. Legally, the absence of witnesses meant that any charge brought against him was “circumstantial.” The honey pot of rumors and legal technicalities drew numerous lawyerly flies full of Yeas and Nays who tied the case up in court for three years. Settlement was finally adjudicated in 1894 by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals which affirmed the lower court’s finding of manslaughter. Redman was sentenced to eight years imprisonment, but by this time he’d already served three. He was sent to the Kansas penitentiary in Lansing, where he served two more years before being pardoned. Oklahoma governors were free with pardons in the pre-statehood period because the fledgling state had no federal prisons and was forced to send its long- term prisoners to Lansing, which was already full-up with Kansans.

Background

Apart from four brief articles in the Chandler newspapers, initially I could find nothing about “Henry Redman.” Blocked by this brick wall, I called upon my smarter cousin Ruth Coker of Arlington Texas to help me-- a cousin distant by blood but close by the affection resulting from our many years pulling together in the

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harness of family history. Ruth made two moves that opened a floodgate of data. She found that the usual spelling of the killer’s surname was Redmon (with an o), and she alerted me to the fact that the newspapers.com database has older articles than those contained in my standby database at Gateway to Oklahoma History. The latter has nothing for Lincoln County earlier than about 1893, whereas newspapers.com has files going back to 1891, the year of the land run and the year that the first newspapers appeared.

As to the database, I could console myself by recalling that up to about a year ago, newspapers.com had no local newspapers in Oklahoma. The lesson here is that private enterprise trumps governmental funding (Gateway to Oklahoma History is a state-funded database). Private profit churns out more money than taxes can.

Henry Redmon (also spelled Redman and Redmond) was born in Buchanan County Missouri in 1857. His father was Franklin Redmon and his mother Nancy McElfresh, both of Kentucky. The two are commemorated by a fine 19th-century style grave stone in Rushville, Buchanan County, suggesting that either their children respected them or the parents had the foresight to purchase their own gravestone., Only two children, however, left records, Henry and a younger brother named James. Appalachian families of this period usually had ten to twelve children who lived long enough to leave a record. This family seems curiously truncated, and since Henry can’t be suspected of filial piety, the stone was probably placed by his brother.

Henry’s first wife was Flora or Faith Crook, born like Henry in 1857 and also from Rushville, Buchanan

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Francis &Nancy Redmon Stone, Buchanon Co. MO

County. The Lincoln County History said they had six children but the censuses records show eight. In addition, we know Henry had another child, Lizzie, born about 1876 of an unknown mother, a child who in Chandler was the object of his incestuous lust. As she was a mere fifteen, normally one would refrain from giving her name, but Lizzie is named in the newspapers of the day and then she disappears from the records. There was yet another female daughter, seven years of age (name suppressed here), that Henry is said to have abused.

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Henry’s teenaged second wife, Emma Lou Soward, was in born in Illinois in 1874 but at the time of her marriage was living in Leon, Butler County, Kansas with her parents Jonathan and Mary Soward, both from Ohio. The Sowards had eight children that are known, but one of the younger ones died in 1880, leaving Lou and Bruce as the two youngest. We will hear more about Bruce.

The Killing

The first unofficial report of the killing was filed by Henry himself in a telegram sent to Lou’s mother, Mary Soward, two days later: “Your daughter shot herself, come immediately. H. A. Redman,” it said. And in fact, the mother does come, as will be seen below.

A more detailed version of the event is given in the Chandler News for 2 January 1892, beginning with the marriage.

About three weeks ago Mr. Redmond went to Leon, Butler County, Kansas, and there he married Miss Lulu Soward....he returned to this city about two weeks ago, bringing his young bride with

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him. It is reported she was sadly disappointed in her marriage owing to her husband’s over indulgence in strong liquor.

In short, Henry was a drinker, and on the frontier that meant rotgut whiskey, known as a mocker in the brain and a rage in the blood.

At the inquest over the body of Mrs. Redmond, immediately following the shooting, some startling developments were made. A large number of witnesses were examined, and it was ascertained that the revolver was placed upon a semi-oval trunk after the shooting. Mr. Redmond testified that his wife was right handed, that she held the revolver about twelve to eighteen inches from her breast, that she then laid the revolver on the trunk and fell to the floor.

The News then soberly expounds the impossibility of squaring Lou’s right-handedness with the entrance and exit wounds the bullet made in the victim’s body. Then we examine the revolver and arrive at the self-evident conclusion.

The revolver is an extraordinarily large one, being extremely heavy, and the trigger works very
hard . . . . The six men of the jury (named)] rendered the following verdict: We the jury find that Lulu Redmond came to her death on the afternoon of December 29th 1891 from a wound received in her body, from a revolver while in the hands of Henry A. Redmond her husband, and that he did the same willfully and deliberately.

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With the jury dismissed and Redmon led off to jail, the News renders its own verdict on Henry:

He maintains [the same] stoical indifference that he manifested upon the streets just after the shooting. He is a cold blooded villain for which hanging is entirely too good. And that he murdered his young wife in cold blood is beyond cavil.

In a parallel column, we hear a self-justification from Henry which the scrupulous reader may want to weigh in the balance. After reiterating at a gallop the charge that the murder was “the most diabolical crime yet committed in the whole territory,” the News writer drops the reigns to his horse.

A bride of but two weeks, and because of indiscretions on her part committed prior to her marriage, which in his drunken orgies he charged her with, and which she finally admitted, thinking possibly that by so doing, it would forever end the torment she was continuously undergoing, he desired to sever his marital vows, and in a frenzy caused by his wife’s admission of all these things so enraged that brute, that he drew his revolver and fired its deadly bullet into the heart of his girl wife.

Reined in from it’s bucking syntax, the horse sense of this sentence seems to be that Lou confessed to some premarital indiscretions which so enraged Henry that he shot her dead. Though the reader may be wondering if the journalistic horse has not broken its back in three places, the writer picks up the reins and continues more soberly:

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The only proof that the world will ever have that any admissions or confessions were made by her, is his sworn statement before the coroner’s jury, “that she did so, and that he told her that he was going to write to her parents and expose her to them” and that she said “that if he did she would commit suicide.” This is a very fishy cock-and-bull story, and none but a depraved mind could invent its equal.

And none but a mind afflicted by a verbal frenzy would ever mix a fish, a cock, and a bull in one adjectival phrase, but we must allow the News to have its say. The assertion here may lead the reader to suspect that Lou was no better than she should have been, but a charitable view would keep in mind her youth and the fact that the statement, coming from the man who killed her, lacks credibility.

The Trials

To the simple gaze of the good-hearted reporter, Redman’s guilt may have been beyond cavil, but to the legal profession “beyond cavil” is a concept that does not exist. Cavil always abounds. Over a period of three years, there were four trials. The inquest, as stated above, found that Henry killed Lou “willfully and deliberately.” At the preliminary hearing, which followed close on the inquest, this finding was reversed, and Henry was found not-guilty for lack of evidence. That is, legally the court could only rule on the basis of what had been proven, and there was no witness to the shooting. Louis E. Payne was the chief defense lawyer, and would continue in that role. Lou’s mother and her brother Bruce, surprising, were initially witnesses for the defense, and deposed that Henry was such

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a fine fellow that he could never have killed anyone. “Surprising,” because family members do not usually accept the killing of their kin so meekly. They were testifying for Redman and against his wife.

Letters from both Mary Soward and her son Bruce appeared in the News on January 16, 1892. They are both addressed to Claude F. Parker, the first Lincoln County sheriff and appointed by the territorial governor in 1891.

Dear Sir:
Having heard that Henry A. Redmond shot

my daughter, I can say that I believe he is an innocent man and every word you can say in his behalf will be highly appreciated by me the mother of the deceased girl.

Mary E. Soward

To Sheriff Parker,
Dear Sir: Having heard it rumored that

Henry A. Redmond shot my sister, I will say that I believe him to be innocent of the charge, and anything you can say in his behalf will be appreciated by me, the brother of the deceased girl.

B. J. Soward

The letters are curious, to say the least.They seem to be based on insider knowledge but what that knowledge consists of we are not told. There was either maternal animosity toward Lou, or Henry must have exerted some powerful charm. The father Jonathan was himself a notorious drunkard and proprietor of a “joint” or “blind tiger” patronized by Henry Redmon and Bruce Soward, which the good citizens of Leon would have liked to close down. He seems never to have been a factor in his family’s

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life. His absence from the case may lead us to suspect that the mother was brow-beaten by Bruce, who at the time of the letter was himself on trial for the murder of a young man who was the brother of a married woman Bruce had seduced. In fact, in 1900 Bruce would kill another illicit lover before turning his pistol on himself.

Two brothers, the only males in the family, both of them murderers, and behind them the alcoholic father. Sounds like material for a temperance tract.

If Henry and Bruce were brothers it was under the fatherhood of mayhem. As much is suggested by the Norman Transcript for 9 February 1894 which warned that “the Redman and Soward outfit are a tough crowd.” The universally accepted distinction between the two crimes Redmon is accused of is also noteworthy: killing your wife is manslaughter and can get you slapped with an eight-year sentence, but “ruining” the purity of your daughter can get you hanged.

By the time of the Grand Jury in Guthrie (where the crime was tried) the evidence of incest had emerged, and now the prosecution could show clear motivation. The most detailed report on the incest was supplied by the News for 13 February. It began with the large headlines MURDER! / A YOUNG GIRL IS RUINED BY HER OWN FATHER!

Henry A. Redmond was arrested yesterday afternoon on the charge of incest with his daughter Lizzie Redmond, a pretty little girl of fifteen years of age, preferring the charge. . . . This young girl tells a story, that would hardly be given credence, but for the fact of innumerable witness, she says that for nearly three years her father has attempted to outrage her, but that she has fought him off tho she was frequently compelled to sit up all night in a

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chair to keep him from accomplishing his purpose. Her little seven year old sister says that Lizzie has had to take a piece of stove wood to bed with her to keep her father from getting in bed with her. . . .

The part played Lou’s brother Bruce is of more than passing interest.

Immediately after the killing of Mrs. Redmond, her brother Bruce Soward came to Chandler to investigate into the cause of the death of his sister, and never having met his brother-in-law before, and hearing his story about how Mrs. Redmond had committed suicide, he believed it and without investigating the affair, he at once set about clearing his brother-in-law of the charge of having murdered his sister, in this his efforts were successful. Mr. Soward however remained in this city for two or three weeks, living with the Redmonds during that time, he must have learned something for upon leaving Chandler and going to Stillwater, he wrote the following letter to his parents in Leon, Butler County, Kansas.

The reporter errs in suggesting the two brothers-in-law didn’t know each other before the killing, for they were both patrons of Jonathan Soward’s blind tiger in Leon, but that point has been lost between the muddled syntax and the public scandal.

The same issue of the News even supplied a letter from Bruce to his mother, probably for the purpose of establishing that no slur on Lizzie or Redmon had been heard in Leon.

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Dear Parents
I received your kind and welcome letter last

night, it found me well, I just got in from Chandler last night. Lizzie is sick; Redmon gets home drunk as usual, you ought to see the way he abuses those children of his. He came home and cussed Lizzie to everything he could think of and he tried to get in bed with her, and Lizzie told me that that wasn't the first time that he had tried that with her. Mother I think we ought to have put the law to him, but there is a chance of his being indicted before the Grand Jury anyway.

Bruce E. Soward

The News comments, “This letter was probably the first intimation received by any one in Chandler of the true conditions of the Redmond household. The officers of the law were at once apprised of the affairs, and they immediately set about bringing the wretch to the bar of justice . . .” And then it supplies Lizzie’s formal affidavit, where in legal language she states the case frankly, including the fact that they have had "sexual intercourse with each other, though they knew they were father and daughter." The affidavit was signed and sworn the 10th day of February 1892. Now Henry’s fat was in the fire.

The Guthrie trial lasted several days, and the jury was out six hours before returning a verdict of manslaughter. The honeypot created by the charge of incest had by this time drawn seven legal flies to take part at different times in the prosecution. Lawyers are like politicians, they love a position no one can oppose. Everybody was jumping on the bandwagon. The townspeople, hearing reports of incest, were incited to their own form of mayhem--lynchings, that is. Newspapers

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around the state reported lynching threats and at least two of them that Henry had in fact been lynched. Mark Twain would have called these rumors of his death exaggerated.

The defense of course appealed the guilty verdict of the Guthrie court, but an appeal was pro forma. At this time in Oklahoma Territory, all murder convictions were automatically reviewed by the Court of Criminal Appeals. The defense had a list of some seventy technical points by reason of which the verdict should be overturned, but the whole list was dismissed by the Appeals Court, which upheld the verdict of the lower court.

On September 28, 1894, Sheriff Parker escorted Redmon to the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing to finish serving the eight years of his initial sentence. As noted above, he would serve only two years before being pardoned.

Loose Ends and Aftershocks

Judgments by the Appeals Court are invaluable to the historian, because if nothing else they get the proven facts straight and lay out a coherent narrative. They can also add detail. It is here we learn for certain that Lizzie is the name of Henry’s seduced daughter, and we also hear of S. B. Macklin, a witness in the first trials but now deceased. “On the 17th day of February, 1894, [Redmon] was sentenced by the court to imprisonment in the penitentiary, at Lansing, Kansas, for a period of ten years, with two years off, being the period of his incarceration in jail awaiting trial.

The name Macklin posed for me an intriguing problem. I had long been aware that the plot book for Wright Cemetery, Chandler’s oldest, contained the name Macklin (no first name), and the date of the plot purchase, 12 March 1893. The plot was purchased for an adult male.

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Given that this date fell between the first trials and the Court of Appeals hearing, nothing was more natural than for me to suppose that this grave belonged to Macklin the witness. However, I could find no reference to a Macklin in Chandler in 1893 in the newspaper archives. I did, however, finally learn that S. B. Macklin was Silas Barney Macklin, who died in Chandler in 1904 and is properly buried in Tulsa with a Find-a-Grave memorial. His son Guy was born in Chandler in 1889, so the period of Macklin’s interest in Chandler has mortal coordinates. The Appeals Court would like to have heard his testimony. Now we will never know what it was.

A pleasant side note to the murder is supplied by Lou’s sister Ada Bell, who at the time was living in Stillwater about thirty miles north of Chandler. She had married a man named Emery M. Blansett, who was a barber with a sideline selling lemonade. The couple quickly arrived in Chandler but left no affidavit or record of their visit. By 1930 they had moved to Los Angeles, and Emery was running a chicken farm. Lemonade and chicken farming must have been refreshing after the turmoil of killing and incest.

The ultimate end of Bruce Soward has been related. He died by violence and he died young. The older people in the story, the Soward parents and Barney Macklin, all died between 1895 and 1904, as if undergoing the slow effects of shock. The later life of the daughter Lizzie is completely unknown. Her little sister became a seamstress and died young. Henry Redmon was pardoned from prison in 1897 and by 1900 had returned to Buchanan County Missouri and to his first wife Faith, whose death was clearly exaggerated by the newspapers. I find no reference to Henry after 1900, but a poetic justice would be served if he were buried by the side of the road somewhere, his life violently abridged, his grave unmarked, his passing unmourned.

Sources

Old newspapers are quoted from one of two sources: Gateway to Oklahoma History and newspapers.com. Vital statistics are obtained from Ancestry.com.