Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (33 page)

As he, lips sealed, waited for the homicide trial, he never exhibited anything but quiet certainty about his case, despite shooting point-blank an unarmed man bending over to pick up his hat, and firing a second bullet into his back, both shots directed at the heart. Bayne did not once attempt to aim for a leg or arm; he fired no warning shot; he did not brandish the weapon; and he did not respond with his own large fists. Yet he seemed assured his argument of self-defense against a man who punched him once but clearly intended no further blows would prevail in the murder trial.

An undertaker’s ambulance, a new horse-drawn vehicle, came to take Grayston to the morgue for an autopsy. The county physician removed the slug from William’s broken shoulder blade but left in the other, deeply embedded mortal piece of lead, and today it lies with William’s remains under a few feet of flinty soil on a hillside north of Sparta in Christian County, in a forgotten family cemetery big enough to hold only seven other related burials, one of them his infant son, Herbert.

Those eight Graystons rest beneath five old cedars, the graves marked for a century by only small, rough fieldstones that look more accidental than placed, meager memorials from the man who put them there, the paterfamilias, the old stonecutter from England, “the hermit poet-preacher” who apparently saw things of this realm as dross, distractions from the true life-eternal promised to the delivered.

The last words I’ve been able to find from him reveal
his hope
that his freethinking son — the one who believed any heaven would be of human making — had changed his mind and at last joined that blessed gathering of the redeemed waiting somewhere beyond this particular vale of tears.

And, of tears shed during the justments for the deceased, none exceeded those from William’s first wife who, wrote the
Press,

arose in the church and stated in the presence of the living and the dead in a voice broken with sobs, that the trouble which caused her separation from W. E. Grayston was her own fault, and that she felt it her duty at this time and upon this occasion to offer this restitution, this exoneration from blame to his memory; that had she been a little less impatient and had acted as she should have done, that they might have been living happily together today, because she had always loved him and him only.

People witnessing her shocking eruption in the crowded chapel feared the emotion-racked confession revealed temporary derangement. Among those gathered was William’s first daughter, fifteen-year-old Gertrude. Twenty-three-year-old Mrs. Pearl Grayston chose to stay home in Joplin.

Gertrude Grayston, Springfield, Missouri, 1900.

6

God Help the Jury

Y
OU’LL RECALL
that Q brought reports of this homicide to me while I was reading about the Quapaw Ghost Light before we were to go in quest of it. But I want to keep William’s story together, so I’m going to step ahead in sequence and travel only in time to get you to the outcome before I return to the road leading to the purported Light along the border of the old Indian Territory.

The murder of Grayston, as far as I could follow it, seemed to have more loose ends than a frayed hawser. Discovering a threadlet here and an inkle there still didn’t allow me to bring them into coherence, and the unraveled strands lay parted and tangled, failing to tie together the century-old interpretation of a crime of passions. The record was replete with incompatible details and cryptic utterances even a master boatswain’s mate couldn’t braid into a plausible line. It wasn’t that
something
was missing — it was that a full locker of lines looked to be missing.

For a time, the new information led only deeper into a dead end. Then, a small gleam, a kind of ghostly beacon, if you will, rose above that cul-de-sac to shine and beckon, and behind it were truths waiting for more than a century to come into light.

The skeleton of the story lay in several newspapers of 1901 and 1902, most of them from Jasper County. I continually had to evaluate political orientations that colored and, at times, distorted reporting: the
Joplin Daily Globe
was a Democratic organ and the
News-Herald
and
Carthage Press
were Republican. While what I’m about to tell you, as much as possible, is evidential fact or testimony corroborated by confirmed events, I’ve still had to referee variations and contradictory details, always trying to discount the overwhelming conjectures and speculations at the trial. I struggled against the loose standards of reportage in that era not far removed from the days of yellow journalism, and I had to weigh obviously biased assumptions and rumormongering presented as truth, especially when they contradicted established particulars. The amount of sheer reportorial incompetence — corrupted quotations, names spelled differently (not just from day to day but within the same sentence) or given entirely wrong (
Price
changed to
Pratt
), grammatical errors (“he had threw that away”) — left me confused at one moment and amused the next. And then there were the typesetters’ hooters. Here’s a single line
quoting
the judge’s instructions to the jury:

arguments, ou are yhereb nyotified not to.

Q discovered Grayston had once brought a libel suit against the Republican
News-Herald
(later dropped for reasons unknown) and also had political clashes with Democrats running the
Globe.
In a small town with fifty barrooms, William’s Anti-Saloon League lectures put him at odds with influential men and their cohorts who owned and operated highly lucrative establishments, the House of Lords supreme among them (the editor of the
Globe
held title to the building). Working against relative newcomer Grayston was his belonging to neither lodge nor church as well as his support of issues such as women’s suffrage and pensions to miners’ widows in a town controlled by mining magnates and their associates and underlings.

One last detail: despite several searches across the state, attorney Q could find no transcript of the trial,
State of Missouri v. George G. Bayne.

On June 30, 1902, from a jury pool of almost sixty men, the attorneys selected twelve, most of them farmers, ages twenty-five to sixty-five, only one from Joplin. In the middle of the growing season, the men were pulled out of their fields and away from their stock to be sequestered for an unspecified period but almost certainly including the Fourth of July, when there would be nothing for men of the open air to do but sit confined in a hot hotel.

The trial began on July 1 in a filled chamber where “standing room only” meant people at the rear stood on chairs to get a glimpse of the faces and demeanors of the killer and of the Belle of Joplin. A third of the audience was female, among them “two very pretty women, the sister of Grayston . . . attired in deep mourning.” She was the only person present whose grief exceeded her curiosity. “The other of those more than ordinarily pretty women was Mrs. Grayston . . . attired in a soft white wool shirtwaist.” William’s father, the renowned man of the cloth, remained in Christian County. The question for the spectators was not who did it or why he did it — they already “knew” that; what they didn’t know were the terms of his punishment. But, even more, their curiosity wanted to hear somebody break into a steamy confession.

The state opened with its plan to press for murder in the first degree, a verdict that would require proof of malice aforethought. (When Q read of the prosecutor’s plan, she said, “I can’t believe it! He’s opened and lost.”) Despite numerous denials from the victim himself based on his several investigations, the motive the prosecutor and his three assistants intended to prove was that George Bayne had been intimate with Pearl Grayston while William was traveling. (As Q read on, she said: “What’ve they found that William’s investigation missed?”)

The defense answered: Grayston was a volatile and “dangerous” person whose several public threats to Bayne virtually forced the defendant to protect himself with a concealed weapon for which he had a permit. Lawyers for the accused held that Grayston was a large, strong, unstable man, and they trotted several witnesses to the stand who alleged they had
heard of
his being “dangerous” or they had
surmised
as much, although not one of them himself (they were all males) had witnessed anything beyond a vocal threat to Bayne. Their ex parte testimony being expressed in such similar language suggests considerable pretrial coaching, virtually confirmed by subsequent leading of witnesses. The prosecution did not raise an objection to those tactics or to witnesses throwing out rampant speculations and judgments. In fact, on at least two occasions, the prosecutor’s own witnesses spoke opinions that hardly assisted his argument. He seemed unable — or
unwilling
 — to control their statements.

Again and again, the defense readily drew from witnesses variations of Grayston’s “reputation was bad” and Bayne’s “reputation was good,” one man citing the time William told an opposing lawyer “to sit down or he’d pull his whiskers.” Another testified he’d heard someone say Grayston “was the kind of man who’d come up behind you and blow your head off.” (William had never owned a gun.) Yet another opined the slain man “was liable to kill anybody.” Dolan, Grayston’s perpetual courtroom foe, told the jury the victim “was one of the meanest men . . . or the craziest” he’d ever known. To all of that hearsay and supposition, the prosecution objected
not even once.
Judging by accounts in the Joplin newspapers, the first two days were trial by character assassination.

It was day three before the prosecuting attorney at last raised an objection, but only to Dolan’s “bulldozing” a witness, which drew a rebuke from the judge for using such a coarse term in his courtroom; but he did sustain the objection.

Assisted by Grayston’s brother, the prosecution team was not undistinguished; if anything, its credentials appear to have outshone those of Bayne’s three lawyers. But even when the legally astute George Grayston took the stand, his testimony was listless and perfunctory, surely leading their sister to wonder,
If he won’t speak forcefully for our brother, who will?

The prosecutors based much of their argument on equivocal statements by three teenage girls who, during elocution practice in the Methodist church across the street from the Payton boardinghouse, alleged they saw from ninety feet away and through two windows a woman who was — or looked like — Pearl sitting on the lap of a man who was — or looked like — George Bayne, the pair “hugging and kissing” while he — or she — was inexplicably holding a newspaper. A woman testified she’d seen Pearl and Bayne riding in a buggy over in Byersville, to which the defense responded with a witness out of Oklahoma, one Mabel Price (a name to remember), who said it was she in the buggy and that she was sometimes mistaken for Mrs. Grayston; Mabel then stood before the jury in an attempt to show a professed resemblance. Throughout the trial, Pearl herself conferred frequently with the killer’s lawyers.

At last, the petite beauty in her white shirtwaist took the stand as the crowded court murmured and then grew silent, not to miss a single of her words, every ear waiting for that titillating question. At last the prosecuting attorney asked it: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with Mister Bayne?” Emphatically, Pearl Grayston said, “Certainly not!” The prosecution, as if rebuked, took that line no further and yielded to the defense which then established Pearl was at work on the afternoon the teenage girls claimed to have seen her smooching it up with Bayne.

The evening Q read the account of the trial, she said to me, “I keep waiting for the prosecution to argue that five shots from a thirty-eight — one while the victim was bending over and another into his back, both aimed at his heart — were hardly a
measured
self-defense against an unarmed man. Besides, William made no attempt to batter Bayne. It wasn’t a fight.” I suggested she keep reading, but she didn’t, not just then. Instead she said, “If William was so strong and dangerous, the kind to come up behind you, why didn’t he just beat up or shoot Bayne in a dark alley with no witnesses? I mean, he took action on the most public street in Joplin when it was most full of people.” She was getting vexed. “And I’ve got another problem. Does a
dangerous
man make all his threats in public?”

She was shaking her head. “His open challenges had to be just a tactic to embarrass Bayne and get him to move away from Pearl.” I recommended she read on, but she said, “Why hasn’t the prosecution found and brought forth the bloody vest to show the jury? Juries don’t easily forget blood. And why aren’t those unethical procedures of that scalawag of a justice of the peace coming out? He had no legal training. He tampered with evidence. He tried to manipulate a key witness. He tried to influence the inquest verdict.” Then she read on, but not before adding, “Where’s any mention of William as an advocate of the Law and Order League? Come on now, this is an all-star prosecution team? A law student could show up such ineptness. It had to be deliberately executed incompetence.”