Red Grass River

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Liars Club

THE FIRST ANYBODY HEARD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WAS WHEN A coupla Sebastian boys named Miller and Davis come tearing into town in their car late one Saturday night hollering that the cops had captured the Ashley Gang out at Sebastian Bridge. Folk was standing out in the street jabbering about the news when here come the High Sheriff J.R. Merritt to tell them his deputies had killed John Ashley and three of the gang when they tried to resist arrest. Some people cussed at the news and some cheered and said it was about time somebody killed that whole bunch of lowdown outlaws. Sheriff Merritt picked out six men to serve as a coroner’s jury and the got in cars and all went out to the bridge. The way we heard the story, when the jury got there the dead men were all neatly laid out next to the road. The jury had their official look at them and then the bodies were stacked in a car and driven to the Fee Hardware and Mortuary in Fort Pierce. It was the middle of the night when they got there but the news had traveled ahead by telephone and they say it was a good-sized crowd waiting on them. The cops laid the bodies on the sidewalk so everybody could have a good look. the undertaker, W.I. Fee, showed up early that Sunday morning and had the bodies taken inside and by that afternoon he’d embalmed all four.

The news just flew up the coast. That afternoon Jack Middleton came into Fort Pierce on the train from Jacksonville and claimed the body of his brother Clarence. Ma and Bill Ashley came with the elder Mobleys to take home the bodies of John And Hanford. When they were told Ray Lynn had no known kin and would go in a pauper’s grave Ma Ashley said no he would not, he could be buried in the graveyard at Twin Oaks. Some who were there and saw her said she looked to be a hundred years old.

The bodies were in the ground by the time of the inquest three days later. The day before the inquest J.R. Merritt was elected to remain sheriff of St. Lucie County for another two years—despite the rumor going around that the Miller and Davis boys had seen John Ashley and his men under arrest and handcuffed at the Sebastian Bridge and it might be the police had executed them in cold blood. The lawmen who’d been at the scene refused to talk to reporters about the rumor and they hired lawyers to represent them at the inquest. They say when Ma Ashley heard the rumor she cussed the cops for murderers with badges and hired a lawyer named Alto L. Adams to attend the inquest and make sure some important questions got asked.

The presiding judge was Angus Sumner and the first witness was undertaker W.I. Fee. One of the first questions Adams asked him was if he had seen any marks on the dead men’s wrists, especially marks that might of been made by handcuffs. Fee said he hadnt seen any such a thing. They say the undertaker was sweating bullets and kept licking his lips and looking over at the seven cops who never took their eyes off him the whole time he was testifying. They say the judge dint seem too pleased with Adam’s line of questioning but the jury looked mighty interested.

Then the Miller and Davis boys took their turns on the stand and both of them testified under oath that they’d seen the four bandits under arrest and with their hands cuffed. No amount of badgering by either of the two lawyers for the cops could make either one change a word of their story. The coroner’s jurymen looked to be hanging on every word of the boys’ testimony. None of them had seen any marks on the men’s wrists when they went to the bridge, but like one of them said later, it had been dark and none of them had had reason to look very closely at the men’s wrists anyway. When Adams made a motion to have the bodies exhumed so they could be examined for handcuff marks, several of the jurymen nodded like they thought that was a fine idea.

The judge didnt think so. He said the question of whether the jurymen had seen marks on the dead men’s wrists when they went to the bridge to view the bodies now made them material witnesses and so they couldnt serve as impartial jurors. He disbanded the jury and said he would impanel a new one and hold another inquest in three] days.

And thats exactly what he did. The new inquest took place on the following Saturday and this time the cops took the stand, all seven of them in their turn, and every one of them said he had shot in self-defense when the prisoners—who were not handcuffed and probably acting on a secret signal from John Ashley—all made a try for their guns at the same time. After all the testimony had been given, the coroner’s jury reached a unanimous decision of justifiable homicide.

Some folk couldnt believe it. Some still dont. The suspicions about what happened on the Sebastian River Bridge that night of November first, nineteen and twenty-four, will probably never go away. Hell, our own Liars Club been arguing about it all our lives, and some of us side with the cops’ version and some with the Ashley’s’. Ever few years one local newspaper or another will bring up the story of the Ashley Gang but they dont say anything we aint heard a hundred times before.

One more thing. Before John Ashley’s body was in the ground a week there were stories going around that when his body got to the undertaker’s it was missing its glass eye. Everybody knew somebody who claimed to know somebody who’d seen the body laying in front of the undertaker’s and seen that the eye was missing, but nobody ever said they’d seen so with their own two eyes. The undertaker said the eye was in place when he did the embalming, but some say he was too scared to tell the truth, which is that one of the cops took it and gave it to Bobby Baker, who’d always said he meant to have it. But Bobby always denied that anybody’d given him the eye and said the only way he ever wanted to have it was if he could of taken off John Ashley himself. The Ashley family—what was left of it, Ma and Bill and the sisters—they all said the eye was buried with John, but how would they know unless they opened his eye to check and nobody saw them do it when they came for the body at the undertaker’s. Maybe they checked for it before they buried him and it really was there. Or maybe, like some say, they were just trying to save face by not admitting that somebody got the best of John Ashley at the end by making off with his eye.

It’s just one more thing the Liars Club been arguin about for years and years.