New Britain Herald Newspaper, August 18, 1927, Page 19

Mystery Deepens When State Frees Detective’s Wido Sensational Trial and Fails to Find Any of the Revengeful Bad Men Suspected of the Crime Edith Bishop, widow of the two-gun detective of whose murder she was recently acquitted, and her son Leo N Oklahoma ju ving recently decided that Mrs. Luther Bishop did not kill her husband, the in- habitants of that exciting commonwealth have gone back to asking one another the question that has been agitating the Southwest ever since the morning of December 5, 1926: “Who killed ‘Two Gun’ Bishop, then?” It is a pretty problem; one that would have delighted Bishop himself, for twenty years a detective and peace of ficer of renown in the frontier settle- ments and oil boom towns of Oklahoma Throughout the Southwest, Luther Bishop was known, respected and feared as a two-gun detective who usually got his man. Six bandits had been Killed by the doughty officer in line of duty, and he had escaped unscathed from a dozen other gun fights with Southwestern out- laws. Asleep or awake, his trusty six-shoot ers were always within easy reach, and he let it be known that hostile bad men who aspired to catch him unawares and fill him full of lead before he could fight back were “foolish in the head.” “They’ll never get me,” he boasted, when he was in an expansive mood. “Or, if they do, I'll drop a few of them before they drop me.” Al of which was re membered and commented upon by his former intimates the morning after Bishop was killed with his own revolvers The two-gun terror of the outlaws died, not in the saddle, leading a foray of law officers against a bandit cutpost. but while he slept in his bed on a glassed-in porch on the second floor of his comfortable and commonplace bunga low in Oklahoma City. And his wife, n pleasant-faced, ‘“home body” kind of woman, was sleeping three feet away from him when he was shot, she told in vestigators. When word of the murder first gor abroad, everybody in Oklahoma thought he knew the answer. “They got Luthe: at last, did they?” frontier wiseacres would remark to one another. Then they would start recalling his exploits as a hard-boiled, straight-shooting officer of the law, and speculating as to which of the many criminals he had sent to jail had gotten loose and taken his revenge. Three days after the shooting, however, the state was shocked nd startled by the arrest of Mrs. hop on suspicion of murder. Men who had been Bi at first suspected vindicti men, but had been compelled to veer around to the theory involv- ing his wife, or widow. Bishop had with a forty olver, or revolvers; and they said when they first were sum: moned to the house, his own revolvers were missing. But a few hours before Mrs. Bishop was arrested, the revolvers were found in a cardbox in a closet of the Bishop home, and there were four empty chambers in each. * With such sinister evidence in their possession, the prosecuting authorities failed lamentably to make out their case, although when they started the trial betting was two to one they would con- viet, Basing their accusations on the re volvers, the number of shots in the mur- dered detective's body, and the “improb- ability” of Mrs. Bishop’s story, the_pros ecutors tried bard. The defense was, in the main, that she nad no motive for killing a husband who was devoted to her, and the claim that some bandit who hated Bishop for auld tang syne had killed him and planted the revolvers to throw suspicion upon the wife, Bishop held to her story under and made the jurors believe it, and. n an Oklahoma grown more or less law 1biding, that is the important thing. The woman said that on the night ot e murder she ana her husband retires at the usual hour, occupying beds about three feet apart on the sleeping porch on the second floor. She believed he had been wearing his six-shooters, and hung After them and his hip-holster on the bedpost. She fell asleep immediately after getting in bed, and was sometime later awakened by the sound of shots. There was the thud of hurrying feet in the dark. A dark shape blotted out the light from one of the many windows for a moment. Then she arose, turned on the light, and found her husband bleeding from eight bullet wounds. “l screamed,” she said, “and my young son, a boy friend who was spend ing the night with him and my father came running. My husband died in my arms. He was not conscious. see his revolvers anywhere. J. K. Wright, a sardonic and cynical county attorney, put the old man and the boys on the stand and made them admit they had not seen anyone escap: ing by the sleeping porch window when they ran into the room. Nor did they hear the sound of retreating footsteps. By other witnesses, he proved that it was a drop of thirteen feet from the window to the ground. Mr. Wright asked Mrs. Bishop how that particular window could havé Been unlatched by the hypothetical intruder, getting in, and she didn’t know. He asked her how it came about that her husband’s revolvers were missing when the police arrived, yet were found in a box in a closet three days later. And Copyright, I did nots 4/ A deafening tattoo of shots scattered the peaceful still- ness and Luther Bishop tried to rise, only to fall back dead, the victim of the blaz- ing death that spurted from the muzzles of his own six- shooters One of Mrs. Bishop’s lawyers showing how he believes the killer of the two- gun detective escaped from the second-story sleeping porch seen at the right she said she didn’t know. She denied the crime. She had not been able to see the “murderer.” She was sure it was a man her husband had “sent up for a long stretch” while working as a detective. Mrs. Bishop reminded the cross ex- aminer that the closet where the revolv- ers were found had been unlocked after the murder, and the weapons could eas- ily have been planted there without her knowledge or that of any other member of the household. He asked her how it was her nightgown was blood-stained after she gave the alarm, and when the oflicers arrived. She wept, and said that she had rushed to her husband's side as soon as she saw his condition, and he died in her arms. Mr. Wright asked her whether there had been bloody finger-prints on the foot of her husband’s bed when the first po liceman arrived, and whether they had been washed away while the officer was out of the room. She said no. Active and astute lawyers in her pay put on witness after witness to prove that Oklahoma was, in a manner speak ing, “alive” with men who had bacn jailed through the activity of Luther Bishop. Some of them were at large, the lawyers showed, and apparently still practicing crime as a profession.. “Why 1927, by Central Press Association, Inc. could not one such crim- inal, who had an ancient grudge against this gallant officer, have climbed to his bedroom and slain him while “he slept?” chal- lenged the counsel for the accused. - “Why could he not have planted the re- volvers where they would throw sus- picion upon the wife? Such a fiendish plan might have appealed to a man smarting_under the memory of some act he might have construed as an injury.” And the accommodating jury echoed “why not?” and freed the lawyers’ client. Certainly Oklahoma was not without foes of society who would have liked to “bump off” Luther Bishop. He had been literally a terror to the evil doers of the rough-and-tumble fron- tier and the mushroom oil towns, and made enemies by the seore. Once he trapped and captured “Big Jim” McGraw single-handed, after that picturesque outlaw had staged thirty-eight daylight robberies in Kan- sas, Arkansas and Oklahoma in four years of crime. McGraw’s loot had aggregated $500,000. Bishop took his prisoner to the state penitentiary at McAlester, Oklahoma, only to see his work go for nothing when McGraw sscaped. Mrs. Bishop's lawyers did no¥ fail to emphasize the likelihood of McGraw’s being concerned in the sleep- ing porch killing. And they were able to show he was still at large, and in all probability back at his old tricks. “Luther was working on a new plan to recapture him, and earn $50,000 in rewards, when they got him,” Mrs. hop testified. She also said that her husband fre- quently had mentioned the names of Matthew Kimes and Ray Terrill as out- laws who were anxious to “get the drop” on him. Both were at large at the time of the murder, and the trial, having escaped from jail after being caught through the cleverness and courage of Bishop. Both were classed as among the most desper- ate criminals of the new Southwest: Going even further back into the lurid past of the two-gun border detective, Mrs. Bishop’s attorneys brought up the old matter of the Osage murders, which shocked the Southwest years ago. A band of clever and utterly un- scrupulous criminals got members of their own clique to marry Osage Indian girls, virtually all of them government wards, and most of them heiresses, as a result of the discoveries in the oil ficlds. Then Indians standing in the way of the criminal white men were killed, and the whites achieved “marriage rights” in great oil fortunes. Bishop was a deputy warshal when the Osage murders were committed, and worked for five years on the case before he ordered an arrest. But when he did, he was ready, and secured several con- victions, Mrs. Bishop told the court, in her own strange defense, that Luther had informed her he was not through with the Osage case and expected other The late Luther Bishop, the Okla- homa officer who was mysteriqusly slain with his own six-shooters and startling developments. Try as they would, counsel for the prosecution Were unable to stop the introduction of such evidence, or to take away from its ef- fect upon the jury. 0ld “buddies” of Bishop even told of the historic battle between the two-gun detective and Al Spencer, the gray eagle of Oklahoma banditry for fifteen years, in which Spencer was the loser. In 1923, Al and four of his temporary licutenants robbed a train near Bartles- ville, Oklahoma. It was the last of the Oklahoma train robberies. And it was staged along regular movie-thriller lines. The men of the train crew were sur prised and overpowered. The safe was blown. A currency shipment to an Oklahoma bank constituted the plunder. [t was about $125,000. Bishop headed the posse that ran Al down near Bartles- ville, and Bishop and he duelled to the death—the bandit's death. The defense in Mrs. Bishop’s trial pointed out that the men who assisted Spencer the only time he ever had ac- complices were still at large, and sup- posedly revengeful. Surprised-and dismayed by the verdict acquitting Mrs. Bishop, the State of Oklahoma has made no further effort as yet to run down the border detective’s slayer. In spite of what her lawyers said, you can't indict a “criminal ele- ment;” you must indict an individual. And the authorities, very frankly, haven't an idea in the world as to who it is they ought to indict. Maybe the mys- tery will alw be one. And “Two- Gun” Bishop will go down on the rec- ords as killed with his own straight shooting revolvers by a person or per- sons unknown.