Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (34 page)

Finally, Bayne came to the stand. For a couple of hours, he gave an account that hardly differed from what others had said except in two details: first, he saw Grayston put his
right
hand into his pocket before hitting him, and second, the blow landed on Bayne’s
right
jaw. Grayston’s right-handedness made both assertions highly dubious unless you accept that he struck a powerful blow with his left hand while his right was reaching into his pocket. An enraged righty leading with his left? Bayne clearly was trying to use the single testimony — denied by all others — that Grayston appeared to be going for a gun just before he swung his fist. The prosecution raised not one of those questions.

Of the defendant’s assured testimony, the
Globe
wrote, “Bayne was decidedly the best witness on either side.” Given the prosecution’s insipid questioning of him, that’s probably accurate.

After the Fourth of July recess, on the final day, the prosecutors at last seemed to take up genuine pursuit of justice, as each of them spoke in summary to ridicule the argument that unarmed Grayston was a “dangerous man.” The concluding statement, given by the least-experienced prosecutor, nevertheless drew applause from spectators. On reading that, Q said, “I don’t know how, but maybe the all-stars are going to pull it out.” Then she read on to see that the closing arguments for the defense also had effect.

Just before midnight on Saturday, the fifth of July, the judge gave the unlettered jury his complex instructions: Although Bayne had been tried for murder in the first degree, the jury “could not find in the first degree . . . as the trouble resulting in the murder was not unprovoked.” But, should they find the defendant not guilty as charged but rather guilty of premeditating a crime, they could find him guilty in the second degree. Or, further, if they “find the deed was committed in sudden heat of passion and done of malice,” their verdict could be murder in the fourth degree. If that was their decision, the killer could be considered for the minimal penalty — a fine of a hundred dollars.

William’s father in Sparta would write:

God help the jury in this case

To give our homes a sacred place;

Without it, life is but a sham;

To Thee we look, the great I Am.

And so, off into the night thick with July heat went twelve “thoroughly fatigued men,” cooped up for a week like so many laying hens — farmers kept from the necessary care of stock and crops — to consider forty hours of testimony. On Sunday morning it took them a little more than a hundred minutes to reach a verdict, despite the first vote being ten to two. After brief further discussion, it was eleven to one. Then, although the last juror was still dubious, to keep deliberations from dragging on only to end up with a hung jury, he voted with the majority.

Monday morning the court reconvened, and the foreman stood to read the verdict in those first half-dozen words known so well: “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty as charged.” George G. Bayne, slayer of William E. Grayston, stood calmly, his assurance now confirmed, as he accepted the congratulations of his lawyers. Three days later the acquitted killer resigned from the Joplin Waterworks to take a similar job in Carthage, and nine months after that he married the petite blonde he’d taken for a buggy ride or two, the woman who testified in support of one of his alibis: Mabel Price.

The day following the trial, the
Carthage Press
reported: “One of the jurors remarked afterward that on general principles Bayne should have been given about two years for remaining and courting danger, but that under the law and evidence, the jury could do nothing but turn him loose.”

And Grayston? Well, he was proven right: his wife was innocent of adultery.

Robert Ingersoll, the freethinking attorney who had inspired William years earlier, once wrote, “In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”

7

A Triangle Becomes a Polygon

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG
with the entire story — not merely justice miscarried but something of even greater import; the evidence simply didn’t fit what the public accepted: a mortal outcome of a marital triangle. A pair of facts kept trying to bend the human geometry into a different shape.
But what the devil was the true shape?
The first fact was Bayne’s moving out of the Payton rooming house immediately after he was freed on bail the day following the murder, the very thing the victim for eighteen months had been demanding. Second, Bayne speedily married not Pearl but the woman he’d allegedly been glimpsed with during those months. If there was adultery in the Payton place, wouldn’t his future bride also have demanded he move elsewhere? Were he truly innocent of adulterous dalliance, wouldn’t she insist he clear his name?

Other nettlesome details arose: Why would a man who for months appeared craven and feckless even with a pistol in his pocket finally court a confrontation that would shame him at the most public place in Joplin? Why would a well-paid president and superintendent of a company insist on living a year and a half in an eight-dollar-a-week room in a small and crowded house not far from the honky-tonks of the Kansas City Southern bottoms? Why, three days after his acquittal, would he resign his job with Joplin Waterworks only to take a similar one just twelve miles away? Why would a man whose career was notable for its transience refuse to move even across the street to defuse a threat to his life? Why would a man fearing his survival be so dangerously stubborn?

I couldn’t leave those questions alone. One night, when Q and I were home again from the Southwest, I began rehashing aloud all we’d learned about the events. Finally, hearing myself, I stopped and apologized for once again flooding her with what I called my obsession for the truth of the murder. “I don’t think you’re
obsessed,
” she said. “I think you’re
possessed.
William’s ghost has you.” I said she knew I believed in only ghosts of the Nodgort kind. She hesitated not a moment. “But you believe big-time in the persistence of memory.”

Unbeknownst to me, Q soon went to the State Historical Society on the University of Missouri campus to begin cranking more reels of old microfilmed newspapers, trying to read the scratched and blemished and often barely legible words. When she returned, she handed me several sheets of gray photocopies. “You’ve been complaining of the blatant bias in the reporting in Joplin, so I went looking for stories from out of town.”

As Carthage started planning a massively magnificent courthouse in 1891, Joplin demanded for itself a kind of “annex” almost as impressive, a place to handle criminal cases. Carthage, the “holy city” where mine owners went to live, could house the recorder of deeds as long as Joplin, the “sin city” where miners came out of deep holes to blow their wages, got the county prosecutor. After all, in the competition between the towns, what was litigable in one might not be so in the other. A jurisprudence of convenience — and control.

I sat down with the
Carthage Press
account of the murder but found nothing to alter or enlarge what I already knew. I must have read too fast, because a few days later when I went over it again, I noticed the final paragraph, a little piece seemingly tacked on as an afterthought, the kind of thing a compositor may cut off to fit a story onto a page, fourteen lines almost hidden in the shadow of smudged microfilm. If I did believe in ghosts, I’d have sworn they had just inserted the paragraph. Above it in tiny type was this subheadline — 
INVESTIGATING WATERWORKS
 — and following were three sentences, the last one a stroboscopic beam:

It is a fact that W. E. Grayston had been for some time conducting a searching inquiry into the Joplin Waterworks affairs. It is not known that this fact had anything to do with yesterday’s trouble, but it certainly had no tendency to promote pleasant relations between the two men. Grayston charged that the city council had to an extent been bought up by the water company, and that he would shortly divulge some startling facts which would have important bearing on the spring elections.

So: the crime was not a triangle, and maybe it wasn’t even a rectangle. Maybe it was a polygon of more angles than a spectacular billiard shot. The triangle, as presented by both the defense and the prosecution, was (to mix the image) a red herring, a lurid ruse readily comprehensible to a rough-edged populace wanting a smutty tale of criminal carnality rather than one of municipal turpitude. The papers in Joplin had not, in a suspicious silence over eight months, even once in several thousand words mentioned Grayston’s investigations. What’s more, neither did the prosecuting attorney (a Joplinite), although such evidence had motive for murder written all over it.

In search of items that before seemed contradictory, elliptic, unexplained, inconsonant, or downright nonsensical, I took up the murder again, rereading what I’d earlier gathered. No longer did I need a cudgel to beat loose details into a formation because at last they fell into place and marched along like a drill team.

After more than a century, not every piece was still existent, but plenty enough remained to build a ghost outline of the new figure — a polygon indeed. Q and I dug up long-buried news stories, most of them outwardly unconnected to the homicide; we got marriage certificates, divorce petitions, Last Wills and Testaments, obituaries, funeral records, civil suits in two states, minutes of city council meetings, lodge rosters, old maps, and photographs of faces and buildings in turn-of-the-century Joplin and Carthage; we did considerable footwork on the streets, even twice reenacting William’s last steps, once with me playing the victim, and once the malefactor; we went off to find his unremembered and overgrown grave (a search leaving us crawling with ticks). We even later stopped in Illinois to see the mausoleum wherein since 1939 has lain the murderer in his marble sarcophagus.

Despite the sensational nature of the homicide, by the time of our visit more than a century later, Joplin had quite forgotten about it — acquittals reduce significance — but its drama readily drew in librarians and archivists who came up with documents we otherwise would never have found. Some of the records were in deplorable condition. One newspaper account of the murder, which might have shed even more detail, lay within a large, bound book, but the brittle paper was in more and tinier fragments than the Dead Sea Scrolls. And a possibly significant nineteenth-century legal document in Springfield had disappeared forever because it and hundreds of others had been stored in a shed alongside wet snowplows. Administrators in my own county courthouse some years previous had ordered a dump truck to back up under an attic window to catch old records pitched out for a trip to the landfill. (Beyond all that, how much American history everywhere has gone down the gullets of mice to end up as droppings, I can’t guess.)

The
Joplin Daily Globe,
the organ that in its own way had once covered over the truth, published a story about my quest. For several weeks thereafter, the postman brought to me now and then an envelope of details. A perfect crime was, except in the escape of the perpetrators, no longer perfect.

I believe now, were those people involved in or witness to the homicide still living, Q could retry the case and convict George G. Bayne not of murder in the fourth degree, nor the third, nor even the second, but of murder one, and his directors as accessories to the crime. Yet, without those witnesses and their truthful testimony, my case must today remain circumstantial; but, as you will see, those circumstantials are so numerous and coherent, probability exceeds coincidence.

That little beacon of a paragraph out of Carthage provided new, more consonant interpretations to utterances like one from Pearl’s father, which I’d previously taken as dissembling or as a simpleminded interpretation of a family tragedy: to a reporter’s asking for “the occasion of this affair,” George Payton answered, “If people would attend to their own business and let other people’s business alone, there would not be so much trouble.” He had to be speaking of gossips as well as Grayston’s investigations into the waterworks. And when William, in the letter to his father, mentioned Pearl’s asking him “not to think ahead and borrow trouble, but just to go along and let the world run as it wants to run,” it was now clear she too was talking about his civic investigations.

Grayston’s unwillingness to “go along” with public malfeasance appears also in that last letter to his father, as William asks him to “read between the lines,” some of which address “the awful corruption in Joplin.” He was, one way or another, a proponent for the “clean government” movement just then beginning to take shape in western Missouri, a cause that, a decade or so after his murder, would lead Joplin to experiment with a city-commission system.

He had once mentioned a “conspiracy” but later dropped the word, not because there wasn’t a conspiracy, I think, but because the term, until proven in court, suggests paranoia. No matter who asked it of him, Grayston was a man incapable of letting “the world run as it wants to run” when that meant harm to the public weal and to his daughter. He was, wrote his father, “goaded by more than common strife,” but I’ve found nothing to suggest he knew his challenge was putting the continuance of his days at risk.

8

Though Dead, He Speaks

O
NCE I HAD ASSEMBLED ALL THE PERTINENT FACTS
I was likely to turn up, here’s what I believe happened in Joplin, starting in the spring of 1901 when the promise of the new millennium was only three months old.

Realizing Pearl’s divorce petition prevented moving his family, Grayston decided to remain in town to investigate further the corruption of East Joplin and the related vice of West Joplin, baneful iniquities now reaching into his own home and threatening his daughter’s future. For a man of an inherited, preternaturally crusading spirit, his decision to challenge those behind the jobbery was the only conscionable action. If not religious, he was indeed ethical and thoroughly philosophical, and possessed of an intellectual underpinning that gave reason and basis for trying to correct rottenness — Spencer’s “dissolutions” — harming public welfare and his family.