In January of 1889, I moved my family into a cabin on the land of Jackson Rowe. Another tenant was Belle’s son Eddie Reed, who told me his sister Rosie Lee had seen my hard expression from Belle’s doorway and had warned her mother to make no more threats against Ed Watson. On February third, on the eve of her forty-third birthday, one of the many worthy citizens who had it in for Mrs. Starr took care of that troublous bitch once and for all, shooting her out of her saddle on the muddy river road south of my cabin. The burial took place at Younger’s Bend at noon on Wednesday. Because of that scrape over the lease, it seemed prudent to attend, and poor worried Mandy insisted upon going with me. We crossed on the ferry and rode up the ridge to Belle’s place, where Cherokee relatives and a few outlaw friends were standing silently before the cabin, squinting hard at every rider who appeared. Sure enough, my arrival caused a stir. No one spoke out but Jim Starr stalked me, flaunting his suspicions.
The casket lay inside the one-room cabin, attended by stone-faced Indian women sitting in tight rows. There was no service and no chanting, only the suspense of unfinished business.
Armed men carried the coffin from the cabin and set it down near the rough grave. When the lid was removed, the Starr clan and other Cherokees dropped ceremonial corn bread on Belle’s tight-lipped remains, after which the box was lowered into the pit. I stepped forward to help Jim Cates (who had built the coffin) bank the grave, but I had hardly touched the shovel when Starr and his sidekick Charley Acton drew their guns and yelled at me to put my hands up. Starr pointed his weapon at my eyes, accusing me of murdering his woman, as his Indians grunted beady-eyed assent, without expression.
Unsurprised, I remained steady and my wife did, too, despite the likelihood that her husband would be gunned down before her eyes. I did not trust Starr, who was very drunk, to keep his head, so instead of raising my hands as ordered, I grabbed hold of Cates and yanked him between me and the guns. Cates implored me to raise my hands or else we’d both be killed, and I finally did so, but not before saying to Jim Starr, “If you kill me, Jim, you will be killing the wrong man.” Mandy thought it was my calm demeanor that persuaded those Indians I deserved a hearing, and eventually Starr, growling, put his gun away.
That evening, however, Starr came to my house with other Indians and put me under citizen’s arrest, intending to take me to the U.S. District Court at Fort Smith. He finally agreed to my demand that Jackson Rowe and others be permitted to accompany our party as witnesses. We left for Fort Smith that very evening, stopping for the night at a farm along the way. Next day, February 8, I was marched before the Commissioner in the U.S. District Court for a preliminary hearing. Starr filed a formal affidavit “that Edgar A. Watson, did in the Indian Country… feloniously, willfully, premeditatedly and of his malice aforethought kill and murder Belle Starr, against the peace and dignity of the United States.” Deputized, he was given two weeks to assemble witnesses and evidence for a second hearing to determine whether the defendant Watson should go to trial. And so I sat cooling my heels in jail with my lease still unsettled and spring planting near. Crop or no crop, that was fine by me. I felt a lot safer behind bars than waiting for the murderous Tom Starr in the Cherokee Nation.
“I know nothing about the murder and will have no trouble establishing my innocence,” I told the publisher of the Van Buren (Arkansas) Press-Argus, who quoted me from an interview in the jail. “I know very little of Belle Starr, though she for some reason, I know not what, has been prejudiced against me. I am thirty-three years old and have a wife who is living with me. I have never had trouble with anyone and have no idea who killed her.” Quoted in the same edition, Jim Starr said: “I knew enough to satisfy me that Watson was the murderer. We buried Belle at Younger’s Bend and I went after Watson and got him. He showed no fight or I would have killed him”-lies, of course.
On the twenty-first, Starr returned to Fort Smith with Belle’s two offspring and ten other witnesses; the hearing commenced on February 22 and ended the next day. Some of my neighbors gave depositions, mentioned a quarrel, said Watson lived close by the murder scene. But Farmer Watson, who had a good reputation with the merchants as a man who paid his bills, made a better impression than Horse Thief Starr. The Argus de-scribed the accused as a man of “fair complexion, light sunburnt whiskers, and blue eyes” who was “decidedly good-looking and talked well.” Furthermore, he appeared to be “the very opposite of a man who would be supposed to commit such a crime.”
Jim Starr’s socalled evidence being deemed circumstantial, he was granted an extension while he sought more witnesses, but very little new evidence was forthcoming. On March 4, the plaintiff ’s case was judged too weak to merit the indictment of an honest white American-“a quiet, hard-working man whose local reputation is good,” said the Fort Smith Era next day. Even so, I had spent two weeks in jail before the Hanging Judge threw out the case.
Furious, Jim Starr rode away to join an outlaw band. He died less than a year later, shot down in the Chickasaw Nation by a sheriff ’s deputy who reported that the dying Starr confessed to killing his own wife with Watson’s gun. By that time, it was widely rumored that Old Tom Starr had killed her to avenge the death of his beloved son Sam, whom she had led into bad company. Pony Starr declared that a white rancher had hired a cowhand to dispose of her and others suspected an outlaw named John Middleton. Ed Watson was the only suspect ever brought to court for the murder of Belle Starr but many others would be nominated for that honor.
With her death, Maybelle was transformed by the newspapers from the ill-favored consort of robbers to the beautiful Civil War spy, border hellion, and Queen of the Outlaws whose lovers were the terror of the West. Her legend got off to a flying start on the day of her funeral in a brief news flash in the Press-Argus, which made four errors in its single sentence: It is reported that the notorious Indian (sic) woman Bell (sic) Starr was shot dead on Monday (sic) at Eufaula (sic), Indian Territory. The “woman” part was accurate but only barely. Next, a Fort Smith editor filed the following dispatch, duly printed on the front page of the New York Times:
Word has been received from Eufala, Indian Territory, that Belle Starr was killed there Sunday night. Belle was the wife of Cole Younger [and]the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders. She married Cole Younger directly after the war, but left him and joined a band of outlaws that operated in the Indian Territory. She had been arrested for murder and robbery a score of times, but always managed to escape.
After the first sentence, this report is inaccurate in every last detail.
Since Belle’s son Eddie had sworn publicly that he would “slaughter that old sow,” it seemed rather curious that no one wondered if young Reed might not have been the killer, or even if Reed and Mr. Watson, who were neighbors at Jack Rowe’s, had not collaborated in the killing, all the more likely since on that fatal Sunday, Reed had left those premises not long before his mother’s arrival, just as I had. Called by the prosecution in the hope he would testify against me, Eddie never once mentioned my name.
Dr. Jesse Mooney, who had tended Eddie after a savage beating from his mother, concluded that her son had been her killer, having been told this in so many words by Rosie Lee Reed, alias Pearl Younger, who had covered for her brother by throwing suspicion on me. Rosie Lee related to Dr. Mooney that when she found Belle dying in the road, she lifted her head from the bloody puddle and held her in her arms, at which point Belle opened her eyes and whispered, “Baby, your darned brother done this. I seen him across the fence before he cracked down on me.” Mercifully Pearl seemed unaware that her brother climbed the fence and walked over to his mother and fired a second shot into her face. Otherwise, her account was pretty accurate. I know that because I saw him do it. I was there.