Completing his research for the biography of E. J. Watson, Lucius had placed notices in local newspapers requesting information. These notices attracted the anticipated motley of old Watson anecdotes, but astonishingly, they also produced a copy of the affadavit given by Bill House in the Lee County Courthouse after his father’s death-the document that his brother Eddie had refused to show him.
My name is Mr. William House residing at Chokoloskee Island, Ten Thousand Islands, Florida.
Mr. Ed J. Watson was at Chokoloskee when the story come about the Chatham murders. He swore that Leslie Cox had done him wrong and not only him but the three people he murdered. Watson left to fetch the Sheriff and the men thought they’d seen the last of him. This was Sunday evening, October 16, the eve of the Great Hurricane.
Three days after the storm, Ed Watson come back through. Mr. D. D. House advised he better stay right there until the Sheriff come and Watson said he didn’t need no Sheriff, said he knew his business and would take care of it himself. Aimed to go home to Chatham River “and straighten that skunk out before he got away”-them were his own words. He promised to return with Cox or Cox’s head.
Watson was red-eyed in his appearance, very wild, and nobody didn’t care to interfere with him. The men there at Smallwood’s landing figured he’d keep right on going, head for the east coast railroad or Key West. This time they’d seen the last of him for sure. But last Monday October 24 toward evening, his motor was heard coming from the south’ard and a bunch of fellers went to the landing to arrest him. Watson seen that crowd of armed men waiting but he come on anyway, he was that kind.
The hurricane had tore the dock away, weren’t nothing left of her but pilings, so he run his launch aground west of the boat way. He jumped ashore with his shotgun quick and bold, got himself set before one word was spoken. Had his weapon pointed down but hitched, ready to swing. He told the men he had killed Cox but the body fell off his dock into the river and was lost. He drawed a old hat out of his coat, showed the bullet hole from his revolver. Then he shoved his middle finger through that hole and twirled the hat on it and laughed. Some of us seen he was laughing at us. Nobody felt like laughing along with him.
Mr. D. D. House was not the ringleader, never mind what some has said, but no other man stepped forward so my dad done the talking. I and my next two brothers, Dan Junior and Lloyd, stood alongside him. Mr. D. D. House reminded Watson that a head was promised and a hat weren’t good enough so the men would have to go to Chatham Bend, look for the body. And he notified Mr. Watson he must hand over his weapons in the meantime. That brought hard words. After a short argument, Watson swung his shotgun up at point-blank range. Some has said the man just meant to bluff the crowd back while he escaped: I believe he aimed at us with intent to kill, only his shells misfired. We opened up on him all in a roar and he fell down dead.
Some has been trying to point fingers, claiming we was laying for him, fixing to gun him down no matter what. Might of been true of some of ’em. Houses never knew nothing about no such thing.
Others give hints that one man lost his head and fired first and that this man was the only one responsible. I don’t rightly know who fired first and they don’t neither on account of the whole bunch fired together. We took the life of E. J. Watson to defend our own and all present was in on it from start to finish.
X
[William W. House: his mark]
Transcribed and attested: (signed) E. E. Watson, Dep. Court Clerk
Lee County Courthouse, Fort Myers, Florida, October 27, 1910
Oddly, this document had been sent anonymously, without a note, in a coffee-stained envelope mailed from Ochopee, a construction camp post office out along the Trail. What startled Lucius was his brother’s signature as deputy court clerk: he had almost forgotten that Eddie had transcribed the testimony of those men. In his biography-in-progress, Lucius sought the historian’s objective tone:
While this affidavit is critical as the one firsthand account of E. J. Watson’s death that has come to light, it raises more questions than it answers: its main interest lies in what can be inferred between the lines. House’s statement makes clear that E. J. Watson was killed despite the Negro’s testimony at Pavilion Key that the brutal slayings at Chatham Bend had been committed not by Mr. Watson but by his foreman, Leslie Cox, a convicted killer and fugitive from justice who had turned up at the Watson place a few months earlier.
As for the murder at Chokoloskee on October 24th, Bill House asserts that killing Mr. Watson was an act of self-defense while conceding that Watson did not open fire on the crowd or otherwise assault or harm any man there. It has been argued that no malice aforethought was involved-that the horrifying murders at Chatham Bend followed so swiftly by the calamity of the Great Hurricane had driven this isolated community to a breaking point of terror and exhaustion which caused those men to meet Watson’s bluff with that fatal barrage. However, widespread rumors in the community suggest that at least a few of the participants had planned the shooting in advance, justifying what amounted to a lynching with the argument that otherwise Watson might have evaded justice “as he had done so often in the past.”
The House account leaves open another urgent question: did one man execute him with the first shot and the others fire reflexively in the confusion? Though House denies this, the evident need to deny it gives substance to a rumor that the undersigned had dismissed as highly improbable. If there is truth in it, then who was House so anxious to protect?
In appraising Mr. Watson’s degree of responsibility, one must first determine whether or not Cox killed his three victims on Watson’s orders and whether or not Watson killed Cox when he returned to Chatham Bend after the hurricane. If he did, was he enforcing his own code of retribution, or-as Sheriff Tippins believed-was he eliminating the one witness whose testimony could do him damage in a murder trial, on the not unreasonable assumption that even if the Negro had not retracted his unsupported account of Mr. Watson’s involvement, a black man’s testimony might well have been discounted by a white jury?
In the climate of fear in the community, almost nobody believed that Leslie Cox had been eliminated by E. J. Watson; to this day, a local dread persists that Cox survived. If so, what became of him? Is he still alive back in the Glades? With the passage of years, it seems ever less likely that we shall learn the fate of that cold-blooded killer who appeared so randomly and wreaked such havoc, only to vanish. Somewhere in the backcountry of America, an old man known in other days as Leslie Cox might still squint in the sun, and spit, and revile his fate.
In preparing his case for the reinstatement of E. J. Watson’s claim on Chatham Bend, Attorney Dyer had asked to see Lucius’s early draft of his Watson biography. What drew his attention immediately was Hoad Storter’s account of transporting new cane from Chatham River to Moore Haven on Lake Okeechobee, which seemed to establish that Planter Watson’s hardy strain had provided the seed cane for the huge new agriculture in central Florida. Ever scrupulous, Lucius felt obliged to append a footnote: when the bad hurricane of 1926 broke down the Okeechobee dikes and drowned more than a hundred souls around Moore Haven, the devastation was blamed locally on “Emperor” Watson, whose “bad seed,” as one newspaper called it, was “steeped in human blood.”
Excising that fool reminder of those hurricane mortalities, Attorney Dyer had shown the story of E. J. Watson’s cane to United Sugar Associates (“U.S.A. SPELLS AMERICA!”) for whom he served as legal counsel in its ongoing appropriation of huge swaths of public marshland in that region. U.S.A., Dyer predicted, would endorse any worthwhile literature about pioneer sugar plantations and the early prominence of sugarcane in south Florida agriculture and might well subsidize its publication; the published biography, he felt sure, would also lend strength to the Watson land claim.
Because of the favorable reception of his History, Lucius had been offered a small advance on the Watson biography by the university press. At the last minute, however, the press had stipulated the use of a pen name for the biography lest the author appear less than objective. Refusing to hide behind a pseudonym, Lucius threatened to withdraw the book, whereupon Attorney Dyer fired off a furious letter, reminding him of his responsibilities: without the enhancement of E. J. Watson’s reputation in “our book”. said Dyer, there was little hope that the Chatham land claim would survive on its merits in court.