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DEACON JIM MILLER

THE WORST MAN I EVER KNEW

Oh God!” cried Gus Bobbitt as the shotgun roared out of the twilight gloom. “Oh God!” The cattleman toppled from his wagon, and his panicked team ran.

Bobbitt’s neighbor Bob Ferguson jumped from his own rig, but there was no more shooting, only the clatter of hooves as a horse broke out of the thicket from which the fire had come. Ferguson recognized him as the same man who had just passed Bobbitt and Ferguson moments before. Behind his saddle had been something wrapped in what looked like a folded slicker.

Inside the slicker was a shotgun, the favorite weapon of James P. Miller, commonly known as “Deacon Jim,” from his favorite dress of black broadcloth and his pretense of churchgoing respectability. Born in Arkansas in 1866, Deacon Jim was orphaned early and sent to live with his grandparents in Coryell County, Texas. When he was eight, his grandparents were murdered; he was arrested for the crime but was sent to live with his sister and brother-in-law, John Coop. Ten years later, a shotgun killed John Coop as he slept on his front porch one evening.

This time, seventeen-year-old Miller was tried and convicted. Miller’s alibi was that for at least part of the evening he had been at a camp meeting, but his witness—a young lady—admitted at trial that he had left her and “did not return until the regular service was over and the shouting commenced.” Miller got life, but his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Miller drifted into McCulloch County, where he raced horses and punched cows for Mannen Clements Sr., who had killed at least a couple men himself. Miller got to know Mannie Clements’s equally violent son, Mannen “Mannie” Clements Jr., and Sallie, his pretty daughter.

In 1887, Mannen Clements was killed in a saloon by city marshal Joe Townsend. Shortly afterward, Townsend, riding home at night, was knocked out of his saddle by a shotgun blast and lost an arm. The ambusher was never identified, but Miller, widely suspected, left the country at a high lope.

He drifted on through the Mexican border area and would later brag that he had “lost my notch stick on Mexicans that I killed out on the border.”

In 1891, he rode into Pecos, Texas, a raw, tough town just beginning to acquire a little civilization. Its population now spent its time “making a living, going to church, picnics, engaging in a friendly drink now and then, praying three times a day and fist-fighting twice a week.”

Miller hired on as a deputy to Sheriff Bud Fraser, who did not question his antecedents. In West Texas around the turn of the century, speculating about a man’s back trail was just not done; what mattered was how he behaved today and maybe tomorrow. You did not ask about yesterday.

For a while, Miller’s conduct was all any sheriff could wish. He neither smoked nor drank and was a regular at church. He became a familiar figure in Pecos, always making his rounds in a black broadcloth coat, black boots and black Stetson. The nickname “Deacon Jim” was a natural.

In 1891, Miller married Sallie Clements. As stock theft increased in the Pecos Valley, Miller spent much time alone in devoted pursuit of rustlers. Trouble was, he didn’t seem to catch anybody. Sheriff Frazer’s brother-in-law, Barney Riggs, suggested a logical first step: fire Miller, whom he rightly suspected of rustling.

Miller laughed off the accusation, church members supported him and the town took sides. Maybe Miller didn’t respond with gunfire because his deputy’s star was such wonderful cover for his rustling business. Maybe he was reluctant to challenge Riggs, a tough hombre himself. Sentenced to life after he killed a rival for a woman’s favors, Riggs was pardoned in 1887, after he had killed two convicts who attacked the warden.

Sheriff Frazer, without proof of Miller’s dishonesty, kept him until he killed an “escaping” Mexican prisoner. Riggs alleged Miller had murdered the man because he knew where Deacon Jim had hidden a pair of stolen mules. Sure enough, on instructions supplied by Riggs, Frazer found the mules and immediately fired Miller.

In the summer of 1892, Miller opposed Frazer for sheriff and was defeated. Miller managed to win the office of city marshal, however, and began to surround himself with gunmen, including Mannie Clements and one of the Hardin clan. Animosity festered and came to a head in May 1893, while Bud Frazer was away. The criminal element simply took over Pecos.

Somebody wired Frazer, who caught a train for home. Miller arranged an ambush at the station, but citizen Con Gibson overheard the plan and wired Frazer. When he got off the train flanked by Texas Rangers, the plot fizzled; so, unfortunately, did the case against Miller, Clements and Hardin.

The Pecos ulcer continued to fester. Con Gibson, who had warned Frazer, was murdered in New Mexico by a man apparently working for Miller, but Frazer could do nothing until, finally, he took matters into his own hands on a morning in 1894.

Passing Miller in front of his hotel, Frazer roared, “Jim, you’re a thief and a murderer! Here’s one for Con Gibson!”

And he drilled a bullet into the front of Miller’s customary black coat and a second into the gunman’s right arm. Miller drew left handed and returned fire, but his slugs went wild. Frazer put three rounds into a space the size of a coffee cup, right over Deacon Jim‘s heart. He should have been dead.

But he wasn’t, and now people learned why he wore the black broadcloth coat in all weather. Underneath it was a steel plate, which had deflected Frazer’s bullets. Miller was badly bruised but very much alive and panting for revenge. “I’m going to kill Bud Frazer,” he promised, “if I have to crawl twenty miles on my knees to do it.” While Miller nursed his grudge, some leading citizens, pillars of the church, supported Miller because of his sanctimonious Sunday behavior and his recent “conversion” at a revival meeting. Frazer lost the next election.

Stung, he left Pecos for new prospects in New Mexico. But the feud wasn’t over yet. Frazer returned to Pecos briefly to settle some personal affairs and met Miller on the street. This time, Frazer was carrying a Winchester and Miller his favorite weapon, a shotgun. Knowing Killin’ Jim had been looking for him, Frazer opened up, nailing Miller in the right arm and left leg, then twice over the heart. Still, Miller stayed on his feet, and Frazer took to his heels.

Frazer was arrested, but trial was transferred to El Paso and ended in a hung jury. The second trial was put over for a year. To complete Miller’s unhappiness, Frazer was acquitted and returned to his new place in New Mexico. Both he and Miller knew their fight was not over.

In September, Frazer visited family in Toyah, about eighteen miles from Pecos. Frazer sat playing seven-up at a saloon table on the morning of September 13. Miller, alerted by a confederate, slid his shotgun through the saloon door and squeezed off both barrels. The buckshot tore Frazer’s head off in a shower of blood and bone, leaving his body still seated at the table.

Miller rode back to Pecos, where he was promptly jailed for murder. Before he went, he grandly ordered all of Frazer’s supporters to leave the county. Tough Barney Riggs, at least, stayed around town and tangled with two Miller henchmen in the Orient Saloon; one of them was Earhart, the man who had been Miller’s lookout in Toyah.

Earhart got off the first shot, but Riggs’s return fire drilled his man between the eyes. Riggs then chased the other hired gun into the street and blew the back of his head off. Scooping up a few of the brains, he promised to send them to Con Miller’s widow. Tried for murder in El Paso, Riggs was promptly acquitted.

Miller himself was tried for the Frazer murder in Eastland, Texas. After the first jury hung eleven to one, Miller spent the next months helping his minister hold prayer meetings. Little wonder, then, that a second jury acquitted him in January 1899.

Deacon Jim next ran a saloon while working as a part-time deputy in Memphis, Texas. By now, he openly boasted of his murders, even “predicting” them. He urged a man named Earp (no known relation to Wyatt) to swear away an innocent man’s life for a $10,000 reward, but Earp turned state’s evidence. That should have been the end of Miller’s career, but his conviction was reversed, and as he rode the train back to Memphis, he boasted, “Joe Earp turned state’s evidence on me, and no man can do that and live. Watch the papers, boys, and you’ll see where Joe Earp died.”

Three weeks later, Earp was ambushed and shot down.

Miller moved on, ending in 1900 in Fort Worth, where he gambled and speculated in real estate. He and his wife opened a rooming house, and he followed his familiar pattern of joining the church. His real occupation, however—and maybe his hobby—was still killing.

These were the days of the great sheep wars, and Miller hired out to exterminate sheep men at $150 per job. He may have killed as many as a dozen men, some anonymously and others on some excuse such as self-defense. He soon expanded his services to include murdering farmers whose fences obstructed the great cattle herds.

In 1904, he ambushed Lubbock lawyer James Jarrott, who represented several farmers fighting against the big cattle interests. Jim dry-gulched him with a rifle and then shot his helpless victim repeatedly as he lay writhing on the ground. “Hardest damned man to kill I ever tackled,” said Miller.

Miller got $500 for murdering Jarrott and began to strut the streets wearing a diamond ring and studs. He branched out into promoting the sale of real estate lots well submerged in the Gulf of Mexico. When in 1905 his salesman threatened to reveal the fraud, Miller shot him down in a Fort Worth hotel. Again, he escaped the law, this time on perjured alibi testimony.

Up in the Chickasaw Nation, lawman Ben Collins had incurred the wrath of the Pruitt brothers by crippling one of them during an arrest. The Pruitts knew who to call. One August evening, a man screamed as the roar of a shotgun split the night near the gate to Collins’s little farm. Collins’s wife ran from the house, but she was too late. The marshal died hard, getting off four rounds from his pistol after the first load of buckshot knocked him from his horse. But another blast tore into his face, and he was dead by the time his frantic wife got to him.

Investigation identified several conspirators, including the Pruitts, a possible triggerman called Washmood and Miller. Miller had killed the young marshal for $1,800, but he was both smart and lucky. As months dragged on before trial, one conspirator died and one of the Pruitts was killed by a lawman. Late in 1907, out on bail, Miller returned to Fort Worth, in time to answer a call from New Mexico. There was work for him.

The quarry was big game, and the pay was commensurate: $1,500. His target was none other than Pat Garrett, the legendary sheriff who had killed Billy the Kid. Garrett was semiretired now, living up in Dona Ana County, New Mexico, and he had become a major problem to powerful neighbors who coveted his land and his water.

Financially strapped, Garrett leased part of his range to one Brazil, who by prearrangement with Garrett’s avaricious neighbors imported the unthinkable: goats. Garrett was appalled and sought any way to rid his range of the voracious beasts before they destroyed it entirely.

In January 1908, Deacon Jim appeared, posing as a cattleman in the market for grazing rights. He made an attractive offer to Garrett, who began to dicker with Brazil to get those accursed goats off his land. Negotiations broke down, however, and Garrett hit Brazil and then told him what kind of a low life ran goats in cattle country.

In February, however, Garrett agreed to go to Las Cruces to talk to Deacon Jim. He traveled with Brazil and a man named Adamson, to whom he had extended hospitality the night before his trip. Garrett carried no sidearm, only a folding shotgun in its case alongside him in a buggy. Garrett, now pushing sixty, had not been an active lawman for years and obviously did not connect cattleman Miller with the deadly Deacon Jim.

And so, along the trail to Las Cruces, when he stopped to answer the call of nature, a bullet tore through the back of his head and another lodged in his stomach. The other two men drove into to Las Cruces. They claimed that Brazil had killed Garrett with his revolver in self-defense, after another argument about goats on the cattle range.

Lucero, the sheriff in Las Cruces, smelled a rat. He found Garrett still lying in the road, his shotgun beside him. But the famous sheriff ’s fly was still unbuttoned and his right hand still encased in a heavy glove, hardly the garb of an experienced gunfighter ready to attack. Lucero concluded that Garrett’s shotgun, loaded only with birdshot, “was placed near the body after he was killed.”

The killing emitted an even stronger smell after a Mounted Police officer found horse droppings and two spent Winchester shells near the spot where Garrett was killed. The same officer knew Deacon Jim’s record and discovered he was related to Adamson. But Brazil was acquitted, and Miller was never arrested, although there was reason to believe he had no cattle and no need for grazing land. It is only fair to say that a fine biography of Garrett does not accept Miller as the murderer, and there were, indeed, other excellent suspects.

Toward the end of 1908, Killin’ Jim’s friend and relative Mannie Clements died in a saloon fight in El Paso. Miller was determined to seek revenge. First, however, there was another contract—no unsung nester or humble sheep man, or even a famous sheriff, but a prominent man, a pillar of his community of Ada, Oklahoma. This time the blood price was $2,000, the richest prize of Deacon Jim’s ugly career. Vengeance would have to wait.

Ada was a bustling young town, the center of a thriving cotton trade, a city on the way up. It was also a tough place, in or near which thirtysix people had been murdered in 1908 alone. It was also home to a bitter quarrel between unscrupulous saloon operators named West and Allen and hard-nosed businessman and sometime lawman Angus Bobbitt. There had been much disorder as a result, and several killings, but the smoke had cleared, and Bobbitt’s rivals left the area to run cattle in Texas.

But they had not forgotten Bobbitt at all.

Instead, they hired Jim Miller. And so it was that Angus Bobbitt drove his wagon back from town one winter night, and a terrible scattergun tore the life out of him at the gate to his own field. Bobbitt lived about an hour, lying with his head in his wife’s lap. Tough and clear-headed to the end, he told her how to dispose of his property—and included $1,000 as a reward for the man who killed him.

The Ada citizenry was furious, and a posse immediately set off to run down Bobbitt’s killer. This time, maybe arrogant from long immunity, Miller had not covered his trail well. The posse found his horse at the home of a confederate, one John Williamson. Beaten and cowed by a crowd of angry men, Williamson spilled the beans.

Williamson was Deacon Jim’s nephew; he sheltered his uncle before and after the killing. Miller borrowed a mare from Williamson, admitted to him that he had killed a man and threatened to kill his nephew if he talked.

Miller was traced to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where his landlady told officers the deacon had been carrying a shotgun. The trail then led to a youngster who admitted he had been paid to bring Miller to Ada. West and Allen had paid Miller his $2,000 fee through one Burrell.

Burrell was arrested in Texas and returned to Ada. Then a tip led lawmen to the breaks of the Trinity River near Fort Worth—and to Miller, who was arrested without resistance. By the first of April, he was residing in the Ada jail. Allen and West were lured out of Texas by a simple—and wholly fraudulent—wire: “Come to Ada at once. Need $10,000.”

By the sixth of April, all the conspirators had been jailed. Miller, Burrell, West and Allen occupied cells in Ada. Peeler and Williamson, ready and eager to testify for the state, had been moved to another town. Allen and West were terrified that “Judge Lynch” would hurry the course of the law a little too much, accurately sensing the temper of the town. As it turned out, their instincts were excellent.

The good citizens of Ada had had enough of due process. Miller was living high on the hog in jail, shaving twice a day, changing his sheets each morning, eating steak brought in from the Elite Café and even softening the floor of his cell with carpet. He openly scorned the citizens’ efforts to bring him to justice. After all, this had been tried repeatedly before, without success.

And as he had done before, Miller hired the best lawyer around: Moman Pruitt, a dynamic litigator who had never had a client executed and would win acquittals in 304 of his 342 murder cases. This was the last straw. And so, in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 19, about forty men broke into the jail, overpowered the two lawmen there and dragged Miller, West, Allen and Burrell out of their cells and down an alley into an abandoned livery stable behind the jail.

Miller’s three codefendants were quickly jerked from the floor to twitch and convulse in ghastly silence. Then it was Miller’s turn; the implacable men around him urged him to confess his crimes. Miller, to his credit, was as impassive as he had been when he blew other men into eternity. He cared mostly about his dreadful record: “Let the record show that I’ve killed fiftyone men.”

He pulled off a diamond ring and asked that it be given to his wife; a diamond shirt stud he left to the jailer for some kindness. And then, as the noose slid around his neck, Deacon Jim Miller asked for his trademark: his black broadcloth coat. “I’d like to have my coat,” he said. “I don’t want to die naked.”

No, said the posse members. No. Maybe somebody there remembered how Bud Frazer couldn’t kill the deacon when he wore the coat; maybe the posse had just had enough of this cool killer’s effrontery. At his request, somebody did set Killin’ Jim’s hat on the side of his head, and Miller actually laughed. “I’m ready now. You couldn’t kill me otherwise. Let her rip!”

The vigilantes pulled away, and at last, after Miller’s convulsive struggles were over, one of the mob hung Deacon Jim’s famous coat across his shoulders. “It won’t help him now,” he said.

And it didn’t. The executioners went on home through a misty rain, leaving the four bodies still hanging alone in the gloom of the empty stable. Nobody ever found out who the mob members were. Nobody really cared. As an Ada historian wrote later, “[The lynching] can be written down as the one mob action in America entirely justified in the eyes of God and man.”

If this was a bit presumptuous, it is certain that most of Ada agreed. The message to hoodlums was clearly posted, and Ada was on its way to the peace and quiet its citizens so devoutly desired. With Deacon Jim Miller gone, the world was surely a cleaner, brighter place. One respected citizen spoke Miller’s epitaph, cutting cleanly through his smooth manners and churchgoing façade: “He was just a killer—the worst man I ever knew.”