DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
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Ashley researcher challenges narrative
After nearly a half century studying the famous crime family, Steve Carr questions common perceptions
BY GREGORY ENNS
Steve Carr’s interest in the Ashley Gang began as a child growing up in Lake Worth, where he would hear his grandfather, William Carr, and friend, Woody Upthegrove, talk about the gang’s exploits.
Woody was the brother of gang member Laura Upthegrove, John Ashley’s girlfriend, and did work on the periphery for the gang such as driving members around. Woody’s tales and the reminiscences of others made Carr realize how central the story of the Ashley Gang was to the history of the region and those living in South Florida in the 1910s and ‘20s.
“It happened here. It’s our story,’’ said the 69-year-old retired Palm Beach County firefighter/paramedic. “So if you live here, it’s your story.’’
THE REAL STORY
When Carr returned from service in the Army in the 1980s, his interest in the Ashley Gang led to a search, now in its fifth decade, to go beyond legends and hyperbole to discover the real story of the Ashley Gang.
Metal detector in hand, Carr spent countless weekends surveying the Ashley land in Fruita on the east side of Old Dixie Highway in southern Martin County. The Ashley property on the west side of Old Dixie Highway, including the family cemetery, had been purchased for the development of the Mariner Sands residential community in 1978. Fruita was part of the original Spanish land grant called Gomez.
Carr’s site work stopped when the state and county purchased the east side of the Ashley property and other parcels to create Seabranch Preserve Park in 1991. State law prohibits metal detecting in non-coastal parks and requires permits for digging for artifacts on state-owned land.
SITE WORK
Through his earlier research, Carr said he found the site hidden in a hammock where Ashley patriarch Joe Ashley and Deputy Fred Baker were killed. The site, which had been set on fire after the sheriff’s raid, was showered with burnt bullet casings and broken moonshine jars. Additionally, Carr found two other sites where Joe ran stills. Near the shootout site is what Carr believes is the site where the Ashley home stood. He believes a second home built for Lugenia Ashley after deputies set fire to her home Jan. 9, 1924, was located across Dixie Highway near the family cemetery.
Besides running stills, the Ashleys also imported labeled liquor from the Bahamas, which they sold illegally during Prohibition. Four of the Ashley brothers — Ed, Bill, John and Frank — all participated in their father’s moonshine business. A fifth brother, Bob, had died in 1915 in a shootout after killing two law enforcement officers.
The Ashleys and others would make runs to the Bahamas to retrieve the liquor and offload it in what was then called Salerno. It was then hauled by mule cart a mile or so along a wide sandy trail and off-loaded and hidden near the Ashley home, where it would be distributed clandestinely by car or truck to points throughout both coasts of Florida.
SYMPATHETIC VIEW
In his years of research, Carr developed a sympathetic view toward the Ashleys, saying they had to negotiate the legal system under the corrupt practices of Sheriff George Baker and his successor, his son Bob Baker.
In the story of the Ashleys, Carr said, “there seems to be a good side to the bad guys and a bad side to the good guys. Sorting it all out gets kind of sticky.’’ His conclusions upend many common perceptions about the Ashley Gang story.
Carr believes the feud between the Bakers and the Ashleys was in part fueled by race.
Joe Ashley had employed in his moonshine stills members of the African American community in nearby New Monrovia and later built a rooming house for them. Carr said Joe also helped fund construction of the African American church in New Monrovia. He said revenue from Joe’s stills — and perhaps his son’s bank robberies — may have helped the Ashleys provide loans for the poor whites and blacks unable to get them from banks. Carr said George Baker, a Ku Klux Klan leader, did not want blacks living in Palm Beach County.
“There were people that were destitute,’’ Carr said. “The moonshining business actually saved the community. Fruita was grow and expanding.’’
Carr also believes the Ashley train and bank robberies targeted institutions seen as oppressive by poor whites and blacks. He said he believes the 1915 robbery of a Florida East Coast Railway train by the earliest members of the Ashley Gang was done in retribution for the railway reneging on an agreement with Joe Ashley to build a delivery depot at Fruita, which would have enabled Joe to ship his tomatoes from there when he was in a more legitimate line of business. The Bank of Stuart, robbed twice by the Ashleys, was a target because it held the money of the region’s wealthy.
As for the event that set off John Ashley’s public career as a criminal, Carr aligns with the prevailing conclusion that John Ashley intentionally killed Seminole DeSoto Tiger on Dec. 29, 1911. But while prosecutors argued that John killed Tiger so he could take possession of his valuable furs, Carr believes John killed Tiger over his refusal to pay for a large delivery of liquor, perhaps supplied by his brother, Bill, and took the furs, which he later sold, as compensation. Carr does not buy John’s argument that he killed Tiger in self-defense after Tiger pointed a gun at him and threatened to kill him because the bullet wounds Tiger received indicated Tiger was trying to defend himself.
QUESTIONS REMAIN
Two of the biggest questions regarding the Ashley Gang are whether they were executed by law officers at the Sebastian River bridge and who alerted law authorities that they would be traveling north to Jacksonville?
The publication of Alice Luckhardt’s O.B. Padgett — A Florida Son in 2009 rather conclusively answered both questions. The book contained the written reminiscences of Padgett, the former Stuart police chief who was at the bridge shooting. Because of illness, Padgett did not testify at the inquest into the killings of the Ashley Gang, where his fellow lawmen testified that John Ashley, his nephew, Hanford Mobley, Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton had not been handcuffed and were shot when John gave a signal and reached for his revolver.
But in his reminiscences, recorded in the late1970s, Padgett wrote: “The men were killed in cold blood while handcuffed and unarmed. They very meekly gave themselves up. They never argued; they never attempted to escape; there was no talking between them.’’
INFORMANT IDENTIFIED
Padgett’s memoirs also answered the question of who tipped off law enforcement. Padgett wrote that John Ashley’s brother-in-law, George Mario, had told him on Nov. 1, 1924, of the gang’s plans to leave for Jacksonville that night. Mario was upset because John Ashley had requisitioned Mario’s new Ford touring car for the trip, and Mario needed it to transport his pregnant wife, Lola, John Ashley’s sister, for medical care in case of complications. Lola, blind at birth, had suffered a stillbirth the year before.
“They had no way to get her to a doctor,’’ Carr said. “Clearly John had stolen his car to be used for his getaway. That car was important to George Mario and taking it was the last straw.’’
Carr said he believes Sheriff Baker paid Padgett for the tip, and Padgett in turn paid Mario. Baker denied paying for the tip, though he acknowledged that he had paid out up to $5,000 over the years for tips about the Ashleys.
Carr found the recorded events of the death of Laura Upthegrove by suicide in 1927 baffling. According to accounts of her death, Laura was working at her mother’s gas station near Lake Okeechobee when she got in a dispute with a customer over the quality of liquor she had sold him. By coincidence, deputies Elmer Padgett and A. Brownlee were on the scene to visit the Upthegroves and witnessed Laura chasing the man from the store with a gun.
Back at the store, Laura’s mother took the gun away from her. Laura then was reported to have taken a bottle of disinfectant, swallowed its contents and then collapsed and died several minutes later.
Carr said it was too coincidental that the deputies were at the station at the time of Laura’s death and something else was in play. He believes they were there to intimidate Laura into revealing where money from robberies had been hidden. “I can’t come up with another reason why they would be there at the exact same time that happened.’’
Carr said he also believes that Bill Ashley, the last of the surviving Ashley men, killed Mario during a rowboat trip on the St. Lucie Canal in 1932. Mario’s death was blamed on an accidental drowning, but relatives and friends close to Bill said he later acknowledged killing Mario in retaliation for John’s and Hanford’s deaths on the bridge.
“He kept his vengeance cold,” Carr said. “Knowing George gave the information that allowed sheriff to get into position not only to capture John but to kill him, I think that weighed heavily on Bill.’’
ANOTHER EXCEPTION
Carr also believes that Deputy Fred Baker was killed by friendly fire from one of his fellow deputies and not by John during the moonshine still shootout on Jan. 9, 1924. He said the condition of Baker’s body — his right lung was punctured and his shoulder was nearly torn off —indicated he had been hit with a military-style weapon and not a rifle, the gun John Ashley was firing. He also cites an interview Deputy Sim Jackson had with editor Fenwick Cole at the time in which Jackson reported that Fred Baker asked deputy Elmer Padgett after being shot, “Elmer, what did you shoot me in the back for?’’
When Carr wasn’t researching Ashley sites, he sought out Ashley contemporaries to interview them and capture their firsthand memories. One was his grandfather’s old friend, Woody Upthegrove, whose interview was recorded and transcribed. Another person interviewed was Ashley contemporary Zeb Crews, who married Eva Ashley’s daughter, Lugenia. Crews was 102 when Carr interviewed him.
ACQUIRING THE COLLECTION
But it was Carr’s meetings with another Ashley contemporary, Arthur W. “Bink’’ Glisson, a collector of Ashley Gang and other criminal memorabilia and a founder of the modern-day community of Wellington, that led Carr in a new direction.
Carr’s interest in the Ashley Gang impressed Glisson to the point that before his death in 2000 he gave his Ashley Gang collection to Carr on one condition. “When he got older and could no longer share that he passed it to me with the caveat that I had to use it for education,’’ Carr said.
Carr spent years traveling around the region giving educational lectures on the Ashley Gang, until a few years ago when he decided to donate the collection to the Elliott Museum in Stuart, which created a permanent Ashley Gang exhibit that opened in January 2022. Carr said he has never sold any of his Ashley memorabilia.
“I just within last 10 years realized hat I don’t have the energy to get out and use it for education, so we decided to donate it to the Elliott Museum. Everything that was donated to me is at the Elliott.’’
The collection of 75 objects includes John Ashley’s glass eyeball, John’s blood-stained hat used in the first Bank of Stuart robbery, a frying pan and coffee pot riddled with bullet holes, revolvers, shoes and a belt buckle. Also on display is a moonshine still of the era. One coveted Ashley object not on display at the museum is John’s 25/35 Winchester rifle, which is owned by a descendant of St. Lucie Sheriff J.R. Merritt, who led the 1924 ambush of the gang.
STORY OF THE EYEBALL
Of all the items, the eyeball has the greatest interest. John lost his eye in the 1915 Bank of Stuart robbery when confederate Kid Lowe accidentally or purposely discharged his gun as the gang departed the scene. When John began a prison sentence at Raiford in 1917 he was fitted for the prosthetic eye, which has a vivid blue iris.
After John made threats in 1924 to Sheriff Bob Baker to meet him for a showdown in the Everglades, Baker privately retorted that he planned to turn Ashley’s eyeball into a watch fob. When John and the other three were gunned down on the Sebastian River bridge, deputy Elmer Padgett scooped John’s eyeball out of his head and later gave it to Baker.
Incensed, John’s girlfriend, Laura Upthegrove, sent Baker a letter that said, “If you don’t put John’s eye back in his head before they bury him, I’ll crawl on my hands and knees through hell to kill you.’’
Baker complied. “I knew that she meant what she said,’’ Baker said in an interview before his death in 1933. “It meant that I would have to kill her or she would kill me, just over a glass eye that belonged to her man. I sent it back.’’
Although many accounts say the eyeball was returned to John’s body before burial, Carr said Laura kept the eyeball. When Laura died in 1927, her mother, Emma Tracy, became custodian. Emma, who attached a note describing the provenance of the eyeball, in turn gave it to her son, Woody, who sold it to Bink Glisson in the 1960s. Today, the eyeball is on display in a glass case at the Elliott, along with Mrs. Tracy’s note.
GROUP EFFORT
Carr helped create the Elliott exhibit with some 30 museum staff members and volunteers, including his wife, Vivienne, who painted much of the background scenery. In addition to interviews and site research he conducted, Carr said he and “many other historians whose shoulders I have stood on to get the truth out of this story,’’ including Jeff Whittman, Sandra Thurlow, Linda Geary, Patrick Messmer, John Cooper, Lisa Upthegrove and Michael Mortimer. He said some information has also come from people in the community with information or memorabilia related to the Ashleys. “We always welcome input from the community to help us understand the story better,’’ he said.
Rob Steele, CEO and president of the Historical Society of Martin County, which runs the Elliott, said the exhibit Carr donated has regional and national appeal, with some visitors saying they have come to the museum just for the Ashley exhibit.
"Our very popular Ashley Gang exhibit was made possible by Steve Carr's lifelong commitment to researching and collecting artifacts [related to] this incredibly significant local history story,’’ Steele said. “His work is the cornerstone of this project."
Steele noted that the exhibit attracted the attention of the Discovery Channel, which featured the museum collection and the Ashley story in the show Expedition Unknown with Josh Gates.
Carr believes the Ashley story will continue to change and be updated as more research is conducted.
“If I wrote a book 20 years ago I’d have to apologize because the story keeps morphing itself into something else.’’
Nov. 2024
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