LIVING HISTORY
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Ed Register, 90, remembers that day 83 years ago when he saw the bodies of the Ashley Gang lying outside of the Fee Hardware and Mortuary in Fort
Pierce. “It scared the tar out of me,” he says.
ing in 1924 in which the four bodies of the Ashley Gang were
laid out after being shot by lawmen at the Sebastian Bridge
the night before.
Nearly 83 years later, Register meets us outside the building
on Second Street and Avenue A where Will Fee sold
hardware and caskets, a commodity that made running a
funeral parlor a natural side business. Today, a decorating
store occupies the space. As if it were that very Sunday
morning, Register tells us how the bodies were positioned on
the sidewalk, like quarry displayed after a big hunt.
On the cold slab of sidewalk lay the one-eyed John Ashley,
the leader; his nephew, Handford Mobley; and fellow gangsters
Clarence Middleton and Ray “Shorty” Lynn.
“I can picture one of the bodies in particular,” Register
recalls. “He was very young, late teens or early 20s, out on
the cement sidewalk, uncovered and looking pale because all
his blood had settled. They were all uncovered, lying on
their backs with their arms at their sides. It scared the tar out
of me.”
I asked Register the question that has been the center of
controversy since their deaths. Was the Ashley Gang shot
while trying to escape from St. Lucie County Sheriff J.R.
Merritt and his posse of lawmen? Or, were they summarily
executed while handcuffed that night on the Sebastian
Bridge?
“No, no handcuffs in sight” was Register’s answer.
THE STORY LINE
While the Ashley Gang’s exploits never caught the national
media’s attention like Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone,
they nevertheless captured the imagination of pre-television
South Floridians and their newspapers.
The Ashley Gang legend, built over more than a decade,
had all the elements for a headline-grabbing story line: a
handsome ringleader who wore a patch over his eye, family
loyalty, romance, Robin Hood-like anecdotes of kindness,
bootlegging, an Everglades hideout, bank and train robberies,
shootouts, escapes and betrayal.
And like Al Capone’s feud with the original G-Man, Elliott
Ness, John Ashley had his own feud with two consecutive
Palm Beach County sheriffs, George Baker and his son
Robert C. “Bob” Baker. Ashley and the Bakers had been playing
cops and robbers for years but the killings of Ashley’s
father, Joe, and Palm Beach County Deputy Fred Baker, kin
to the Bakers, in a shootout in the months before Sebastian
Bridge elevated it to the next level: a deadly family feud.
COLLECTIVE SIGH
The deaths of the Ashley Gang in 1924 brought a collective
sigh of relief from Florida lawmen, as witnessed from the