LIVING HISTORY
FORT PIERCE, NOVEMBER 6, l924 -- An inquest into the
killing of John Ashley, notorious east coast bandit, and three companions
by Sheriff J. R. Merrit and a force of St. Lucie and Palm
Beach County deputies at the Sebastian River Bridge last Saturday
night came to a sudden halt Wednesday afternoon.
The unexpected adjournment of the inquest came after four
hours of startling testimony by T.R. Miller and S.O. Davis, two
Sebastian young men, whose evidence tended to show that the four
desperadoes might have been shot down while handcuffed and
defenseless.
This story describes how Will Fee, the Fort Pierce undertaker
who prepared the bodies, had been called as the first
witness. He testified that there had been no marks on the
bodies to indicate that they had been handcuffed. This was
contradicted by the later testimony of Miller and Davis, both
of whom were in a car that had come to a stop at the chain
across the bridge, directly in front of the Ashley’s car. They
claimed to have witnessed the arrest, and testified that when
they last saw the prisoners they were all alive and handcuffed.
Both Miller and Davis had left the bridge before the
shooting started.
Another story gave the following account of the 2nd
Coroner’s Jury:
FORT PIERCE - NOVEMBER 8, l924 - Justifiable homicide
was the unanimous verdict of the second coroner's jury empaneled
Saturday to investigate the killing of John Ashley, bandit leader,
and three companions by St. Lucie and Palm Beach County officers
at the Sebastian Bridge on the night of Nov. l
Sheriff Merritt and the deputies who assisted in the capture of
the Ashley gang all took the stand and refuted the testimony given
in a previous hearing to the effect that they saw Ashley and his
companions handcuffed before they were shot.
FRONTIER JUSTICE
As a boy, Hap Merritt remembers the stories of frontier justice
he and his grandfather and friend, O.E. “Three-Fingers”
Wiggins, would swap on the porch of Merritt’s home on
Saturday night. Hap Merritt says the two had been marshals
in Bartow, Florida, a lawless town after the turn of the century,
and remembers them saying, “We cleaned up that town in
six months. There were a lot of funerals.”
J.R. Merritt himself experienced the other side of the law.
In 1915, St. Lucie’s sheriff-to-be was himself convicted of
assault and attempted murder in Avon Park, and served six
months at Raiford.
“He was railroaded,” Hap Merritt says. J.R. later received a
full pardon from Gov. Cary A. Hardee, who appointed J.R.
sheriff of St. Lucie County on Nov. 7, 1922.
In later years, Hardee was among the many visitors to
J.R.’s home. The sheriff, who later became a county commissioner,
died in 1949.
Hap Merritt doesn’t discount theories that his grandfather
and the deputies exercised a form of frontier justice. The
many congratulatory telegrams Merritt received from fellow
law officers was evidence of this. Consider, for example, this
one from Sheriff C.M. Hand of Sanford to Merritt on
November 3, 1924: “CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR WIPING
OUT THE ASHLEY GANG.”
“I think the last thing he told his posse on the bridge that
night was that if they moved to shoot them,” he said. “Even
before they left Fort Pierce that night I believe granddad told
Three Fingers that they would not be bringing any prisoners
back to Fort Pierce jail that night. Remember, the Ashleys
had a history of killing policemen and breaking out of jails,
and granddad and Three Fingers knew how they cleaned up
Bartow.”
“They were both good men, and good lawmen for their
time.”
LAST OF THE ASHLEYS
As far as he knows, Albert Ashley, 67, says he and his sister
may be the last of the Ashley family around this part of
Florida. Albert’s grandfather was Frank Ashley, who was lost
at sea in 1921.
Ashley says his father, Hugh Ashley, who was just a toddler
when Frank Ashley was lost, never talked about the
family history. “My dad didn’t have anything to do with
them,” says Albert, who lives in Fort Pierce.
Albert’s knowledge is basically what he’s read in the books
by Hix and Williams and a few chance encounters he’s had
with people who said they knew the family or had some
connection to the case. But in his family, it was pure silence.
“I never heard anyone mention anything about it. They
were people who came a long time before me.”
Three members of the Ashley Gang are buried in the Ashley family cemetery. While most accounts spell the youngest gang member’s name as Hanford
Mobley, his tombstone spells it Handford. Once in remote woodlands, the cemetery is now next to the 18th hole of the Mariner Sands Country Club.
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