DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
THE TUMULTUOUS END OF THE ASHLEY GANG
The Ashley Gang came to a violent end on Nov. 1, 1924, but that was hardly the end of the story
BY GREGORY ENNS
With John Ashley in prison and three of his brothers dead from their criminal activities, leadership of the Ashley Gang in 1922 fell to John’s 17-year-old nephew, Hanford Mobley.
Newspapers described him as the “boy leader’’ and “supposed leader of the Ashley Gang.” His prominence with the band of criminals once known simply as the Ashley Gang had led many newspapers to begin referring to the group as the Ashley-Mobley Gang.
At 5-feet, 5-inches tall and 125 pounds, the boyish Hanford by outward appearances seemed an unlikely candidate to act in his uncle’s stead. Yet he was fearless and deliberate, often packing a .38 revolver. He also had an impeccable criminal pedigree.
UNUSUAL CHILDHOOD
Hanford was the son of John Ashley’s oldest sister, Mary Alice, and her husband, George Mobley, and the family lived across the road from Joe and Lugenia in Fruita. Growing up so close to the Ashley headquarters, Hanford was intimately familiar with his uncles’ and grandfather’s illegal activities.
He was raised on a steady diet of stories about his outlaw relatives: his Uncle John killing DeSoto Tiger and living as a fugitive from justice; John’s many escapes from jail; John and Bob and others robbing a train and the Bank of Stuart and then Bob shooting and killing two law officers while trying to break John out of jail. Then there were the rum-running activities of his grandfather Joe and uncles Ed, Frank, Bill and John, that he grew up as witness to and would become a part of.
Hanford idolized his Uncle John, and had frequent interactions with John during the many years John was on the run and used the Ashley home and Fruita as a base of resupply and communications.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
Hanford’s father, George Wesley Mobley, also had a criminal past. In 1897, at the age of 18, he and an accomplice were convicted of the shooting death of John Low in DeSoto County and sentenced to life in prison, but he was released in 1900 after receiving a pardon from the governor.
George married Mary Alice in 1901. She was 15 and he was 22. In 1905, the couple was living in Arcadia, George’s hometown. Daughter Laeto was born in 1903, followed by Hanford in 1905, Luby in 1910 and William in 1914. The Mobley family eventually moved to Fruita to be close to Joe and Lugenia. Mary, named after her father’s sister, was close to her mother, often providing a second pair of hands.
In Fruita, George had worked as a railway watchman, dredge operator in Stuart and Jupiter, kept bees, and farmed pineapples in Salerno.
LEARNING YOUNG
Growing up next to his grandparents in Fruita, Hanford was close to their daughter, Daisy, who, though his aunt, was just a year older.
He attended high school 10 miles away in Stuart and was popular on campus, often driving the family’s Model T to school. Classmates remembered that he had dressed as a woman at a high school masquerade party while in the ninth grade in 1921.
Outside school, Hanford had another interest. He had begun making runs with gang members to the Bahamas to pick up liquor and bring it back for black market resale in the early days of Prohibition, part of an extensive bootlegging operation run by his grandfather Joe and with the participation of all his uncles. Besides these runs, the gang also advanced to hijacking other bootleggers, whether on land or sea, and taking their cargo.
Apparently desperate to make a Bahamas run on his own, Hanford and others stole a yacht in Palm City from a Chicago millionaire and took it to the Bahamas, where on March 25, 1922, they held up storekeepers on several islands.
The Department of Justice swore out a warrant for piracy against Hanford. The charge against him was serious. He faced a sentence of life in prison.
But instead of dressing for court and appearing in Tampa to face a charge of piracy on May 2, 1922, Hanford slipped on a woman’s black dress and white blouse, stockings and high heels and large-brimmed veiled hat.
Clutching a handbag, he headed out with Clarence Middleton, 22, and Roy Matthews, 28, to rob the Bank of Stuart, the same bank Hanford’s uncles, John and Bob, and Kid Lowe had robbed seven years earlier.
Both Middleton and Matthews had been working bootlegging operations with Hanford. Middleton was the second oldest of seven children of Stephen and Margaret Middleton of Jacksonville. His father had died 15 months before. Middleton’s older brother, Jack, was the Florida heavyweight boxing champion.
Middleton, who also used the alias Jones, was somewhat bigger than Hanford and rough looking. At 5 feet, 7 inches and weighing 143 pounds, he had black hair and blue eyes, a fair complexion and several small scars on his face.
Matthews, who also went by Robert Matthews, was addicted to opiates and was “known to have an utter disregard of the law” and was fearless, said author Hix Stuart, who was marshal of Stuart at the time of the robbery and would later go on to write a book about the Ashleys. For the Bank of Stuart robbery, Matthews had blackened his face with burnt cork in an attempt to conceal his identity.
HOW IT WENT DOWN
According to newspaper accounts and Stuart’s The Notorious Ashley Gang, the Bank of Stuart robbery went like this:
With Middleton as a lookout waiting for them outside, Hanford and Matthews walked into the bank about 11:45 a.m. and ordered cashier Percy Fuge and assistant cashier Peter Hyer to hold up their hands and back away from the counter. Hanford’s disguise apparently didn’t work as Fuge immediately recognized him, as did another employee, John Taylor.
Hanford headed toward the bank’s vault and ordered the employees to lie down on the floor while Middleton entered the bank and cleaned out the cash drawers at the teller windows. Hyer was ordered to pick up silver that had been strewn about on the floor, with the money placed in a sheet or suitcase. Meanwhile, Hanford entered the vault, took out several bundles of cash and then at gunpoint ordered Fuge to open another time vault.
Without Hanford seeing, Fuge turned a time lock so that the vault wouldn’t open. Meanwhile, B.H. Anderson, a local barber, entered the bank to make a transaction but tried to leave when he saw the men wielding guns. As Anderson tried to leave, Middleton jumped out of the car, drew a revolver and ordered Anderson back inside. The commotion apparently frightened Hanford and Middleton, and they headed toward the car and fled with $8,133.14 in currency and loose silver.
The robbers then headed north on Dixie Highway to White City then west toward Okeechobee Road, where about a mile west of Fort Pierce they exchanged the stolen Buick for a stolen Ford.
THE CHASE IS ON
Marshal Stuart, who had heard cashier Fuge yell that the bank had been robbed, took chase until reaching the abandoned Buick. Palm Beach County Sheriff Bob Baker had caught up with Stuart and took the trail from there. When Stuart took possession of the Buick to return it to its owner, he discovered the woman’s clothing Hanford was wearing. Two bottles of whiskey also were inside.
Meanwhile, Baker and a posse of five other deputies kept on the trail across the state in driving rain.
The Buick had been stolen from a Palm Beach taxi driver who had been hired to transport them the night before. As daylight approached, the gang tied the driver to a tree and gagged him near Gomez and stole $30 from him.
Law authorities said the Ford, the vehicle placed in Fort Pierce for the transfer from the Buick, was stolen from D.J. Smith of West Palm Beach, a relative of Hanford.
Hanford and Middleton registered at a hotel in Plant City, but drew suspicion from the proprietor, who called the town’s marshal. The two then headed to Lakeland, where they were captured at the train depot by a motorcycle policeman who had received a bulletin to be on the lookout for them.
The Ford had apparently been in a collision, as Baker found part of a fender torn loose. Later, at a grocery store, Baker learned that the two had inquired about the best way to get to Savannah without going through Jacksonville and were told that they could get a train out of Plant City, a tip that prompted Baker to alert Plant City law authorities.
A Lakeland motorcycle policeman and a Plant City policeman, W.B. Dormany, headed to the Plant City depot where they encountered Middleton and Hanford, who reached for their guns but were overpowered. They had with them a bag of silver worth $2,335.05 of the total $8,133.14 take.
MATTHEWS STAYS FREE
Meanwhile, Matthews had gone to a store to get cigarettes. When he returned, he later told authorities, he saw his friends in the custody of officers. He then slipped around the station and boarded a train that was pulling out for Jacksonville.
After his arrest, Hanford said in an interview with Baker that the robbery was planned by two other men who met them in Fort Pierce, driving them away and letting them have $2,335 in silver. He said the plan was to later meet in Savannah, Georgia, to divvy up the stolen money. When Baker pressed Hanford for information about Matthews, Hanford cursed the sheriff and “stated his uncle had never squealed and he did not intend to do so either,” according to Stuart’s book.
Both Hanford and Middleton had tickets for Savannah when they were arrested at the Plant City train depot. Hanford also claimed that Matthews had held him up with a revolver and taken the money from him. Matthews was later arrested in Griffin, Georgia.
A judge set bail of $15,000 for Hanford and Middleton and $10,000 for Matthews, who was identified as aiding authorities in the case. During a preliminary hearing May 30, 1922, Hyer, the bank employee, positively identified Matthews, who also was known as Robert. He said he had known Hanford for about eight months. But when pressed to make a positive identification of Hanford, he said he could not because it was impossible to see through a veil the face of the person wearing the women’s clothing.
WAITING FOR TRIAL
Unable to make bail, the three would learn later that summer that because of a heavy case load their trial wouldn’t be scheduled until early 1923. The judge overseeing their case also ordered them transferred from the Palm Beach County Jail, which was being renovated, to the Broward County Jail in Fort Lauderdale.
But Hanford and Matthews never went to trial. On Dec. 14, 1923, they escaped from the Fort Lauderdale jail. The two men forced their way through a skylight leading to the roof and then reached the ground with the aid of blankets and sheets tied together.
Middleton, also being held with them, decided not to participate and told deputies the escape had been planned for weeks.
THE LOVE INTEREST
Besides Hanford Mobley, Clarence Middleton and Roy Matthews, another person worked behind the scenes to execute the Bank of Stuart robbery, casing the bank in the weeks before with how-to instructions relayed by John Ashley from prison. Her name: Laura Upthegrove, John’s lover.
Laura likely met John in 1920 during the three years he was on the lam. John had made his first prison escape from the state convict camp at Milligan on July 10, 1918, with Tom Maddox of Madison County and was recaptured in June 1921.
THRILL-SEEKER
The late historian Alice Luckhardt, who devoted years of research to the life of Laura, wrote in an article appearing in Indian River Magazine that Upthegrove gave up a life of marriage and motherhood for the thrill of being with John and joining the Ashley Gang.
According to Luckhardt’s account:
The restless Laura was a 23-year-old mother of four children and on a second marriage when in early 1920 she left her husband, Earnest “Buck” Tillman, for a life of adventure with John Ashley.
Laura was born Oct. 5, 1896, and grew up near Ocala, the oldest of nine children. At 14, she married 26-year-old Calvin Collier in 1911 in Lee County. They had two children, a son, Wilson, born in 1912, and a daughter, Vera, born in 1915.
Laura divorced Collier in 1916 to marry Tillman. They had two more children, a son, Clarence, in 1917, and another son, Sidney, born in 1919. Laura’s daughter from Collier remained with her while her son remained with Collier. During this period, the Tillmans had moved to the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee just north of Port Mayaca, where Laura’s parents had already been living. The place is now known as Upthegrove Beach.
MEETING JOHN
But Laura wanted more than a life of marriage and motherhood and her parents living next door. Rebellion stirred in her soul. Reading and hearing about the adventures of John Ashley, she left her husband and children in early 1920 in search of the notorious criminal.
“Finding Ashley was fairly easy for Laura, who would meet up with him at a mangrove region called Peck’s Lake near Manatee Bay in Salerno, although other accounts indicate the two may have already known each other,” Luckhardt wrote.
Before agreeing to allow her to join him, John demanded to know whether Laura could handle a gun. “She obligingly demonstrated skill in using a .38 revolver, shooting off rounds that hit every target,’’ said Luckhardt. “Laura would thereafter be an important part of the gang.”
During this period much of the gang’s activity focused on rum-running and hijacking other competing bootleggers. Laura also served as a lookout for the gang and soon became John’s romantic partner.
But their romance was forcibly broken off when John was captured in June 1921. He escaped again in November 1921, but he was soon recaptured.
ANOTHER PRISON, ANOTHER ESCAPE
As Matthews and Hanford remained free after their December 1922 escape, Middleton was tried in March 1923 and found guilty of aiding in the Bank of Stuart robbery. Middleton’s defense was that he was in Avon Park at the time of the robbery. He was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor by Judge E.C. Davis.
At Raiford prison, Middleton met fellow inmate Ray Lynn, 23, who was serving a five-year sentence for a grand larceny conviction in Duvall County in 1921. Lynn, a married father of three young children, had served in the Army in France during World War I but went AWOL on returning to the states.
Middleton also likely knew another inmate, Joe Tracy, doing a two-year stretch for highway robbery, who would also become a member of the Ashley Gang. The 30-year-old Tracy, who grew up in Crab Grass in Osceola County, also had a family connection. Tracy’s brother, Walter, had married the mother of Laura Upthegrove, John Ashley’s girlfriend.
Apparently, the gang had a standard for bravery and Tracy didn’t always meet John Ashley’s standards. “Let me tell you something about Joe Tracy,” outlaw Heywood Register, who was sometimes associated with the gang, said in a 1925 interview. “He’s a bold, bad outlaw but a coward. John Ashley nearly killed him several times.”
Lynn and Middleton later were assigned to state road camp No. 1 in Marianna, Florida, in the Panhandle near the Alabama state line when they escaped on Aug. 11, 1924. Tracy had been released from prison after serving his sentence just a week earlier, on Aug. 3, 1924, and it was widely believed that he had picked them up in a Ford car recently purchased from one of the guards at the prison.
In the next three months, they would meet up with John Ashley in the Everglades, help him rob the Bank of Pompano and meet their doom at the Sebastian River bridge.
BACK TO THE EVERGLADES
After nearly two more years in prison, John Ashley made his fifth and final escape from custody on Sept. 27, 1923.
He and fellow prisoner Wayne C. Cobb were being held in a stockade at a state road camp near Westville in the Panhandle when they forced the bars out of a cell and then escaped in broad daylight.
John and Cobb split ways, with John returning to the Everglades. But it wouldn’t be a big reunion for the Ashley Gang. Kid Lowe, who assisted in the first Bank of Stuart robbery and was the first outsider to join the gang, had departed company in 1915, shortly before John’s brother, Bob, was killed in a shootout after trying to break John out of the Miami jail. Brothers Ed and Frank Ashley were lost at sea during a rum-running mission in the Bahamas in 1921. Clarence Middleton, confederate in the second Bank of Stuart robbery in 1922, remained in prison. His partners, Hanford Mobley and Roy Matthews, who also used the name Robert Young Matthews, remained free after escaping from the Broward County Jail in late 1922, with Matthews dropping off the map. The volatile Hanford, now 18, returned to the Everglades after his escape, though he would later travel to Germany and California.
For the most part, on his return John kept a low profile, reuniting with Laura Upthegrove and focusing more on helping his father, Joe, and brother, Bill, with their lucrative rum-running business, which had been given a big boost by Prohibition. Besides John, Joe and Bill were the only two male Ashleys from the original family of 11 left living. Though often discovered in the periphery of some of the gang’s major crimes, Joe and Bill were never directly implicated or charged, with their greatest recorded offenses being moonshining and rum-running.
EXPLOSIVE START TO YEAR
Despite the relative calm as 1923 closed, 1924 would open explosively, marking the beginning of the end of the Ashley Gang with the shooting death of family patriarch Joe.
The following account is based on news accounts of the time and Stuart Marshal Hix Stuart’s book The Notorious Ashley Gang, which includes a transcript of an interview with John Ashley.
Shortly after John’s return to Fruita, Joe was arrested for having a moonshine still. Also charged was 19-year-old Albert Miller, who was described as the owner of a store near the Ashley home in Fruita but who was likely the front man for a store Joe owned. Soon, Joe, John and Miller were living at a still site about a mile and a half southwest of the Ashley home in Fruita.
Their camp was hidden in the woods where tree cover hid their activities but afforded them a panoramic view of the low-lying thicket of Florida scrub and any possible intruders. Their camp had three tents, one for Joe and Albert, one for John and a third for their supplies. They were running a 100-gallon still.
Feeling he could venture out quietly in public, John had a vehicle that needed repairs and took it to Salerno. John said he got in a fight with the garage owner, a man he identified as “Seymour,” over the bill, which prompted the garage owner to call town authorities, telling them “something had to be done about me.”
Sheriff Bob Baker was notified, and subsequently sent deputies Fred Baker, his cousin, and H.L. Stubbs to search the woods near Fruita.
After several days, Baker and Stubbs discovered one of Joe Ashley’s stills and camp. In his interview with Hix Stuart, John described the camp as being a mile and a half south of the Ashley homestead while Stuart and other lawmen described it as two miles west southwest of his parents’ home. Amateur archaeologist Steve Carr, who has surveyed several still sites and researched the Ashleys for the past three decades, puts the site just a quarter mile south of the Ashley homestead.
After the discovery of the site, six more deputies, Sim Jackson, Elmer Padgett, Joe Padgett, Oley Bonar, Grover Pass and Ernest Malphurs, were summoned to the scene, with Fred Baker serving as the head of the posse.
SHOOTOUT AT DAWN
Before dawn, the morning of Jan. 9, 1924, four of the deputies were stationed at the edge of the swamp while Fred Baker, Elmer Padgett, Sim Jackson and H.L. Stubbs crawled toward the camp, with Fred Baker up front. Another deputy headed to Stuart for reinforcements. Sheriff Baker told reporters he was also present, though Hix Stuart’s book did not include him as one of the members of the party approaching the camp. If true, once again Bob Baker was out of harm’s way while his men engaged the Ashley Gang.
As daylight broke, the deputies were about 50 feet away from the camp and could hear men and a woman talking. Apparently hearing the deputies, a mongrel dog named Old Bob belonging to Laura Upthegrove barked but was shot and killed by Fred Baker.
Said John in his interview with Hix Stuart:
I grabbed my rifle and got behind a forked tree. I didn’t even have time to dress and was in my underclothes. They poured enough lead at me to kill ten men, but fate seemed against them. With a hail of bullets around me I noticed a palmetto move and I let fly a bullet in short order. A man toppled from the palmetto and fell prone on his face. I knew I had killed a man. The firing ceased.
The man behind the palmettos was 35-year-old Fred Baker. His fellow deputies’ version of the story was that as Baker fell, he shot 18 rounds from his shotgun and revolvers into the camp, killing 63-year-old Joe Ashley.
Running back to the camp, John said he found his father dead and Albert Miller severely wounded. Miller had been shot above the elbow, causing a compound fracture and his arm to dangle loosely. Another bullet shattered bones and tore muscles in his right hip.
“Dad was lying on the bed — dead — shot to death while he was putting on his shoes,’’ John told Hix Stuart. “Poor old dad — he didn’t have a chance.’’
Also injured was Laura Upthegrove, who was hit with about six shotgun pellets in the head and leg that were not life-threatening.
Deputies later carried Baker to safety behind trees. There he shook hands with them, said good-bye with a smile playing over his face, and a few minutes before he expired in the arms of Deputy Sheriff H.L. Stubbs he said: “Well, boys, I did my best.”
Initial news reports in the days after the shooting apparently confused the actions of John for Albert Miller, saying Miller was the lookout who shot and killed Baker. But John, in his statement to Stuart, said he had fired off the fatal shot. A later account by Deputy Sim Jackson would raise questions about whether Baker had instead been hit by friendly fire from Deputy Elmer Padgett behind him. Jackson said in a newspaper interview that Fred Baker asked Padgett after being shot, “Elmer, what did you shoot me in the back for?”
OPPORTUNITY FOR EXIT
Hix Stuart said Laura screamed throughout the ordeal, prompting law officers to cease fire. The calm gave John and Miller time to escape, but not without Miller being shot again.
In his interview with Stuart, John said he initially thought he could steal one of the patrol cars for a getaway but reconsidered.
“I could have bumped every one of them off, but I didn’t,” John told Stuart. “I went to mother’s house and got some clothes.”
Meanwhile, the deputies held their positions for several hours, waiting for the reinforcements to arrive from Stuart. Thirty men were deputized back in town, supplemented with 2,000 rounds of ammunition and 20 rifles provided by the National Guard unit of West Palm Beach.
At about noon, the 30 men who had been deputized arrived and then stormed the camp, finding only Laura and Mary Mobley sitting beside Joe’s dead body, which had been pierced with five bullets.
SCORCHED EARTH CAMPAIGN
The deputies then set about destroying the still and whiskey at the camp and burning the hammock. They also rounded up all Ashley family members, mostly women and children, and then set upon a scorched earth campaign.
They immediately jailed Upthegrove, Wesley and Mary Mobley; their daughter, Laeto, with an infant; and another 3-year-old, described as a Mobley child; Lugenia Ashley and her daughters, Lola and Daisy. Stuart said also taken into custody were Lola’s husband, George Mario, and Ashley daughter, Eva, and her husband, Pete Jenkins. Law officers, meanwhile, began a search for Bill Ashley.
After the shooting, deputies began searching for John around the home of his mother. They set that house on fire as well as the home of Ashley daughter, Lola, and son-in-law, George Mario, who had recently been shot in the leg by a deputy sheriff on a charge of resisting arrest. Garages with cars in them were also burned, as were the grocery store Albert Miller and the Jenkinses ran. A packing house was also partially burned. The Stuart Messenger reported that the home of George and Mary Mobley, parents of Hanford, was also burned.
After retrieving his clothes from his mother’s home before it was burned, John said he walked about four miles toward Stuart. He said he encountered another confederate, whom he identified using the alias Jack, and asked him to go get him more rifle cartridges, since he only had five left. Jack returned more than three hours later, saying the storekeeper was only allowed to sell cartridges to posse members who were looking for John.
John ended up sleeping in the barn of John Rogers that night and at the home of preacher Parson Yancy Lundy, pastor of the African American church in New Monrovia, the next night. According to Stuart, John’s brother, Bill, first arrived at the Lundy home followed by John. John asked for food and Lundy’s wife prepared a meal, John eating it with a rifle across his lap. When they left, Stuart said John told Mrs. Lundy, “Auntie, if they crow me, I’ll kill another sheriff.’’
HEADING WEST
From Lundy’s, John went to a shack on the southwest side of Lake Okeechobee used to store nets and tackle, where he met Lynn and Middleton and other members of the gang, according to Stuart’s account. From a second story of the shack, two machine guns were ready to be fired at intruders. The shack was also equipped with a trap walkway over the lake into the front door that would drop anyone who stepped on it 15 feet in the water.
Deputies closed a 12-mile section of Dixie Highway from Jupiter to Stuart and lawmen searched for John. Attempting to chase him to the east, they also patrolled waters in the area and removed all boats along the shore except those used by deputies.
No luck, although Albert Miller was arrested after limping some 12 miles of ground during his escape.
LAID TO REST
The funeral for Fred Baker, married and father of three, was held Jan. 13 at the Congregational church in West Palm Beach. For days, Joe’s body lay unclaimed as there were no relatives who could claim it because they were all in jail.
Finally, Sheriff Baker allowed Lugenia Ashley and Bill Ashley to set up a service and temporarily released them to attend it. Except for Laura, who was accused of being an accomplice in the murder of Deputy Baker, all those jailed were released a week after their arrest and charges dropped.
JOHN STAYS NEAR
During Laura’s time in jail in the following months, John stayed hidden further in the Everglades, awaiting her release. But her confinement dragged on. She was unable to meet a $5,000 bail and by September was still being held in the jail after the bail had been reduced to $2,500.
About two months after the death of his father, John took off for California, where he had also fled after the killing of DeSoto Tiger. But he said he was haunted by the death moans of his father. Eager to avenge the death of Joe, John returned home, hiding deeper into the Everglades.
When Lugenia returned to Fruita after being released from jail, she found her home scorched, all her possessions destroyed. Soon, though, she was living in a new home a distance away from her burned home and closer to the family cemetery. The four-room structure had been built without cost to her by Joe’s African American moonshine workers and members of Yancy Lundy’s church in New Monrovia. Joe provided jobs for much of the African American community nearby, built a rooming house for still workers and helped fund construction of Lundy’s church.
BANK OF POMPANO ROBBERY
In the months following the shootout at the moonshine still, the Ashley Gang and Sheriff Bob Baker and his deputies had settled into a kind of detente.
Both sides knew that the only way the war would end was with more killings.
In late August, Sheriff Baker said he found a moonshine camp near Hialeah that was part of the Ashley-Mobley outfit. Because the camp was located in Dade County, he asked Gov. Cary A. Hardee for authority to go into Dade, but the governor declined, saying Baker could only do so if accompanied by a Dade officer. Baker got an officer to agree, but when he and two deputies arrived to raid the camp at night the deputy failed to show up. Mission aborted.
DRIFTING SOUTH?
The discovery of the Hialeah camp offered a clue that the gang was operating farther south of its base in Fruita. Apparently needing cash, John Ashley would pull off his last bank robbery in his former hometown of Pompano the afternoon of Sept. 12, 1924.
Here’s how it went down:
Bank of Pompano cashier J.R. Cates told deputies that four men drove in front of the bank shortly after 2 p.m., with three of them, armed with revolvers, entering the bank and a fourth staying in the car.
The men brandished four revolvers and two rifles, and one of them ordered Cates and clerk T.L. Myers, the only employees inside the bank, to turn toward the wall and keep their hands above their heads.
Two of the robbers then raked up all the cash on the counter, and more money in currency and silver were taken. The three robbers, working at an unhurried pace, collected $5,000 in cash and $4,000 in liberty bonds.
Before leaving, a man later identified as John Ashley gave a .25 caliber rifle bullet to them, saying, “Give this to our good friend, Sheriff Bob Baker, and tell him if he wants us, he will find us in the Everglades.”
SEARCH BEGINS
A posse was organized, following the bandits to Deerfield and then west near the Hillsboro Canal, where they found an abandoned Studebaker. The four apparently swam across the canal, with law officers later finding traces of the four climbing the steep bank on the other side. Deputies suspected the gang members were trying to make their way back to Fruita, and Baker later said he believed the bandits had a power boat waiting for them.
The owner of the Studebaker, Wesley Powell, told deputies that Ashley also handed him a rifle cartridge and told him, “This bullet, boy, is just to remind you that we have had 15 years’ experience in this business and for you to take [it] to our good friend Sheriff Baker. Look us over carefully, give Sheriff Bob our descriptions and tell him that if he wants us, he can find us in the Glades.”
Deputies searched the Everglades through the weekend, halting their effort on Sunday without luck. Besides Tracy and Ashley, the other two involved in the bank robbery were Clarence Middleton and gang newcomer Ray Lynn, who had escaped from prison the month before. Hanford Mobley at the time was likely in California.
SEPTEMBER SEARCH
Palm Beach County Sheriff Bob Baker got something of a break when John Ashley and the gang robbed the Bank of Pompano on Sept. 12, 1924.
While other Ashley Gang heists such as a train robbery and two bank robberies had been committed in Palm Beach County, the Bank of Pompano robbery was committed in Broward County, a jurisdiction beyond Baker’s responsibility.
Since late December 1911 when John killed Seminole DeSoto Tiger, Baker, and his father, George, before him, had been ridiculed about their inability to capture and keep John Ashley and the gang in jail or to bring them fully to justice for the crimes they committed. Throughout most of these dozen years, Ashley family patriarch Joe ran one of the biggest moonshine and bootlegging operations in southeast Florida right under the nose of the Bakers.
Which begs the questions.
Why was it so difficult for the father and son to capture and keep John Ashley? Why was the Ashley moonshine operation allowed to run so long without the weight of the law bearing down on it? Until 1923, all moonshine arrests relating to the Ashleys occurred outside Palm Beach County.
A FEW REASONS
John’s intelligence and guile certainly played a part in evading the Bakers. So did his decision to use much of the Everglades as a hideout when the heat of the law was on him. He was able to keep a base in Fruita, then in Palm Beach County but now part of southern Martin County, because it was a remote wilderness that provided plenty of cover for sharpshooter John. Lawmen walking into the woods in search of John could easily be ambushed and killed.
But the corrupt activities — and distractions — of both Bakers also could have played a role.
George Baker, who became sheriff of newly created Palm Beach County in 1909, was heavily involved in Bradley’s Beach Club, a gambling operation headed by Edward R. Bradley. In 1913, a group called the Law and Order League alleged that Baker was covering up the illegal activities of the club. Baker was also a leader in the local Ku Klux Klan.
PROBLEMS AT HOME
Bob Baker, who was appointed sheriff on his father’s death in 1920 and soon won election, faced his own bootlegging problems when he was suspended from office March 22, 1923, by Gov. Cary Hardie after two federal indictments charged him with conspiring with bootleggers to violate prohibition laws. The Florida Senate refused to uphold the suspension after one of the indictments had been quashed, and he was returned to office May 14, 1923.
Baker also had problems at home that came to a boiling point as he approached re-election in November 1924 and pressure increased for him to capture John and the other members of the gang.
Things were getting so bad with Baker and his wife, Anna Etteene, at their Gardenia Street home that Baker would soon move out of and file for divorce. Among other things, Baker alleged that his wife became “violently jealous’’ when he talked to women during the course of his duties and then confronted the women, accusing them of having improper relations with Baker.
Baker said at one point Anna threatened him with a gun and bit him to the bone, and “blood flowed freely.” He said their marital arguments often occurred in front of theirthree children.
SORDID ACCUSATIONS
In court papers seeking support from Baker, Anna and her attorneys didn’t mince words about what she thought of her future ex-husband. Anna’s response, on file at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, along with the complete Baker divorce file, alleges:
It is impossible for the human mind to be able to conceive how it can be that a man who knows and realizes in the smallest degree that there is no one of worse morals than he witnesses; that he is a very hard drinker and a drunkard, that he is a constant gambler, and a whoremaster of the worst type, and that he has had as his dearest companions the vilest and lowest down characters both male and family, and he not only knows that respondent knows these traits of his character, but that the public knows as well the same facts and that he only expects and hopes to maintain his character and cover up and conceal from the Court records these facts by virtue of his position as sheriff backed by his horde of deputies, supplemented by his great worth in a financial way, he being worth, as respondent believes and she has about as good a right to know as anyone … at least $1,500,000.
That sum would be worth about $17.7 million in today’s dollars.
PAYING ‘FINES’
Anna alleged that one way her husband built his net worth was through charging rum runners and moonshiners a monthly fee — disguised as a fine — for protection against being arrested for their misdeeds.
Several witnesses in the divorce trial testified to paying the “fines’’ and bringing them to Baker’s house — instead of the courthouse — and giving them to Anna. One, a man named James Booker, said he would visit Baker’s home monthly, delivering $25 each time in a sealed envelope.
Whether Bob Baker had such an arrangement with the Ashleys is unknown and probably unlikely. But Baker’s arrangements certainly would have constrained him from cracking down on a high-profile target such as the Ashleys for fear that his secret protection of others would become public.
Anna Baker also alleged that her husband’s drinking had gotten to such a point that he sometimes suffered severe alcohol withdrawal symptoms known as the delirium tremens. In one instance, she said her husband’s alcohol use left him out of commission for a week.
This was occurring as the battle with John Ashley was intensifying, with John taunting Baker and leaving the message with two people that Baker could find him in the Everglades. John had returned to Florida after fleeing to California following Joe’s shooting death at his still Jan. 9, 1924, returning to avenge his father’s death. Now, the battle between John and lawmen was a deadly zero-sum game, and only one side could be the winner.
SEARCH CONTINUES
While the Bank of Pompano robbery occurred in Broward County, John and the gang appeared headed back to Palm Beach County when they ditched their get-away car and swam across the Hillsboro Canal and into the safety of
the Everglades.
Unsuccessful at finding the gang immediately after the robbery and facing re-election in barely a month, Baker on Sept. 29, 1924, embarked on a well-publicized weeklong search. It was prompted by a tip he received that John, and the gang, were at Salerno and were planning to dash to Bimini or Gun Key to pirate ships that were harbored there.
That same day, a scout for the sheriff found the gang’s 26-foot cabin cruiser tied to C.C. Jacobs’ dock. It was loaded with mattresses and provisions that could last for months, including ten sides of bacon, preserves and dried fruit, 200 gallons of gasoline stored in drums and about $200 worth of ammunition. Baker confiscated the boat, which had been likely used as a source of supplies, as well as a coupe that was nearby.
POSSE ORGANIZED
Learning of the deputies’ presence in Salerno, Ashley and three confederates — thought to be Clarence Middleton, Joe Tracy and Ray Lynn — escaped to the woods to the west and abandoned their boat. The next day, Sept. 30, Baker gathered a posse of 50 men, organizing them in squads and placing them at points where the gang might search for food and supplies. Some of the searchers included deputies from Osceola County who were seeking gang member Joe Tracy, who was a suspect in the Sept. 9, 1924 murder of C.O. Delesdernier.
As the sheriff went to a railway station to wire for reinforcements, it was reported that George Mario, John Ashley’s brother-in-law, was seen driving a vehicle with Joe Tracy inside and was heading west.
With the gang hiding out about a mile and a half west of Salerno, Tracy had been directed by John to head back to Salerno for food. But on his way, Tracy came upon a posse. When he attempted to turn back the posse cut him off. He took off, boarding a train for freedom and separating from the other three, apparently for good.
Suspecting John, Middleton and Lynn were hiding out near Lugenia Ashley’s rebuilt home in Fruita, Baker posted a four-member posse in hiding 150 yards west of Lugenia’s home.
GIVING A SIGNAL
Lugenia knew law officers were monitoring her, so when her son, John, and the two other gang members emerged from the woods about 1:30 p.m. to approach the house she stood on a stump, waved a handkerchief and let out a blood-curdling yell, recalled Stuart police Chief O.B. Padgett in Alice Luckhardt’s book, Florida Son. Then they scattered back into the woods. Some took cover behind pine trees, and both sides began firing and exchanged shots for about five minutes.
One of the deputies from the posse attempted to spray gang members with a machine gun with no luck. “The gun failed,’’ said an account in the Miami Tribune. “Its trigger was hung and Ashley and his followers sought refuge in the swamp land.”
After a period of silence, the law officers crawled to the gang members’ position, only to discover that they had already fled. Recovered nearby were a .38 automatic revolver thought to have been shot out of one of the fugitive’s hands and a large supply of ammunition.
FLIGHT TO THE EVERGLADES
The gang members then began an eight-mile trek west of Stuart. The law and outlaws had at least one more exchange of gunfire, but efforts to capture the bandits were to no avail, although deputies found what they believed to be the gang’s main ammunition dump near Fruita.
The manhunt for John in early October didn’t deter the moonshining activities of his big brother, Bill, who was arrested Oct. 11 in Riviera on a firearms and moonshine charges.
The gun in question, which had been purchased just a few minutes before his arrest, was a new repeating rifle. Though the gun charge was dropped, Bill was sentenced to 30 days in jail on Oct. 16.
A jury also found him guilty of driving an automobile while under the influence of liquor, but the 30-day sentence in that charge was withheld as long as he paid a $250 fine and his court costs.
Also, later that month, Joe Tracy was arrested Oct. 12 in Okeechobee after boarding a Florida East Coast Railway passenger train. Railway conductor Sam Veronee, who had known Tracy, recognized him.
NEWEST MEMBER
As November 1924 approached, the Ashley Gang had been reduced to the trio of John Ashley as leader, veteran criminal Clarence Middleton and newcomer Jerold Ray “Shorty” Lynn.
Lynn, 25, was the newest member of the gang, having joined it barely three months earlier after fleeing to the Everglades with fellow escapee Middleton. Lynn was serving a five-year term on a 1921 grand larceny conviction out of Jacksonville when he escaped with Middleton, apparently with the help of another gang member, Joe Tracy, released a week earlier. As November approached, Tracy remained in jail facing the Osceola murder charge.
Born in Pike County, Alabama, Lynn had grown up in Milton in the Florida Panhandle. He had married Lillie Johns of Charlton, Georgia, in 1917 and was the father of three young children, Inez [Hamilton], born in 1918, Lee [Kuzminski], born in 1919, and Ressie Lynn, born in 1921. By the time of the escape, he had been disowned by his parents, John and Minnie Lynn, and apparently was estranged from his wife, who coincidentally had moved to Fort Pierce in 1923.
WHERE’S HANFORD?
The whereabouts of 19-year-old Hanford Mobley, John’s nephew, were widely disputed at the time, with his family saying he was out of state and didn’t return to Florida until the end of October.
Hanford’s father, George Mobley, said he had given him money two years ago after his escape from the Broward County jail in late 1922. “I gave him money to go away when he left the country, and I told him not to come back.”
Miami Herald reporter George L. Bradley, quoting Mobley family members, wrote that Hanford, in the two years since his escape, had joined the Navy [but apparently went AWOL], took three trips to Germany and then returned to the United States and obtained a job in a New York clubhouse under an assumed name. George Mobley said his son had last been living in Los Angeles when he returned.
Stuart police Chief O.B. Padgett wrote of Hanford in his memoir from the 1970s: “We didn’t hear anything about him for several years. He finally came back but was back only a very, very short time, [possibly] for a week or two before the gang was captured.”
DESTINED FOR DAISY’S
As Hanford returned in the days before November approached, heat had reached a point John decided to head to his kid sister Daisy’s in Jacksonville. Daisy, 20, had been dating 26-year-old Otis D. Kirkland of Jacksonville, whom she would marry in January 1925.
Daisy was John’s favorite sister, and he was especially close to her, as was Hanford, who was just one year younger. As the youngest of the Ashleys, she was the fun-loving favorite and even ran or owned a speak-easy for a while in Fruita.
Taking Middleton and Lynn with them, John and Hanford planned to drive at night up to Jacksonville, stay at Daisy’s during the day and then hit the road at night. But to make the trip, they needed a car. John knew just the right one.
His brother-in-law, George Mario, also known as Carlo, had just bought a 1924 Ford touring sedan. Mario, 30, had married John’s younger sister, Lola, 26, in October 1922.
FINDING A CAR
Born blind, Lola, at the age of 12, had gone away to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine. When she returned, she continued to live with her parents in Fruita until marrying Mario and establishing their own home nearby.
Mario had never been directly associated with the Ashley Gang, though he had brushes with the law of his own. In 1923 he received a revolver wound while fleeing from a deputy sheriff in Salerno.
Mario had come to the United States at a young age with his father from Salerno, Italy, said Sandra Mario Provence of West Palm Beach, George’s granddaughter. “He had asked someone if they needed farm help, and Joe Ashley hired him to plant tomatoes on the Ashley property. The tomatoes went bust, but he married my grandmother, and that’s the storyI know.”
As November 1924 approached, Lola was pregnant after having delivered a stillborn child the year before. Their new automobile gave George and Lola the comfort of knowing that a ride to seek medical help was available if Lola had complications during delivery.
“My grandfather told him, ‘You can’t take my car,’” Provence said. “He said, ‘Your sister’s going to have a baby, and we won’t have any way to go to the hospital.’ That wasn’t John’s concern. John’s concern was getting out.”
Mario’s plea didn’t deter John from requisitioning the car for his needs. Before taking the car on his journey, John apparently directed Mario to drive to downtown Stuart to fill it with supplies for the gang’s trip. When you get a directive from John Ashley, you don’t say no.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Bob Baker received a tip that the Ashley Gang was planning to go to Jacksonville. Instead of leading an effort to trap the outlaws himself, he relayed the tip to St. Lucie County Sheriff J.R. Merritt and dispatched deputies Elmer Padgett, Henry Stubbs and Lem Thomas, along with Stuart police Chief O.B. Padgett, to Fort Pierce, where they met Merritt at the Silver Palace Pharmacy around 5 p.m. Merritt said it was then that he was alerted that members of the Ashley Gang were going to pass through St. Lucie County by automobile that night.
Merritt said he agreed to help on the condition that they work with his plans, and they agreed to do so. Then the lawmen headed north, with Merritt taking along St. Lucie County Deputy O.E. “Three Fingers” Wiggins and Fort Pierce police Chief J.M. Smith.
A LIGHT RAIN FALLS
Four members of the gang — John, Hanford, Clarence Middleton and Ray Lynn — did indeed head north, piling in Mario’s car. They stopped in Fort Pierce, where John got a haircut and shave and played a game of pool. If the town seemed absent lawmen to John and his confederates, it was because Merritt and the police chief had already arrived at their destination north of Vero on Dixie Highway, the U.S. 1 of its time.
From downtown Fort Pierce, the four outlaws loaded back up — Hanford driving, Middleton at shotgun with John behind Middleton and Lynn behind Hanford — and headed for their doom.
Merritt’s plan was to capture the four outlaws at the wooden two-lane bridge that extends 300 yards over the Sebastian River, which at that time was part of St. Lucie County. Baker would later tell reporters that the ambush plan at the bridge was his idea.
The bridge was the only way to go north for miles, with the only other option going through the middle of the state to get to Jacksonville. At the time, the bridge served as a dividing line between St. Lucie County to the south and Brevard County to the north. Indian River County wouldn’t be created until 1925.
TRAP IS SET
At the Sebastian River bridge, the deputies pulled a chain across the south end of the bridge and hung a red lantern in the middle of the chain. Then they hid in mangroves at the side of the road, awaiting the arrival of the outlaws. It was dark and late and raining intermittently.
Around 10:45 p.m., a car carrying Sebastian youths Ted R. Miller, 20, and Shadrick O. Davis , 21, approached the bridge and stopped their vehicle at the hanging chain. The Ashley Gang in their Ford was not far behind and pulled up behind, according to a written statement released by Sheriff Merritt the next day. Merritt’s statement is counter to some others that said the chain had been lowed so Miller and Davis could drive through. Said Merritt’s statement:
We waited until they stopped then came up from behind [out of the mangroves] and covered them with our guns. They were caught unawares, being interested in seeing why the automobile ahead had stopped.
When we came alongside, John Ashley saw me first and grabbed for his rifle. I pushed a shotgun in his face and Deputy Wiggins pushed a gun into his ribs at the same time, telling him to throw up his hands or he would blow his head off. Wiggins reached in and got Ashley’s rifle, while Chief of Police Smith got Lynn’s rifle. We then made all four of them get out of the motor car with their hands up and walk around in front of it, where the lights would shine on them.
I then got in Miller’s automobile, telling my men to search the outlaws carefully as I was going for my motor car and handcuffs. When I returned, I stopped my automobile with the lights shining on the party. I got out and went to the side door of my motor car to get the handcuffs. The first pair I got I did not have a key for. I asked Deputy Wiggins if he had a key to fit them and was getting more handcuffs out of the pocket of the door when Ashley gave a signal, and all of the outlaws grabbed for their six-shooters. They had not been searched for them.
Right then and there the shooting began and when the smoke cleared away all four of the desperadoes lay on the ground dead. When the shooting began, we were between 10 and 15 feet from the desperadoes.
With headlights glaring from cars aimed in both directions, there on the bridge lay the bodies of John Ashley, 36; Hanford Mobley, 19; Clarence Middleton, 24; and Ray Lynn, 25. Of the four, John Ashley was the only killer, having shot to death DeSoto Tiger on Dec. 29, 1911, and Deputy Fred Baker on Jan. 9, 1924. Hanford, Middleton and Lynn had never been accused of killing anyone.
Inside the car, deputies found guns, several hundred rounds of ammunition, a small amount of food and some clothing. Deputies said John had a rifle and two revolvers, Lynn had a rifle and revolver, Hanford had two revolvers and Middleton, one revolver.
The outlaws didn’t have much loot. Deputies found $100 on John, $85.85 on Hanford, and nothing on Middleton. Lynn was the best off with $363.
A PUBLIC DISPLAY
The News-Tribune reported that Judge Angus Sumner was summoned to the bridge to inspect the bodies. Sheriff Baker also rushed to the scene, and a coroner’s jury was impaneled. In the early morning of Sunday, Nov. 2, the coroner’s jury viewed the bodies at the scene of the killing.
Before loading the bodies in the car in which they came — Mario’s Ford — Palm Beach Deputy Elmer Padgett scooped John’s glass eye out of his head to give to Sheriff Baker. During the Bank of Pompano robbery, John had twice left bullets, telling the recipients to give them to Baker and meet him in the Everglades. In response, Baker predicted he would wear John’s glass eye as his watch fob.
The bodies of the four were then taken to Fee & Stewart hardware and mortuary in downtown Fort Pierce. There, they were laid out along the storefront on Pine Street, now Second Street.
“Sunday, from early morning until the bodies had been removed, there was a crowd congregated in front of the undertaking parlors,” the Fort Pierce News-Tribune reported. “People from every section of the county and many from Palm Beach County came here hoping to get a glimpse of the dead men. Relatives and friends of the men were also present.”
It must have been a gruesome scene. John’s body was riddled with seven buckshot pellets and his right hand, his shooting hand, was blown off. Mobley’s body was shot through the left side with buckshot. Buckshot was scattered over Middleton’s body. Ray Lynn had his jaw shot away and other wounds to his head and body.
Why were the bodies publicly displayed like quarry froma hunt?
“This incident was instantly infamous because John was in the news for almost 15 years,” said Chessy Ricca, who has spent four years researching the Ashley Gang and helped prepare the permanent Ashley exhibit for the Elliott Museum in Stuart. “The chase was a sensation. Could it have been to prove to the public that they were in fact deceased? No more fear or threat of robbery or violence? Did it put the public at ease knowing they were dead?”
Despite the hundreds perhaps thousands of people who visited the scene, surprisingly no photos of the bodies laid out on the sidewalk are publicly available today. Perhaps because the bodies were so mutilated, no newspapers published photos of them. Steve Carr, who donated his Ashley Gang memorabilia to the Elliott, said recently that such a photo would be the “holy grail” of Ashley collectibles.
‘SCARED THE TAR’
Walking downtown and seeing a crowd around the hardware store, Ed Register remembered his dad taking him there to see what was happening. The image remained seared in his memory for more than eight decades.
“I wish my father never brought me there,” Register, 90 at the time, told Indian River Magazine, in 2007. “I was only 7 years old, but I remember seeing those dead bodies laid out on the sidewalk.”
The image of the body of the youngest of the outlaws, Hanford Mobley, especially remained with him.
“I can picture one [of the bodies] in particular,” said Register, who died in 2010. “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.”
CLAIMING THE BODIES
The Palm Beach Post reported that Lugenia Ashley and Mary Mobley visited the undertaker’s parlor on Sunday, and then “burial robes were placed on the bodies of their sons.” The bodies were then shipped by train to Fruita and taken to the home of John’s sister and brother-in-law, Eva and Pete Jenkins, for viewing.
Boxer Jack Middleton claimed his brother Clarence’s body, which was shipped to Jacksonville and buried in Evergreen Cemetery. Nobody initially claimed Lynn’s body.
“From a young age his father had disowned him and had no interest in continuing a relationship with him,” Ray’s great-great-grandson, Austin Alderman of Fort Pierce, said recently. “The reason he’s buried in the Ashley family plot is that his own father said he was dead to him. They had no interest in claiming him.”
But the Ashleys believed they owed it to Lynn to give him a decent burial.
“Lynn lived and fought and died with them, and I couldn’t let them send him to a potter’s field,” said Bill Ashley, John’s brother. Bill was in jail when his brother and the other three were killed, serving a 30-day sentence on the moonshine possession charge. Sheriff Baker released him from Palm Beach County jail in West Palm Beach for 24 hours so he could attend his brother’s funeral.
Observed the Herald of the gesture to bury Lynn in the family cemetery:
The Ashley-Mobleys have a code. Once a friend always a friend; a good turn for a good turn. Cold blood flows through their veins for the enemy, but not for one who was true to their cause. Ray Lynn fought and died with their boys, and they would not see him buried in a potter’s field.
ELECTION, FUNERAL SAME DAY
The funeral for John Ashley, Hanford Mobley and Ray Lynn took place at the family cemetery in Fruita on Tuesday, Nov. 4, Election Day, the same day Baker would learn whether he won re-election. Merritt ran unopposed.
At a rally for Democrat candidates the night before the election, Baker defended himself against charges of cowardice for not accompanying his deputies to confront the Ashley Gang. “I had political speeches to make that night and moreover expected any minute to have to begin the distribution of the ballot boxes, so I sent my four deputies,” he said.
“I want Merritt to have all the credit due him. I got the information and sent my deputies to the scene. Personally, I have spent $6,500 on the Ashley Gang since that escape from the Lauderdale jail. My opponents say, ‘Why wasn’t the fearless sheriff there?’ Pershing was in France, but did you see him in the ditches?”
Baker said over the years he had given rewards of $5 to $500 of his own money for information about the Ashleys, but he denied that he had given any reward money for the tip he received about them going to Jacksonville.
Despite the controversy over whether Baker should have been at the Sebastian River bridge, he would win re-election, defeating opponent Calvin Campbell by more than 300 votes. Baker would remain Palm Beach County sheriff until his death by heart attack in 1933 at the age of 46.
SOLEMN BURIAL
Lugenia allowed newspaper reporters and a photographer to attend the funeral.
At the grave site, she told a Miami Herald reporter, “Here they are — three of them. They killed them for not a thing in the world.”
Then she turned to Joe Ashley’s grave, dug 10 months earlier after the shootout at his moonshine still. “He never wanted to harm a hair on anybody’s head.”
Interjected her son, Bill Ashley, the last of her sons, the other four lost by gang activities. “Forget it, Ma, it doesn’t do any good to talk about it. He wanted to die anyway.”
Lugenia agreed. “Yes, he wanted to die, but they didn’t have to kill him.” Lugenia blamed the family’s troubles on Sheriff Baker. “It’s Bob Baker’s work. We never did anything to him. I hope he’s paralyzed tomorrow, and they have to feed him out of a spoon for the rest of his life. Gang? Gang? We don’t belong to no gang.”
When another relative comforted her that she would see them in the afterlife, Lugenia agreed. “Yes, it won’t be long ‘til we meet them again.”
All three of the dead lay in what the reporter described as “cheap gray coffins.” One by one they were lowered into the vault. John Ashley first, then Hanford Mobley and then Ray Lynn, who was unrelated but had no relative to claim his body. Middleton’s brother, the boxer, had claimed his body, with burial to be in Jacksonville.
Some 50 people attended along with a small group of them from the Salvation Army, which conducted the service. A woman from the Army sang a hymn and then Commander John Bourterse of Miami gave a short service.
“That was all,” the Herald reporter wrote. “The funeral was over. John Ashley, fastest man on the trigger in Florida, and his body had been consigned back to the Everglades soil that was once their stomping ground. The Ashley Gang was to be feared no more.”
INQUEST BEGINS
As the Ashleys grieved their losses, Sheriff Merritt was flooded with congratulatory telegrams. He said he was most proud of the one from Gov. John W. Martin: “Please accept my heartfelt congratulations on the splendid work that you and your deputies have done for Florida.” He also received a few threats, including one that said, “You got four of them, but they are not all gone yet.”
Nevertheless, Merritt would have to defend his actions at a coroner’s jury inquest — a formal inquiry into the killings — on Nov. 5, the day after the Ashley funerals.
But after three hours of testimony, Sumner announced that a new jury would be impaneled and a new inquest held because three of the jurors, who also had visited the bridge the night of the shooting, might be needed as witnesses if a trial were held. The new inquest was held Nov. 10.
ASHLEY FAMILY REPRESENTATION
For both hearings, the Ashley and Mobley families had hired a young attorney who had just arrived in Fort Pierce, Alto Lee Adams, to represent them. Adams 15 years later would be appointed to the Florida Supreme Court. But in this matter of dealing with the South Florida legal system, Adams, a new arrival from the Panhandle, admitted to being a greenhorn against established lawyers in the region.
Adams had argued that he could produce additional witnesses from Palm Beach County who would testify regarding marks on the arms of Hanford and John.
Adams had seen the mutilated bodies when they were laid out on the sidewalk in front of the Fee and Stewart mortuary. During the hearing, Adams said he had evidence that the four men were shot down with handcuffs on them and moved that the bodies be exhumed and examined for the prints of handcuffs. Judge Sumner denied Adams’ motion. “I was virtually an unknown and did not make any headway,” Adams wrote in his memoir, The Fourth Quarter.
Testimony from Miller and Davis was also heard at the second inquest.
Miller said he later returned — without Davis — to the scene and looked at the bodies as they lay on the ground and saw marks on the arms of two of them that he believed were caused by the handcuffs.
Their testimony was bolstered by other witnesses from Sebastian who visited the scene the night of Nov. 1 and morning of Nov. 2 who also said they saw marks on their arms. Three men who were notified by Miller and Davis that the Ashley Gang had been captured also backed up their statements.
Albert Schuman, who was later asked by Sheriff Merritt to gather a coroner’s jury, also testified that when he went to the scene, he checked their wrists and said he saw marks on the wrists of two of them. Schuman also said he searched the bodies and found no weapons on them, a contradiction of Merritt’s statement that the four still had their weapons on them.
S.A. Braswell testified that he saw marks on the left hand of Lynn and the right hand of Hanford. George Badger said he saw marks on the right wrist of one man and the left wrist of the other. D.J. Rhea also said he saw marks on two of the men’s wrists.
WITNESSES CHALLENGED
Undertaker Will Fee also testified in person at the second hearing and repeated his testimony that, after hearing rumors that the men had been shot while handcuffed, he carefully examined their arms and could find no mark indicating the rumor was true.
Merritt’s testimony Nov. 10 was in keeping with the type-written statement he released Nov. 2, the day after the
shooting. After returning from the other side of the bridge to retrieve his car, he exited the automobile. He testified that the shooting occurred while he was getting the handcuffs, and he did not fire a shot. “He emphatically denied the men were handcuffed,” said a report in the Fort Pierce News-Tribune.
The deputies appearing at the hearing all testified that the men were not in handcuffs, including Deputy Wiggins of St. Lucie County, Chief Smith of Fort Pierce and deputies Stubbs, Thomas and Elmer Padgett of Palm Beach County. Another law enforcement officer on the bridge that night, Stuart police Chief O.B. Padgett, had been struck with an acute case of indigestion and did not testify at either hearing.
Wiggins, Stubbs, Thomas and Elmer Padgett all testified that John Ashley had given a signal and reached for his revolver. Wiggins testified he then shot Ashley’s right hand off and his pistol dropped to the ground. Smith testified he picked up two pistols after the shooting was over.
Before adjourning, Judge Sumner asked if anyone had voluntary statements to make. John’s mother, Lugenia, and sister, Mary Mobley, then testified that they had seen marks on the wrists of the dead men.
After the hearing, the jury — comprised of J.T. Lisk, J.W. Ergle, Arch Taylor, T.S. Kirby, H.J. Tindall and another identified as “Mr. McGuigan” — retired to discuss the case. They rendered a verdict of justifiable homicide, apparently on the strength of the testimony from the lawmen that they would have taken the four Ashley Gang members alive if it had been possible.
QUESTIONS REMAIN
Despite the verdict, the court of public opinion was never fully satisfied with the answers given at the inquests, and a debate has raged in the century after the deaths of the four Ashley Gang members over whether they were executed by the law officers. Also at issue was who and how Baker got tipped off that the Ashley Gang would be heading north that night to Jacksonville.
St. Lucie historian Ada Coats Williams, in the late 1950s, interviewed one of the deputies on the bridge that night who told her the four outlaws were indeed handcuffed when they were shot. The deputy said Sheriff Merritt knew the tiny Fort Pierce jail would never hold them. Three law officers had already been killed — one by John and two by his brother Bob — and they didn’t plan a fourth.
Williams’ informant exacted a promise from her. “He said, ‘I’m going to tell you what happened on the bridge that night, but you have to promise me that you’ll not repeat what I’m telling you until after the last deputy dies,’” she told Indian River Magazine in 2007.
Williams never identified her source, but retired detective and private investigator Warren Sonne, who wrote the story for Indian River Magazine, concluded that the informant was Palm Beach sheriff’s Deputy Elmer Padgett, who was at the bridge and the still shooting and who had been threatened directly by John Ashley.
After the last deputy on the bridge that night died in 1983, Williams delivered a speech on the Ashley Gang to the Florida Historical Society, which she later expanded into the book, Florida’s Ashley Gang, published by the Florida Classics Library in Hobe Sound in 1996.
In her book, the deputy Sonne identified as Padgett gave the same account of the handcuffs as Miller and Davis, with three of the outlaws handcuffed together and John Ashley handcuffed separately. “The deputy was afraid John might have had a gun hidden, and he was known to be a sharpshooter and quick actor,” Williams said. “He had warned [John] not to drop his hands and said that if he did, he’d shoot him.
“Suddenly John Ashley took a quick step forward and started to drop his handcuffed hands, and the deputy guarding him fired. He said that he supposed the other prisoners tried to break, or that the deputies feared that John had fired on him, for suddenly there was a lot of shooting, and they were all killed.”
Of Padgett, Williams wrote: “He did not credit Sheriff Merritt with any of the shooting. He also did not apologize for his act. He made good a threat to John Ashley and said that John had promised to kill all of them if he had a chance.”
“It was them or us at that point,” Williams quotes the deputy as telling her. Elmer Padgett was the deputy that scooped John’s glass eye out.
Williams’ account was bolstered with the publication in 2014 of O.B. Padgett: A Florida Native Son, a book by Alice Luckhardt, which contains written reminiscences of the former Stuart police chief.
O.B. Padgett was Elmer Padgett’s brother and one of the lawmen on the Sebastian bridge during the shooting. In the book, Padgett contradicts the testimony the law officers gave at the inquests and concedes the outlaws were handcuffed. Because he was suffering from an acute case of indigestion, he did not testify at the 1924 inquests and said he was surprised he was never questioned afterward. But in his written account he gave a step-by-step description of what happened.
Padgett said that on the way to the Sebastian River bridge deputies did not discuss killing the gang once captured. Padgett said that after the Ford carrying the outlaws stopped at the bridge, six deputies surrounded them and poked their automatic shotguns to the side of their heads. Deputy Lem Thomas, who was made part of the posse because he knew Ashley and could identify him, approached the right side of the vehicle, pointed his flashlight inside the car and exclaimed, “There’s John Ashley sitting there; look at his one eye, that’s him.”
Sheriff Merritt then approached the right side of the car, opened the door and ordered Clarence Middleton out of the car. Thomas searched him and handcuffed him and walked him to the front of the Ford. Then Thomas reached into the car, pulled out two pistols and a Winchester rifle and handed them to O.B. Padgett, who stuck the pistols in his belt and held the rifle.
Then John Ashley, sitting in the back seat behind Middleton, was ordered out of the car, with Thomas retrieving a .38 revolver John kept in a home-made deerskin holster he was wearing. Padgett said John was the only one who had a gun on his person. Then he was searched and handcuffed. Hanford and Lynn then exited the car and were searched and handcuffed to Middleton, “all the while as four deputies had their weapons trained on the outlaws’ every move.”
Then Merritt left to retrieve his vehicle from the other side of the bridge and returned, parking so that his car was directly in front of the Ashley Ford and both cars were facing each other with their headlights on. Merritt then asked O.B. Padgett to bring over the confiscated weapons to his car. As he was doing so, O.B. Padgett said he then heard Deputy Henry Stubbs ask Elmer Padgett, “Elmer, do you want to kill John?” O.B. said Elmer replied, “Might as well and get it all over with.”
Wrote Padgett of what happened next:
John Ashley then spoke up and said, ‘If you are going to kill me, how about a drink before you do?’ Elmer said, ‘What kind of drink do you mean, a drink?’ He said, ‘A drink of water, liquor, anything, just give me a drink before you kill me,’ and as he reached up to take his hat off, apparently all four deputies fired at the same time at the bandits; they were all shot down — five loads of 12 gauge buckshot in each bandit. They were all handcuffed as they all lay there on the ground.
Concluded witness Padgett:
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. John was the only one who had anything to say, and that was when they were going to kill him. It has often worried me — about a man being as brave as John Ashley was — standing there and asking for a drink. When he asked them to let him take his hat off … they were all killed.
The four firing weapons were Palm Beach deputies Elmer Padgett and Stubbs, Fort Pierce police chief Smith and St. Lucie deputy Wiggins. According to O.B. Padgett’s version, neither he nor Sheriff Merritt nor Lem Thomas, who was unarmed, fired weapons.
Padgett said that after the shooting and things had settled down, Merritt looked around and said, “Well, I guess that takes care of this.”
Wrote Padgett:
When the deputies started loading the bodies of the bandits, they picked one of them up and threw him in the back of their car about like throwing in a dead dog. John Ashley was thrown in next, right on top of the first one. Hanford Mobley was picked up and tossed in right on top of the others and then the last bandits. Elmer Padgett drove them to Fort Pierce in their own automobile.
Padgett also revealed who provided the tip about the Ashley Gang’s planned trip to Jacksonville the night of Nov. 1, 1924. He said he received it from George Mario, John Ashley’s brother-in-law, and then relayed the information to Sheriff Baker.
Wrote Padgett:
I was walking down the sideway about mid-morning this Saturday. It was a beautiful morning; the sun was shining, and it was warm; the birds were singing and everything was just beautiful. I walked by a grocery store where George F. Mario [brother-in-law of John Ashley] had just walked out and was putting some supplies in his car. I stopped and spoke to George, and we started talking and passing the time of day. I asked him if he had anything new at all, he looked all around and saw that there was nobody nearby to hear what he said. He said, “Yes, they are leaving tonight, and they are going to California. They are going as far as Jacksonville tonight and will lay up there tomorrow at John Ashley’s sister, Daisy’s, house and they will continue traveling at night until they get to California. They will be traveling in this automobile that I am putting these supplies in. They’re going to leave later today and there will be four of them.
Padgett continued:
I thought the situation over very carefully, pondered it in my mind a little bit, went on down to my office, sat around and talked a while to some of the boys. Then I went out and rode around a little, trying to figure out just what to do, if anything. I decided to call Sheriff Bob Baker of Palm Beach County, of which Stuart was a part of that time. For fear that somebody might overhear me talking on the telephone in my office, I went to my home and called Bob Baker on my private telephone. And in talking to him, I did not want to give the name of my informer — I did not want to tell him of the information and how I got it. One of his first reactions was, “Padgett, you better watch this kind of information — if they can get you out of town this afternoon, they’ll rob that bank again.” It was then that I assured him that my information was correct.
PERSONAL EFFECTS TELL STORY
Padgett said that some of the supplies he had seen in the car earlier in the day remained in it after the shooting. “There were a couple of clean shirts in the car,” he wrote. “Hanford Mobley had a small overnight bag with a couple of changes of underwear, a shirt and a bunch of letters and pictures.”
When the bodies were taken to the undertaker’s, Padgett said he was given Mobley’s overnight bag. He said Merritt had promised him Ashley’s Winchester rifle but never gave it to him. When he got to his office on Monday, Padgett said he went through Hanford’s overnight bag.
“When I went through it, I saw what was in it — mostly a lot of pictures and letters. He had letters from a young girl in California and a lot of her pictures. Apparently, from her letters, they had intended being married when he got back bto California.”
Padgett said he wrote the woman on his office stationery, telling her that Mobley had been killed. But he said the woman wrote back, saying Hanford was using him “to inform her that there would be no marriage between them.”
He said he sent another letter to the woman that included newspaper clippings. “I wished her the best of luck in her future life and never heard from her again.”
Padgett said he gave the overnight bag and the rest of the photos and letters to Hanford’s mother, Mary. “She seemed to be very surprised but appreciated what I did,” he said.
Before the shootings, Padgett said he had occasionally stopped at Mary Mobley’s store in Fruita but only did so one time after giving her the photos. He said George Mario had advised him to look out for the Mobleys “and to be careful and not go where they were, the Mobley part of the family was planning to do me harm.” Padgett said he once was called by George Mobley to come help them with a disturbance at their store at Gomez. Thinking it was a trap; he decided not to make the call.
REASON TO BE CAUTIOUS
George Mario also had reason to be on the lookout himself. Elzie Prevatt, a friend of both the Ashleys and the law officers who was interviewed in 1990 by Billie Holt, said the family suspected it was Mario who had tipped off law enforcement. “This fellow Mario, he was the one. There was only one Ashley man left, Bill Ashley. And the Ashley girls. They were all left, and the old lady was left. They figured that Mario was the one that told the law.”
Nevertheless, for eight years, George Mario participated in Ashley family functions, living next-door to his in-laws in Fruita. In 1925, the Marios and Ashleys celebrated the birth of Carlo Mario, Lola and George’s only child.
MYSTERIOUS DROWNING
But then came that fateful day on Dec. 2, 1932, when George Mario went for a boat ride with his brother-in-law, Bill, the last of the Ashley men. The two had been hired to work on construction of a new bridge across the St. Lucie River and were looking for green timber that could be used for pilings.
As Bill Ashley reported it, their small rowboat filled with water and foundered with Mario, 40, drowning. Bill claimed Mario, who had been crippled by a shooting 10 years before, could not swim. He said he twice tried to pull him into the boat, with the boat capsizing the second time and Mario drowning. Bill said he then swam ashore to save himself.
A search was conducted that included dragging the canal and placing a screen across the canal locks in case the body passed through it. The body was found 11 days later on a sand island in the South Fork of the St. Lucie River by 12-year-old Claude Sides Jr. The body was badly decomposed, but in the end the death was ruled accidental.
Prevatt said Bill Ashley later admitted to Elmer Padgett that he had killed Mario for his betrayal of the Ashley Gang for tipping off law enforcement. “He had to wait all them years to get to do it,” Prevatt said. “He knocked him overboard and just turned the boat over and let it float on down.”
OPPORTUNE TIME
George Mario’s granddaughter, Sandra Provence, said Bill had waited several years to seek revenge so that young Carlo Mario was old enough to take care of himself and would not be a burden on his blind mother, Lola, Bill’s sister. She said her grandfather knew how to swim, having traveled several times across the Atlantic from his native Italy.
Provence said Zeb Crews, who had married her cousin, Lugenia, daughter of Eva Ashley, one of the four Ashley sisters, told her at her father’s funeral in 1992 that Bill was responsible for her grandfather’s murder.
“Uncle Zeb said to my brother and me, ‘You know, Uncle Bill killed your dad’s father over the fact that he ratted on them about the car,” Provence said. “They got killed at the bridge because it was George’s fault for ratting them out.”
If Bill killed George Mario, it would be the last act of vengeance practiced by the Ashley men. Joe and his sons had a long history of retribution going back to 1881, when Joe Ashley sought to avenge the death of his uncle, John, after whom he would name his son, the leader of the Ashley Gang. Bill Ashley, the last of the original Ashley brothers, died of a heart attack in 1940.
Mario, who had recently been released from an Alabama prison after serving a sentence for grand larceny, wasn’t
the only person associated with the Ashleys who would meet a tragic end after the 1924 shootings at the Sebastian River Bridge.
LITANY OF DEATHS
SANDRA MARIO PROVENCE ARCHIVES
Daisy Ashley died in 1928 of what was described as an accidental poisoning or suicide after the recent breakup with a lover.
Heartbroken after the death of John and drinking heavily, Laura Upthegrove would live a tumultuous life of drink after John. One day she was so stewed that she demanded that Sheriff Bob Baker return John Ashley’s glass eye to her. He complied.
From Salerno, Laura moved to Okeechobee but was arrested several times for public drunkenness. She married Leon Lawrence in 1926 in Martin County but divorced him in 1927 in Palm Beach County.
She wandered about and was arrested in Jacksonville in March 1927 for public drunkenness and sentenced to 30 days. After her release she returned to Canal Point on Lake Okeechobee and worked at a gas station owned by her mother. She married yet another time, to 34-year-old Charles Swindle, on Aug. 11, 1927.
Seven days later, while working at the Upthegrove gas station, she got into a fight with a customer over the quality of an illegal bottle of whiskey she had sold him. Deputies Elmer Padgett and Archibald Brownlee had stopped to see Laura and witnessed her chasing the man with a gun and running him out of the store.
Back in the station, Laura’s mother took the gun away from her. Upset, Laura was reported to have taken a bottle of disinfectant, swallowed its contents and collapsed. Within minutes, the 30-year-old Laura was dead.
The bridge shooting had all but ended the Ashley Gang, though a few associated with Laura, some by blood, would continue to operate. They included Laura’s brother, Earl Upthegrove, and Joe Tracy, the original Ashley Gang member who turned himself in on a murder charge in Osceola County just a month before the shooting at the Sebastian River bridge, an arrest that likely saved his life.
George Mobley, Hanford’s father, would be killed in Melbourne in 1956 at the age of 79. Mobley, who had divorced Mary Ashley Mobley in 1927, had gotten a ride from a bar on A1A when an argument ensued after he spat tobacco on the floor of his ride’s car. The two in the car left but returned, with Mobley telling them to get their guns “we’re going to shoot it out and I’m going to kill you.”
Mobley then fired his shotgun into the house where the men had gone, with one of them, Jack Raymond, returning shots with a .22 rifle that killed Mobley.
Except for Daisy, the other Ashley women lived long lives, all having moved to West Palm Beach from Fruita. Mary died in 1979 at the age of 93, Lola died in 1983 at the age of 89 and Eva, the last surviving child of Joe and Lugenia Ashley, died in 1986 at the age of 89.
CLOSING THE CHAPTER
The last chapter in the history of the Joe and Lugenia Ashley family was closed. For those keeping score, a total of 12 people had died during the dozen years of John Ashley’s public criminal career. On the side of the public and law enforcement, the deaths included Desoto Tiger in 1911, jailer Wilbur Hendrickson and Officer John Riblet in 1915, and Deputy Fred Baker in 1924. The deaths suffered by the Ashley Gang and family included brother Bob killed in the Miami attempted jail break in 1915, brothers Ed and Frank Ashley lost at sea while rum-running in 1921, patriarch Joe Ashley killed at the still in 1924, and John Ashley, nephew Hanford Mobley and Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton killed on the Sebastian River bridge in 1924.
Despite his 12-year public crime spree, John and the Ashley Gang never reached the levels of national notoriety of criminals such as Jesse James or Billy the Kid or Bonnie and Clyde, although Hollywood in 1973 produced a tepidly received film on the lives of John and Laura called Little Laura & Big John.
During the Ashley Gang’s run, dozens of bank robberies were blamed on them, with the total seemingly rising over the years. The latest entry on John Ashley in Wikipedia, for example, says John and the Ashley Gang were responsible for robbing nearly $1 million from 40 banks.
But in reality, only three bank robberies — the 1915 Bank of Stuart robbery of $4,500; the 1922 second Bank of Stuart robbery of $8,133.14; and the 1924 Bank of Pompano robbery of $9,000 — could squarely be blamed on them. Total take: $21,633.14, or about $400,000 in today’s money.
Having buried her husband, all five sons and a daughter, Lugenia Ashley died in 1946 at the age of 84. She was the last of the Ashleys buried at the little Fruita cemetery. Undoubtedly, loved ones recalled the words she uttered during the 1924 funeral of John and Hanford: “Yes, it won’t be long ‘til we meet them again.”
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