Category: EVIL MF
William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson was quite the gifted psychopath. The deadliest Confederate guerilla leader of the American Civil War, Anderson led his ruthless mob of cutthroats on a reign of terror along the rugged Kansas–Missouri border and killed hundreds along the way.
The path Bloody Bill took from a well-behaved, respectful child to an inveterate butcher and rapist is a study in human depravity.
The Tale of “Bloody Bill” Anderson
Anderson was indeed, by all accounts, a decent kid. He had two brothers and three sisters. His father supported slavery but did not own slaves. In 1860 Anderson’s mother was struck by lightning and killed.
In his late teens, Anderson killed his first man, a Native American he claimed was trying to rob him. As he came of age, William and his brother Ellis supported themselves by stealing horses.
His moral compass already a bit askew, all the young William Anderson needed was some kind of catalyst to push him over the edge. In May of 1862, a Union-sympathizing judge named Baker became that catalyst.
William’s father heard of Judge Baker’s allegation that his family harbored Confederate fugitives, armed himself, and traveled to Baker’s courthouse in Council Grove. Baker shot and killed the elder Mr. Anderson in the ensuing confrontation, claiming self-defense. When Judge Baker was not charged for the killing, young William hatched a plan.
Bill and his brother Jim returned to Council Grove three months later and, by means of subterfuge, lured Judge Baker and his brother-in-law into a local store. When the judge realized what was afoot, the two men retreated into the basement of the store. Bill and Jim burned the structure to the ground, killing them both.
The Big Time
Bill Anderson then just went feral. He rode with William Quantrill and attracted a robust following of disaffected Southern sympathizers called Bushwhackers. Together they robbed and killed with wanton abandon, fastidiously protecting women—at least at first—but ruthlessly gunning down Union troops and sympathizers at every opportunity. They were remarkably successful. Along the way, Frank and Jesse James fell in with his crew.
Union Brigadier General Thomas Ewing was directed to bring Anderson to task, something easier said than done. Bill’s sisters Josephine and Mary frequently traveled to Kansas City to purchase ammunition for Bill and his troops.
During one outing, Ewing had the women arrested and placed in a flimsy makeshift stockade. The building collapsed, killing Josephine and four of her companions. This event transformed Bill Anderson from a soldier into a psychopath.
Anderson began carrying a silken cord with him everywhere he went. Each time he personally killed a Union soldier, he tied a fresh knot in the cord. At the time of his death, the cord had 53 knots. Anderson decorated his saddle with the scalps of his Union victims.
Gifted Tactican
In addition to a certain familiarity with killing, Bill Anderson was a legitimately gifted tactician. His forte was luring Union forces into a canalized area using a small contingent of his troops as bait.
He would post his mounted forces in the tree lines or behind terrain features until enemy units entered his kill zone. Anderson then used his superior tactics and high-volume weapons to overwhelm the Union forces. He seldom left more than a token number alive.
Anderson’s “Bloody Bill” moniker was well deserved. In September of 1864, Anderson and his men moved on Centralia, Missouri, looting, robbing and killing as they went. While in the town, they seized a passing passenger train carrying 23 unarmed off-duty Union soldiers.
Anderson ordered one Yankee non-commissioned officer (NCO) held for a potential prisoner swap and had the rest shot on the spot. Anderson’s men killed one German civilian on the train for wearing a blue shirt.
Such stuff happened not infrequently. Bloody Bill once personally killed 14 Union soldiers in a single day. In the face of such brutality, his Union adversaries responded in kind, frequently riding under a black banner that told all comers to expect no mercy. Blood flowed freely on all sides.
Things came to a head in October of 1864. Anderson and his men burned Rocheport, Missouri to the ground and moved on Glasgow. Though nominally under Confederate command, Anderson opted instead to ignore his orders and pursue opportunities to loot.
While in Glasgow, Anderson sought an audience with a well-heeled Unionist. The notorious Bushwhacker raped his 13-year-old servant girl and trampled the man under his horse. The Yankee sympathizer ultimately succumbed to his injuries in 1866.
Loaded for Bear
Anderson’s troops were reported to carry four revolvers, each between their mounts and their persons. When he was killed, Anderson was packing six. Realizing that his foes were armed with accurate but slow-firing muzzleloading muskets, Anderson would typically charge enemy formations and absorb the first ragged volley. He and his men would then tear through the blue ranks, cutting down the Union troops with large volumes of close-range pistol fire.
While there were dozens of different types of handguns in common use during the American Civil War, two were the most common. Colonel Colt’s 1851 and 1860 Model revolvers armed soldiers on both sides. The Remington New Model Army was not quite so popular but also saw widespread use. Each gun has an interesting story.
Colt Revolver
Samuel Colt did not invent the revolver—he optimized it. Under Colonel Sam’s guidance and marketing, his eponymous wheelguns filled holsters across the country and throughout the world.
Colt operated manufacturing facilities that churned out his pistols in both Connecticut and in London, England. While the Model 1851 and Model 1860 differed slightly in some details, the designs were conceptually quite similar. Both guns were evolutionary developments of the previous 1849 pocket pistol.
The 1851 Colt Navy featured a positively retained pivoting ramrod underneath the barrel to assist with reloading chores and a characteristic open architecture around the cylinder.
While this offered relatively easy cleaning and ready access to the nipples, the gun was notorious for dropping its spent percussion caps down into the action. Under the wrong circumstances, this can lock the mechanism up tight. I myself have had this happen several times in the decades I have been shooting these old pistols.
These Colt handguns typically fired either .36– or .44-caliber balls and were constructed of both steel and brass components. Colt produced 215,000 copies domestically and another 42,000 in England. The Griswold Gunnison was a copy of the 1851 Navy built in Georgia for Confederate use.
Remington Revolver
These days the Remington New Model Army revolver is frequently called the Model 1858. This is a reference to the September 14, 1858, patent date engraved on the revolver. I have read, however, that this term is a modern contrivance. The guns did not see wide-scale production until 1861. Some people have claimed that the Model 1858 reference arose in the Navy Arms marketing literature during the 1960s.
Regardless, the Remington New Model Army is an altogether more rugged design than that of the Colt. The steel frame on the Remington gun features a topstrap that wraps up and over the cylinder, offering a great deal more strength.
The design of the Remington pistol also allows the cylinder to be removed more readily than that of the Colt competitor. As loading cap-and-ball revolvers is quite laborious, it was an accepted practice to carry separate loaded cylinders that could be exchanged after partially disassembling the guns. This process is easier on the Remington weapon.
Eliphalet Remington approached the U.S. Army in late 1861 and offered to sell his guns to the government for $15 apiece—this at a time when Colt was getting $25. Regardless, the Union Army was still slow to embrace the weapon. However, by the end of its production run, the New Model Army had seen ten variants and more than 230,000 copies produced.
The End Of The Story
On October 27, 1864, Bloody Bill Anderson fell for his own ruse. Lt. Col. Samuel Cox and a contingent of 150 Union troops located Anderson’s encampment and lured him and his men into a narrow lane bounded by thick woods.
Assuming these Yankees would break as easily as those he had previously dispatched, Anderson charged their formation without hesitation. A heavy volley of accurate Union fire dropped several of the Bushwhackers, taking the spirit out of their charge.
Anderson and two others continued on and tore through the Union lines. As he wheeled his mount around for another pass, a second volley raked the three rampaging Confederates. Bloody Bill Anderson caught two rounds to the head and died where he fell. He was 23 years old.
Force Of Nature
These Colt and Remington pistols served much the same way as the German P08 Parabellum and Walther P38 9mm handguns throughout World War II. There were never enough to go around, and production of both weapons was always inadequate. So it was with these two vintage revolvers.
I recently found myself in the market for an original 1851 Colt. I located a copy for sale online at a decent price. However, on closer inspection, it seemed that the barrel rode at a slightly upward cant relative to the frame. Such was the sensitivity of the design. I passed on the gun as a result.
While the Colt is undeniably the prettier of the two pistols, the Remington is much more rugged. In the hands of men like Bloody Bill Anderson, these six-shot wheelguns were indeed a force of nature.
Dixie Gun Works (DixieGunWorks.com) can get you copies of these two classic Civil War wheelguns in kit form at a good price.
Nature versus nurture. It’s a debate as old as psychology. Are we what we are because of our genes, because of our environment, or some mysterious combination? Countless knowledgeable people have devoted their professional lives to pondering that simple question.
Arthur Guyton was born in 1919 in Oxford, Mississippi. His father was an ENT physician, and his mother was a physicist. Guyton was in his surgical residency when he was stricken with polio. Unable to perform surgery, Guyton devoted his extraordinary mind to the deep things of medicine.
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We lack the space to catalog that extraordinary guy’s accomplishments. In addition to devising the world’s first joystick-controlled wheelchair, the first motorized patient hoist, and a series of advanced orthotic braces, Guyton singlehandedly penned the standard textbook of medical physiology used by every reputable medical school on the planet. I was blessed to have him autograph my copy. Dr. and Mrs. Guyton had ten children, every last one of whom went on to become respected physicians in their own right. Theirs was a truly amazing family.
On 15 June 2013, 16-year-old Ethan Crouch killed four people while driving with a restricted license under the influence of drugs and alcohol. At his trial for intoxicated manslaughter, Crouch’s attorneys actually argued that he deserved rehab rather than prison because he suffered from “affluenza.” They reasoned that the kid had never been taught any limits, so it wasn’t his fault that he plowed his dad’s late-model Ford F-350 into a crowd. Crouch eventually fled to Mexico with his wealthy facilitating mother but was apprehended. Nature versus nurture—it’s indeed a murky question.
The Archetypes
Uday and Qusay Hussein were the sons of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Uday, the elder, was seen as Saddam’s heir apparent until he was badly injured in an assassination attempt. Both boys were born in Baghdad to Saddam’s wife/first cousin Sajida Talfah while the patriarch was in prison. The couple also had three daughters. Interestingly, in addition to his well-publicized forays into megalomania, Saddam also anonymously penned a best-selling romance novel titled “Zabibah and the King.”
Uday and Qusay were both crazy, but they were two different flavors of crazy. Qusay was the more cerebral of the two. He married Maher Abd al-Rashid and fathered four children. Qusay killed methodically, institutionally, and, most typically, in the shadows. Thousands of political prisoners were murdered on his orders simply to free up space in Iraqi jails. By contrast, Uday was a much more flamboyant madman.
Uday Hussein was a true old-school psychopath. He derived personal joy from other people’s suffering. Uday was a serial rapist who was granted unfettered institutional power. His henchmen roamed the streets of Baghdad, kidnapping attractive young women for his personal use.
Uday spent three days in medical school before dropping out. He then obtained a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a doctorate in political science. However, there were rumors that his coursework was actually done by others in exchange for gifts, political favors, and the threat of violent, gory death. One of his fellow students described him thusly, “He was really smart, probably smarter than his father—but he was crazy.”
In addition to sundry other duties, Uday was put in charge of the Iraqi Olympic teams. He would torture the athletes if they did not perform to his standards. Latif Yahia, Uday’s body double, later said, “The word that defines him is sadistic. I think Saddam Hussein was more human than Uday. The Olympic Committee was not a sports center, it was Uday’s world.”
Uday reportedly had a policy wherein he never had sex with a woman more than three times. Once he was done, he frequently had his subjects murdered and their bodies disposed of. When he was unable to be present for a victim’s torture, he often called in so he could listen to their screams over the phone.
The veracity of this story has been disputed. However, it was widely reported in 2003 that the man even ordered an industrial plastic shredder to be shipped to Iraq. He purportedly used the device to kill his enemies by gradually lowering them into the machine feet-first. In short, Uday and Qusay really desperately needed killing.
Assassination Attempts
You cannot treat people the way the Hussein boys did without making more than your share of serious enemies. Additionally, Saddam Hussein was Sunni, while the nation he ruled was majority Shia. This, combined with Saddam’s legendarily heavy-handed dictatorship, was the recipe for wet work.
As the quieter of the two psycho brothers, Qusay’s assassination attempt was the milder event. Members of the Iraqi National Congress opened fire on his motorcade on 1 August 2002. Qusay incurred a minor bullet wound to the arm but was otherwise unhurt.
Uday’s event was much more dramatic. He fell prey to his own depraved predictability. Every Tuesday around 7 pm, Uday would cruise around the Mansour district in Baghdad in his late-model Porsche sports car looking for fresh women to rape. Members of the Shia Shaaban resistance movement surveilled the area for three months, gathering intelligence before the hit. When the time was right, a group of assassins opened up, firing a total of fifty rounds at his vehicle. Seventeen actually connected.
The resulting purge resulted in a fairly predictable bloodbath. Countless political opponents, both real and imagined, were tortured and killed. As for Uday, after several surgical procedures, Iraqi physicians removed all but two rounds. However, the butcher had suffered significant spinal cord damage. While he was originally rumored to have been paralyzed, he eventually did recover well enough to be able to walk, albeit with a pronounced limp.
Uday’s extensive injuries also purportedly rendered him impotent. As you might imagine, for a prolific recreational rapist, that represented an undeniable blow to his pride. He subsequently had the secret police spread spurious stories about his extraordinary sexual prowess.
Operation Tapeworm
After the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, hunting down the major players in the Hussein government became the top priority. Coalition forces famously produced a deck of playing cards containing the most infamous personalities. Saddam was the ace of spades. Qusay and Uday were the aces of hearts and clubs, respectively. Coalition forces placed a combined bounty of $30 million on the two reprobates. They christened the mission to unalive these two scumbags Operation Tapeworm.
$30 million is a lot of money. That’s enough cash to allow a man to start afresh somewhere. Amidst the war-torn maelstrom of defeated Iraq, the means to set one’s family up on a metaphorical island somewhere was enough to raise a few eyebrows. A pair of those eyebrows belonged to one Nawaf al-Zaidan.
Nawaf al-Zaidan was a successful businessman and member of the Hussein inner circle of trusted confidantes. When Uday and Qusay needed a place to hide out, they pinged good old Uncle Nawaf. Uday, Qusay, Qusay’s 14-year-old son, Mustafa, and their bodyguard Abdul-Samad had been quietly holed up in Nawaf’s Mosul mansion for about three weeks when Nawaf left the compound on some pretense with his son. The rest of the al-Zaidan family had gone out for breakfast earlier.
Al-Zaidan reported to a nearby 101st Airborne base and explained that the Hussein boys were chilling at his crib. Despite being justifiably terrified–keep in mind that these were the same two fun-loving kids who supposedly maintained their own recreational plastic shredder–he offered physical details that corroborated his story. At 1000 on 22 July 2003, eight Delta Force operators, along with some forty 101st grunts, decided to run down the lead.
Monster Killing 101
The 101st infantrymen established an airtight cordon, and the D-boys gave the Hussein brothers a shout using a bullhorn. When they got no response, the Delta shooters breached the front door for a look-see. They were greeted by sleeting AK-47 fire that wounded three of the assaulters. As the entry team egressed, the Americans took fire from the upper story of the house that wounded a fourth US operator. That’s when these American heroes did what they do best.
In the actual military world, there’s just no such thing as overkill. Fairness and parity of firepower don’t mean bupkis if it is your hide on the line. The surrounding Screaming Eagles opened up with M2 Browning .50-caliber machine guns, AT4 antitank rockets, and Mk 19 automatic grenade launchers to systematically pulverize the structure. Uday and Qusay fought back, but this was turning into quite the big show. Everybody wanted a piece of it. In short order, a further 200 American grunts showed up ready to party. They brought along a handful of OH-58D Kiowa Warrior armed helicopters and several Humvee-mounted TOW launchers. The American people were about to get their money’s worth on some of that astronomical defense budget.
Doing the Deed
Around 1300 hours, some three hours after the Delta team first initiated their breach, the 101st grunts pumped ten BGM-71 TOW antitank missiles into the house. Support weapons and the Kiowa Warriors added to the carnage. Twenty minutes later, an American assault team moved into the rubble to check things out.
Uday and Qusay were blown to smithereens. 14-year-old Mustafa had barricaded himself in what was left of a bedroom with a Kalashnikov. When approached by US forces, the boy unlimbered his rifle. The American shooters cut him down.
The Rest of the Story
US troops recovered what was left of the four Iraqis and verified their identities via dental records and DNA assays. Uday and Qusay had grown their beards long in an effort to alter their appearance. Also, Uday had shaved his head. Uday, Qusay, and Mustafa were buried alongside each other in a cemetery in Tikrit.
Saddam, for his part, took the news with stoicism. Not that it mattered. Five months later, Delta operators dragged the disheveled despot out of a hole in the ground outside a farmhouse in ad-Dawr near Tikrit.
He was armed with a selective fire Glock 18C that was later presented to President Bush as a war trophy. Three years later, the 69-year-old dictator kept his date with the hangman at Camp Justice in Baghdad.
Nawaf al-Zaidan’s home was completely destroyed in the operation. However, don’t be too torn up about that. He got the $30 million he was promised by Coalition authorities for ratting out the Hussein boys. Al-Zaidan subsequently disappeared with his wife Mohassin, his 18-year-old son Shalan, and his four daughters.
As part of the agreement, al-Zaidan and his family were covertly relocated to the US. After a purported one-year training period on a US military base, wherein the family learned English and were schooled in the rudiments of wealth management, they were allowed to move anywhere in the States they wished.
All seven members of the family were given Green Cards with the option of applying for full citizenship five years later. I checked Google and found no reference to where they ended up. They could be living right down the road from any of us.
Sydney Sweeney has good genes. Those five words have recently touched off a hurricane of controversy amidst the cerulean-haired gender fluids who stand ever ready to be cataclysmically offended by pretty much anything. Full disclosure–as I am happily married and she is younger than all three of my kids, my interest in this woman is, tragically, more paternal than hormonal.
This ad campaign was brilliant. I read that it generated $300 million for American Eagle jeans in a day.
Ms Sweeney stands five feet three and, admittedly, has some exceptionally laudable attributes. Although such attributes can also be had for around nine grand these days, presuming you can find the right plastic surgeon, Google claims hers are not silicone. As such, I suppose there is truth in advertising in this case. Sydney does indeed have good genes.
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Genetics
She’s hardly alone in that regard. LeBron James, Ben Carson, and Serena Williams all emerged from the womb with some mighty fine raw material as well. It is simply that Syd was blessed/cursed with pale skin and blue eyes. That automatically makes her a Left-wing dog whistle. The fact that she is a registered Republican and has made a video shooting with Taran Butler is just kerosene on that campfire. Here’s the link.
Life’s not fair. Never has been, never will be. To believe otherwise is magical thinking. LeBron, Ben, and Serena would quite literally mop the floor with me in their respective fields. However, while some folks do indeed have a genetic leg up on the rest of us, there are also some others who seem to enter the world simply cursed.
Blood and Water
Just what is it about brothers, anyway? I have two myself. We fought like wildcats when we were kids. However, nowadays, Lord help you if you raise a finger against one of them and I hear about it. Humans are weird like that.
It’s not just us. Polar bears, gorillas, tigers, and house cats…all mammalian siblings fight just to pass the time. That is likely some byproduct of the fallen nature of the universe. And then there were John and Charles Ruggles.
The Problem
Some people just come from the factory with broken genes. Prisons are filled with such folks. In the United States today, 0.7% of the American population is behind bars. That’s nearly two million souls or roughly one in every 140 adults. Ours is the highest rate of incarceration on Planet Earth. Though we have 4.2% of the world’s population, we play host to 20% of the world’s prisoners. That rate has increased by 500% since the 1970s. Why is that exactly?
Lots of really smart people have devoted their lives to studying that thorny problem. I’m not one of them. However, I did serve my time in an urban emergency room where I met some of the most fascinating criminals. The common denominator was usually just poor impulse control.
The capacity to control one’s emotions is the single greatest predictor of success in life. To use a Star Trek analogy, you want to be Spock, not Kirk. Our jails are not filled to bursting with psychopaths. There are a few, and they can be spectacular to behold. However, your typical inmate just can’t figure out when to walk away. Sprinkle that with a little unfiltered greed, and you have the recipe for something truly horrible. The Ruggles brothers were right out of central casting in that regard.
The Ruggles
The two Ruggles boys lived in the latter part of the 19th century. History has not been kind to the elder John Ruggles. Wikipedia describes him as an ex-convict and sex addict. I have no idea the basis for that second allegation. The details have been lost to time. However, I’d put my money on that aforementioned lack of impulse control.
People often died young and hard back then. John Ruggles lost his wife at a relatively early age and was never quite right afterwards. He passed his daughter off to relatives and struck out for the Sierra Nevada Mountains to take up subsistence living. After a time, his younger brother Charles began to fret about him. He then headed into the Great Unknown with the stated mission of rescuing his older brother John.
After a while spent living off the land, John Ruggles began longing for something a bit more civilized. Nice clothes and amenities require money, and he didn’t have any. When faced with such a quandary, many men would seek out gainful employment. However, that’s not the way John Ruggles rolled. Ruggles teamed up with a proper character named Arizona Pete and began robbing stage coaches. Charles finally caught up with him while he was amid this lucrative new profession.
The Fallen Nature of Man
Nobody knows what that first conversation was like. Perhaps Charles entreated his brother to renounce his evil ways and come back to help him teach Sunday School. However, it’s always easier to make things dirty than to clean them up.
This is indeed a timeless truism. You add a cup full of wine to a vat full of sewage, and you get sewage. You add a cup full of sewage to a vat full of wine, and you also get sewage. In the case of John and Charles Ruggles, the wayward brother soon talked his sibling into joining him on his criminal forays. On 10 May 1892, they robbed the Weaverville Stage. They got away clean but didn’t get much. They needed a bigger score.
The Ruggles Brothers Hit Again
Two days after the first robbery that netted them about nothing, the two brothers set an ambush at the top of a hill some five miles north of Redding, California. I couldn’t find any reference to Arizona Pete. I guess he had reformed, resigned, been killed, or something similar.
By now, the Ruggles boys had refined their tactics. The location they had chosen ensured that the horses pulling the stage would be tired. At first, everything went according to plan.
John stepped out in front of the stage and forced the driver, a man named Johnny Boyce, to stop and throw down the strong box at gunpoint. However, this stage company was not run by imbeciles. They had been robbed before. As Charles approached the side of the coach, a guard inside named Amos Montgomery caught him solidly in the face and neck with a hefty charge of buckshot. Curiously, Amos Montgomery went by the nickname “Buck.” That’s when everything went all pear-shaped.
Chaos
This resulted in a most frenetic exchange of gunfire. A passenger named George Suhr was wounded alongside Johnny Boyce and Buck Montgomery. Montgomery crawled out of the stage only to have the elder Ruggles shoot him through the back and kill him. Boyce, hurt though he was, spurred on his team and got the stage out of the kill zone. John purportedly bid his grievously wounded brother Charles a tearful farewell and split with the cash.
Once Boyce got his stage into town, the local law formed a posse and made haste for the scene of the crime. There, they found Charles all bloody and gross but not as bad off as originally feared. He was remanded to the Redding jail, where he gradually recovered from his wounds.
Wells Fargo detective John Thacker put the screws to the wounded criminal, who promptly gave up his brother. This is not unreasonable considering the elder sibling had essentially run off with the money and left him to die. Wells Fargo put a $1,100 bounty on his head.
John had gone to lay low with an aunt who turned him in when she heard the details of the crime. He was arrested without incident while eating in a restaurant in Woodland, California. In short order, John was extradited to Redding, where he was thrilled to discover that his brother was unexpectedly still above ground.
Women are Just Freaking Crazy
The Ruggles kids were fine-looking lads. A local official was quoted as having said, “While in jail, the handsome brothers were fed and pampered by local ladies who brought flower bouquets, cakes, fruits, and even offers of marriage…” After a lifetime’s worth of effort, I swear I will never comprehend the human female.
All this was more than the local guys could stand. The Ruggles brothers were given a trial date of 28 July 1892. However, four days prior, somewhere between 40 and 75 armed, masked vigilantes assaulted the jail, blew open the safe containing the keys with explosives, and dragged the two criminals outside. John offered up the location of the loot in exchange for his brother’s life, but the crowd was not in a negotiating mood. The mob hanged them both from a derrick on the corner of Shasta Street. Nobody was prosecuted for the killings.
That same local official said, “The recent sentimental attitude of a number of women toward the prisoners as well as the line of defense adopted by their counsel, who has been evidently endeavoring to implicate Messenger [Amos “Buck”] Montgomery as a party to the crime, had been denounced by a number of persons in the county and it is believed the lynching was due to those causes.”
Denouement
The allegations of complicity on the part of Buck Montgomery were baseless. The Ruggles’ take from the robbery was around $5,000 in gold, which was never recovered. It’s still out there somewhere. John claimed to have hidden the stash on the bottom of nearby Middle Creek with some sort of bobber on top to mark its location. I’m certain folks have since gone looking.
The locals were fairly pleased with the outcome. The neighborhood newspaper said, “It was a disagreeable job, but under the circumstances appeared to be necessary for the public good and is an example to the courts.” At the time of their violent deaths, Charles was 22 and John 33. With the crystalline clarity of hindsight, I suppose the Ruggles brothers just had bad genes.