The Last Laugh: Tom Tate of Texas (1912)

There’s the devil in that bottle, according to an old saying, and to drink from can be to swallow a shot of evil. At least according to Tom Tate, the twenty-five-year-old slayer from Tyler, Texas. His shot of evil led to a date with the hangman in 1912. Tate, however, would break the date.

Tom Tate had too much to drink on the morning of January 18, which led to three, separate indictments for murder and “criminal assault.”

Tate’s assault on a bottle of whiskey began a few days before the crimes, so by the morning of January 18, he had plenty of liquid courage. He pounded on the door of Pleasant Hardegree, and when he answered, Tate shot him in the chest at point-blank range. He then set upon Hardegree’s wife. He raped and throttled her before she managed to flee the house.

Her dress torn to shreds, she raced to the Martins’ house, where she babbled a sequence of incoherent statements through chattering teeth. Just minutes later, Tate wobbled past and started shooting, peppering the walls with buckshot. The deadly volley merely wounded Gus Martin and his son, but Mrs. Liddie Martin sustained a fatal gunshot wound and died the next day.

At the end of January, Tate went on trial for two counts of murder and one for the assault on Mrs. Hardegree. He would do his best to keep his neck out of a hangman’s noose during a trial that had everyone in Tyler talking and left the courthouse standing-room-only.

Tate’s defense hinged on his ability to convince the jurors that, at the time of his crimes, he had been temporarily insane, his madness brought on by whiskey. The prosecution endeavored to show that Tate was trying to settle a score from a year earlier when the Hardegree couple allegedly ratted him out to authorities for stealing a watermelon.

In a futile effort, Tate took the stand in his own defense. He explained that for over two months he ran a bootlegging operation. His own best customer, he drank between a quart and a quart-and-a-half each day. On the morning of January 18, he couldn’t see straight and didn’t even remember renting the horse and buggy he took to the Hardegree place.

The jury didn’t buy Tate’s explanation. It took less than two hours to return a verdict of guilty and sentence him to death.

Tate quietly listened to the verdict, seemingly unmoved by his impending date with the hangman. Even the sobbing of his wife didn’t provoke the slightest emotion in Tate, who left the courtroom audibly chuckling and joking around with the guards escorting him to jail.

Perhaps Tate knew then that he wouldn’t be keeping that date with the hangman. His first attempt to escape ended before it began. The plot was thwarted when a recently released prisoner, W.A. Edmundson, was caught trying to smuggle a few strands of steel cable to Tate and two other prisoners under the sentence of death.

A week later, Tate would try again.

On November 10, 1912, he sawed through the bars of his death house cell and slipped out of the notoriously unsecure Fort Worth jail while awaiting the long walk to the scaffold. He used a spring from the instep of his boots to sever three bars around the foot slot (each bar was two inches wide and three-eighths inch thick, making the cell of the lattice-type) and create a hole eight inches wide by twelve inches tall—the approximate size of a sheet of paper. He then squeezed through the hole. For a man of five-feet-eight inches in height and 150 pounds, this was quite a feat of contortion.

In the corridor, he spied a length of garden hose that he used to climb up to and through the skylight and onto the roof. He tied the end of the hose to the chimney and shimmied down to ground level and disappeared into the night. The plot was discovered at midnight, and lights out occurred at nine p.m., giving Tate three hours to make his way out of the lock-up somehow evading night watchman Robert Day, who was on the same floor as Tate’s cell during the three-hour window when he made his way out of the jail.

The escape of a convicted murderer apparently didn’t make the Fort Worth jailors any more circumspect. The next day, two female inmates—Annie Morris and Linnie Williams—dug their way out with a pair of spoons. Captured later that night, they said it took them less than an hour to spoon through the soft walls.

Tate’s escape nullified his appeal; if he was caught, he would certainly swing for his crimes. W.M. Rea, sheriff of Fort Worth, offered $100 for his capture. Governor Coquitt and Smith County later chipped in $250 each, upping the bounty to $600 for Tate’s capture. Wanted leaflets were printed and sent all over the United States.

But Tate got the last laugh after all. Authorities simply could not find him. According to rumors and innuendos that circulated throughout East Texas, Tate escaped to Oklahoma, where he lived the rest of his life as a minister, perhaps preaching about the devil in the bottle.

This wanted leaflet circulated in Oklahoma (the handwritten notation “Oka” indicates its provenance), but despite the photograph, Tate allegedly lived the rest of his life there under an alias.