On a warm spring day last April, I set off to the Dallas Municipal Archives as part of the research process for my second book. I was on the hunt for a mid-century police file. The subject: Candy Barr (real name Juanita Slusher), a stripper sent up the road to Huntsville Penitentiary on a fifteen year narcotics sentence back in 1959.
The archivists pulled the box for me – Dallas Police Department, Box 17, Historical Criminal Cases 1940’s-1960’s. Juanita’s folder was there, but the documents inside were all 1970’s Xerox copies of the originals. I couldn’t complain, none of the information I needed was missing, but I had secretly been hoping to see the original fingerprint cards.
Like most historians, I am incredibly nosy, so I looked through the rest of the folders in the box. There were big, glossy crime scene photos and their negatives, fingerprint cards and criminal records – all from the 1950s (in fact, Juanita’s turned out to be the only ones that were photocopies, which is an intriguing mystery in itself). There were newspaper clippings and sheets of scrawled correspondence blotted with coffee stains. Everything smelled faintly of the chemicals used to develop the photographs. This is my favourite part of archival work. Each box contains a world within a world, the sort of sensory information that you just can’t quite get from reading a book.
Towards the end of the box was a folder stamped several times over in dark red ink with the word ‘DECEASED’. Between the stamps, handwritten in a different shade of red, was the phrase ‘electrocuted on 3-12-1952 for murder of Johnny Sides, Dallas P.D’. The subject of the folder was a man named Robert Lee Johnson. Inside, between the various legal documents, a yellow sheet of paper noted that Robert’s nephew Marvin had been executed for the same crime and two others were sent to prison. A newspaper clipping from the Dallas Morning News called Robert ‘Uncle Robert’ and described him as a ‘hatchet face hillbilly musician’ from California. There was a mugshot and a photograph of Uncle Robert’s cowboy boots.
I had a lot of questions. Why had a small-town western band from California shot a Dallas police officer? How were they caught? Were they a group of career criminals? Was Uncle Robert a sort of proto Charles Manson figure? He certainly has that vibe, here’s the mugshot:
At trial, Uncle Robert shocked the court by taking full responsibility for the murder of rookie Police Officer Willis Wood ‘Johnny’ Sides, so why was his nephew executed and what was going on with the two men in prison?
I benched the questions because I didn’t have the time to answer them, but I never stopped thinking about those cowboy boots. Eventually, I did look for answers, and discovered most of them lay with a lanky seventeen year old named Maxwell Billy Pomeroy. When Billy fell in with Uncle Robert and his roving western band in the days before Christmas in 1950, he just wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Six months later one man was dead, another had been shot, two were facing the death penalty and Billy was serving ninety nine years in the state penitentiary. He still didn’t know how to play the guitar.
Next week I’ll be covering the murder of Officer Johnny Sides and the media circus that ensued during the fallout. There’s conflicting eye witness testimony, a standoff in hospital, questionable fiddle playing, a prison escape, enough side characters to populate a Coen brothers movie and a spaniel named Traffic. At its heart, this is an age-old American story of a routine traffic stop gone horribly wrong, something which feels as much a part of the country’s fabric as fast food and country music.
For now I’ll leave you wondering what this illustration of a rock on a cash register has to do with a capital murder case.
Images of Robert Lee Johnson and his cowboy boots via the Dallas Municipal Archives.
Dallas Morning News, February 8th, 1951.
Dallas Morning News, February 14th, 1951.
Dallas Morning News, March 23rd, 1951.
Hmmm… intriguing! I look forward to the next instalment.