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The murder of Katie DeWitt James


Kowalski

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Yeah, in the first link, it tells how she supposedly lost her head. I'm just thinking maybe they didn't realize how violent the husband could be (for her to be wanting the scandal of divorce) and thought they were helping him, then had him break bad on her at a confrontation they helped engineer. Or maybe it was for him to take his kid... whatever. Once she died, they worried about scandal, a trial... then an elaborate cover up? Too elaborate? - typical of amateur killers. We do have to remember this was then, and things were very different, very churchy especially in rural areas - sometimes dangerously so. As for the cop, even today some cops are bad or cannot bear closer scrutiny. Those 2 gals were "ladies of easy virtue"..... something smoky about the whole relationship tangle there.

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Yeah, in the first link, it tells how she supposedly lost her head. I'm just thinking maybe they didn't realize how violent the husband could be (for her to be wanting the scandal of divorce) and thought they were helping him, then had him break bad on her at a confrontation they helped engineer. Or maybe it was for him to take his kid... whatever. Once she died, they worried about scandal, a trial... then an elaborate cover up? Too elaborate? - typical of amateur killers. We do have to remember this was then, and things were very different, very churchy especially in rural areas - sometimes dangerously so. As for the cop, even today some cops are bad or cannot bear closer scrutiny. Those 2 gals were "ladies of easy virtue"..... something smoky about the whole relationship tangle there.

I thought of the first link when I posted... But then thought - how unnecessary to behead her (In the scenario we were discussing)... Taking her head off would have raised alarm bells even back then... Far safer (and easier to explain) leaving her 'intact'

and just claiming a tragic accident (which it could have been - at least by the standards of the day)...

But if Altie Hoods alleged confession (In later years - through hearsay) is accurate - then it was in no way an accident, but deliberate...

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Hearsay? Katie's Dad ran Altie down to hear from her mouth what really happened out there, is how I understood it. What was written is what the family story of that conversation went like. The writer of both links is a descendant of Katie.

It was a different time, when divorce did not happen (unless, rarely, the man left). Women died in childbirth and their sister would be given to the widower. It was still a time when women lacked the vote, and were not hugely better off than the things we decry today for women in the Middle East or other places. We put a better spin on it because it is more familiar to us, being our own past. End up pregnant, or abandoned or divorced, you were a pariah and had no real options but to turn to whoring if you lacked a sympathetic rich relative who would let you retire in disgrace into servitude in their home.

He wanted the child, or her not to leave him, or was just a rear end jerk like we see causing deaths today over not getting his way, and something happened out there in a seeming confrontation which got covered over sloppily. Easy to forget the times, as the same cr*p happens daily today and for the same reasons :(.

A few miles from my old cabin here there is the site of a burned down rickety shack that stood there maybe 100 years ago...maybe a bit more, from when loggers came through here and worked the dense forests for a time and then moved on. Many of these miniscule hamlets in the wilds got started that way. My place was built then, and is at least 125 years old. The wood is so aged you cannot hammer a nail into it to hang a picture on the original walls. They are like solid rock.

Any way, the tale still gets told that a fellow lived out there with a wife and kid and he was an abusive b*****. Not much you could do then, they were married so he owned her, she couldn't leave. Fire one night, and when the locals got way back up in there to help, he was gone, and his chattel and baby dead in the fire. He went on, probably changed his name, if that much and just hitched onto another logging crew and never did pay for that. I mean, one room shack is not that hard to walk out of if you somehow caught it afire... if you were not dead already. Their names are lost to history now, and it was an old fellow who told me the tale when I moved here. Had he not, the tale would be untold. The old home site is impossible to find now, unless you had JR to poke about and come up with traces beneath the heavy growth to find it.

Nothing new about hate or jacked up people, sorry to say. Always seems like the users in life know the system best to get away with it if anyone can.

JMO.

Edited by RockShaman
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Edit to add: they supposedly had that witness to the body with them behead her as a compromise to having to kill him too. He'd be guilty too the way they saw it. He did it, he claims, then ran to the sheriff and told his story. Obviously nothing was done.

Different times, sort of.

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RockShaman... By "hearsay" I meant that her confession while in jail in New Mexico for horse theft was presented as a family lore type thing, recounted decades later...

I wasn't aware that the confession was officially recorded...

I agree that from what we've been able to find about this case, it sure looks as though that the husband is involved up to his ears, as is Altie, and most likely the Deputy Sheriff as well... The

only question in my mind is degree of involvement by each...

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Apologies Taun I sounded crabby. The Father spoke to Altie directly as I understood it, and what was written is what the family learned from Dad, I guess. Perhaps it was recorded also, I don't know. Horse thieving was a hanging offense for a while, so maybe Altie had nothing left to lose by talking. Truth is ambiguous much of the time in murders once past the basics of who dealt the killing event.

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