Today’s Lawless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
If Jim McKinney were alive today, he would certainly still be behind bars, serving life without parole from the time he was twenty years old. McKinney was a psychotic punk from Farmersville, a small town ten miles southeast of Visalia, California. When McKinney was a young man, he pistol-whipped a schoolteacher who had paddled his younger brother. After he had beaten the hapless teacher to the ground, he pulled out his Bowie knife and cut off a piece of the unconscious man’s ear. A deputy sheriff witnessed the violent act and ran to stop it. The deputy was successful in arresting McKinney, but was slashed on the arm while apprehending him.
Good for nothing Jim McKinney
Nowadays, McKinney would likely serve a twenty-year stretch in San Quentin for such a crime, but McKinney was acquitted in this incident. In the 1880s, it wasn’t uncommon for a criminal to be acquitted of such straight-out violence, even with a police officer as the witness. California justice was much more arbitrary in the 1800s than it could ever be now, no matter how much politicians and media complain about the current legal system.
After the incident, McKinney wisely left Farmersville and became aa drifter. There were rumors that he had ridden with the Wild Bunch, of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fame. He was also thought to have killed a couple of men in Arizona. One thing is certain: Jim McKinney was never a law-abiding citizen.
McKinney had a hard time staying away from California. He came back often, and he invariably caused trouble while there. In Visalia, he shot a woman in the buttocks when she wasn’t interested in his affections. In 1899, he shot Long Tom Sears because McKinney’s girlfriend told him that Sears had mistreated her. McKinney approached Sears in a Bakersfield alley and tried to provoke him into a fight. Sears, who had been a friend of McKinney, didn’t want to fight, and he threw his gun onto the ground. It didn’t matter to McKinney whether Sears was unarmed or had been a friend. The ferocious killer shot him down in cold blood.
As a bullet passed through Long Tom’s body, Deputy Sheriff John Crawford was relieving himself in a nearby outhouse. Hearing the gunshot, Deputy Crawford ran out of the privy with his pants hanging down and ran directly into McKinney. The psycho shot him twice in the butt. McKinney was arrested and tried, but astonishingly he was acquitted of Long Tom Sears’s murder and of shooting Deputy Crawford.
McKinney next appeared in the police ledger in April 1902, when he got drunk in Porterville and started taking target practice in Zalaud’s Saloon. He shot the slowly revolving ceiling fan and, after becoming bored, he started shooting the liquor bottles behind the bar. A town marshal ran into the saloon and cracked McKinney over the head with a club. Getting whacked in the head wasn’t enough to put McKinney down, and the marshal was shot through his mouth, cheek-to-cheek. As the lawman laid on the floor in agony, McKinney stalked out of the saloon, but he soon returned, this time armed with a shotgun. He then fired with both barrels at the first person he saw through his booze-clouded eyes. Unfortunately, it was Billy Lynn, one of McKinney’s few remaining friends. McKinney got onto his horse and rode out of town, shooting two men along the way.
McKinney hid out with his friend Al Hulse, who should have known by this time what happens to people who befriended McKinney. They hid out in a Chinese joss house in Bakersfield. It is hard to imagine a couple of hulking Caucasians going unnoticed in a Chinese temple for a year, but McKinney and Hulse managed to do just that.
On April 19, 1903, the police learned that McKinney was hiding out at the L Street joss house. Along with a posse of policemen, City Marshal Jeff Packard and Deputy Sheriff Bill Tibbet raided the joss house. Packard and Tibbet went from room to room while the rest of the posse guarded the exits. When Packard and Tibbet kicked down the door of the room where McKinney and Hulse were hiding, they were greeted by hot lead and gunsmoke. Packard and Tibbet were seriously wounded.
Rifle in hand, McKinney sprinted for the exit, only to run directly into the shotgun barrel of Deputy Bert Tibbet, the brother of Deputy Bill Tibbet. McKinney fired off a couple of wild shots before Bert Tibbet cut him down with his shot gun. Another deputy finished him off with a shot as he hit the ground.
Packard and Tibbet died of their wounds before the day was over. Hulse was arrested for harboring a fugitive. Seeing that most of McKinney’s friends ended up dead. Hulse got a good deal.
Culled from: California Justice by my friend David Kulczyk
Malady Du Jour!
Man with deformed feet, Wendt, New York City, c. 1885
Culled from: Harms Way