A gangland-style hit on Gay Street, 98 years ago this week
by Jack Neely
The newest film that week at Morris's Electric Theater on Gay Street was footage of the electrocution of Leon Csolgosz, the anarchist who had shot President McKinley just six months ago.
Justice was swift in this new electric age. If the electric chair was a deterrent, Joshua Jones wasn't one to be deterred. He and his 19-year-old nephew, Moultrie Jones, had a score to settle. "We are farmers and have always been peaceable citizens of the state..." he would say to the press the next day. Today, in a train from Loudon on his way to the Southern station in downtown Knoxville, his Smith & Wesson .32 was loaded.
It was a Wednesday afternoon, cool for the middle of March. It hadn't even gotten above freezing yesterday, but with the sun out this afternoon the temperature was up to 42 degrees.
When Josh and Moultrie Jones stepped out onto Gay Street, people stared. They weren't wearing city clothes, but what one policeman recalled as "peculiar dress." Josh wore leather leggings, like a cowboy. They loped south on Gay, on the east side of the street.
Just ahead of them on the opposite side was another young man wearing a new suit. His name was Tom Howard, and in Knoxville he was known as a quiet, respectful young man. Still, the fact that he was a Knoxville cop—a deputy in charge of collecting bail bonds—might have seemed a little odd. In some hollers of Monroe County Howard was known as a killer. Eighteen months ago, he had killed Charles Jones, the justice of the peace. The dead man was the brother of Joshua Jones and the father of Moultrie Jones.
The feud went back a few years, and was a love story of operatic complications. Tom Howard was a college man, maybe the most eligible bachelors in Monroe County in the 1890s. Smitten with the strikingly lovely McGhee girls, he married the youngest one, Alva. The marriage caused a minor scandal; Alva was only 13.
The McGhees were country cousins of the wealthy Knoxville McGhees. Charles McClung McGhee—they called him "Uncle Charlie"—was the industrialist who had founded Knoxville's first public library and named it Lawson McGhee, after his daughter who had died young.
When Tom Howard and his teenage bride settled on McGhee land, the forced intimacy seemed to heighten the McGhees' resentment of Howard. They argued, they fought, sometimes they killed each other. In the first gunfight, the McGhees killed two of Tom Howard's brothers. From Knoxville, Uncle Charlie sent bail money, and they were eventually found not guilty: self-defense.
To make matters worse, strain had gotten the best of Howard's marriage to Alva. They divorced, and Howard married Alva's slightly prettier sister, Lawson McGhee, named for her cousin, the namesake of the Knoxville library. The older McGhees viewed this second marriage even more skeptically than the first.
In a second scrape with the McGhee-Jones clan, Tom Howard killed his own uncle-in-law, Charles Jones, the 60-year-old justice of the peace, at Madisonville's Clew Hotel—and wounded his brother Joshua, leaving a bullet in him.
No one knows what Tom Howard was thinking as he crossed Jackson and walked by Kolter's saloon, on the corner, and then ducked into the next door, which was Whitesides & Keener's Shooting Gallery. Inside, at least a dozen men were watching a knife-throwing contest. Howard seemed to have come to join them.
Outside, the Joneses crossed Gay Street at Jackson. Witnesses remembered what the older man said to the younger one, but the newspapers didn't report all of it. "There he is, the — — — now," said Joshua, according to the papers. "Let's get him."
Standing out on the Gay Street sidewalk, Joshua Jones pulled out his .32 and fired two shots into the shooting gallery's window. They hit Tom Howard in the back, but he somehow leapt over a counter, seeking shelter behind a knife rack, before he collapsed on the floor. The Joneses walked into the gallery, and fired several shots into Tom Howard's face.
"That's enough," said Joshua Jones. "We've got him." They walked out unimpeded, and crossed Gay Street once again, and walked past Rebori's fruit stand and the Lawson McGhee, Uncle Charlie's walkup library. Then they strode into the Knoxville Banking Co. at Gay and Vine, right across from Cal Johnson's saloon.
It was a small bank, and the first man they saw happened to be the president, William Gass. Joshua Jones asked to see a cousin of theirs, Hugh Johnston, the cashier. Gass replied that he's gone out.
"I want to leave my things here," said the elder Jones, showing no obvious emotion. "We have just killed that fellow Howard." Gass somehow talked the Joneses into turning over their guns. He telephoned the constable.
Meanwhile, Police Sgt. Billy Malone, who'd just been talking to his friend Tom Howard, heard about the shooting down at the depot. He walked up to the shooting gallery and saw a man on the floor, his face covered in blood. With a handkerchief Malone wiped the blood from his face and only then did he recognize his friend Tom Howard, shot and singed with powder burns. Howard still wore in his rubber holster an unfired revolver.
In a dramatic trial which cast aspersions on the character of several shooting-gallery witnesses, both Joneses were found not guilty. Years later, Joshua Jones moved to Knoxville, where he died suddenly in his garden. Members of his family blamed his death on the bullet Tom Howard had put in him 20 years before.
March 16, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 11
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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