Kibbe Murder News

Old Gila Murders Recalled  

Information about the 1910 murder of Fred Kibbe was included in a previous post, Murder In The Family.  To read, click here.  Fred Kibbe was a 2nd cousin to our great-grandmother, Minnie Peal Hatfield.  

In 1945, the Arizona Republic newspaper posted a full page article recalling the 1910 murders of Fred Kibbe and Alfred Hillpot. 

Transcription of above:

Sunday Morning, October 21. 1945, By Ben Avery.  

HANGING in a dark, dusty corner of the Gila County Jail, back under the stairs to the second-floor cells, are two hangman's knots one tagged "Goodwin," the other "Stewart." . For more than 30 years they have been hanging there forgotten by all but a few old-timers who also remember a brutal murder and one of the strangest trials in Arizona history and one or two who remember a story about a rose.  Before the story ended four men died, two were murdered and two hanged, but each of the men who climbed the gallows paid with his life for the murder of a man he did not kill. The rose entered the case too late to have much bearing on It. Maybe it had no place in the strange events at all, but two of the leading characters thought it did. One was the defense attorney, great-hearted Tom Flannigan, now a guest in the Arizona Pioneers Home, who mounted the gallows beside his client to pin the rose on his shirt.

The other was Walter Judd Scott, product of the old New York Sun school of journalists. But even a rose could not soften the crime committed by Goodwin and Stewart.  

IT HAPPENED September 14, 1910, at the old stage station of Montano, where the road from Globe to Fort Apache crosses Black river. Goodwin and Stewart, formerly stationed at Fort Apache with the Fifth Cavalry, had returned to Arizona a few months before from Wyoming where they were discharged from the army. They were staked to the stage station for a chicken and hog ranch by J. W. Tuttle, cattleman and operator of the Globe-Fort Apache stage line. 

The victims were Fred Kibbe, 26 years old, a recent arrival from the East who married into a well-to-do Globe family and had entered the grocery business, and his hunting partner, Alfred Hillpot, who owned a Globe cigar store. They were invited by Goodwin and Stewart to stay with them while on a hunting trip, and arrived from Globe that evening.  About 8:30 p.m. near-by campers heard three shots, but paid no attention to them because Stewart and Goodwin were always shooting at something. 

The next morning Ed Johnson, government teamster from Fort Apache, stopped on his way to Globe. Receiving no answer to his knocking, Johnson opened the door to the old stage station. Sitting at the table was Kibbe, shot through the head; lying on the floor was Hillpot, who had put up a fight but was clubbed, shot and had his throat cut. 

JOHNSON pushed his team into Rice and telephoned, Sheriff Henry Thompson, who took two deputies and went to the scene to organize a posse of Indian trailers.  The manhunt that followed was one of the greatest in the state's history. 

Stewart and Goodwin had taken all of the murdered men's belongings, including their horses, and headed north. Five days passed days of dogged trailing over some of the wildest country in Arizona. Then Sheriff Thompson found the horses the murderers had stolen, spent and abandoned 20 miles east of Holbrook. Then chance entered the chase on the side of the law.

When the manhunt started Sheriff Thompson sent word to other law enforcement officers to be on the lookout for the two ex-soldiers. Sheriff Joe F. Woods of Holbrook was away, but the message was received by Deputy W. B. Cross, who doubled as town barber.

Cross could not leave to join the chase because he had 14 prisoners in the county jail and no one to guard them. However, barbers have a way with them. That very afternoon John Pearce, a cowboy, rode into town and dropped into the barber shop for a shave. 

"What's the news?" he asked Cross as he leaned back in the chair. "Not much," Bill replied, "only we've got a hell of a manhunt going on." As his shaving progressed, he filled in the story. 

SUDDENLY, Pearce reared up in the chair, "Say," he said, "this afternoon I was riding along half asleep. Pretty soon I noticed my pony was following a human track. There were two of them. One was dragging his toes, so I knew he was mighty tired. They were heading straight for Adamana.  

Bill, now janitor at the Navajo county courthouse in Holbrook, quit barbering right there. He ran across the street to the depot and called Adamana, telling the telegraph operator there to send someone after Sheriff Thompson.

(Photo of  William Stewart, left, and John B. Goodwin)

KILLERS: Pictured shortly after, their capture on the steps of the Gila county courthouse are the killers, William Stewart, left, and John B. Goodwin, alias James H. Steele. Goodwin, during his trials, was nicknamed "The Tifier." 

Accounts of the actual capture differ. Bill says the sheriff and his posse waited in the Adamana station until the two hunted men approached about 9 o'clock that night, then, warned by the growl of a bulldog on the platform outside, Thompson stepped out and surprised them.  The other is that Thompson and his men waited in the shadow of the Adamana water tank where they knew the men would go for a drink. 

Sheriff Thompson started back with his prisoners the next day1 by train. In Flagstaff he learned the people of Globe were up in arms and that a lynching party was being rounded up.  He stopped off in Phoenix and everyone expected him to continue his trip by train. However, he slipped out of town the afternoon of September 25. by automobile and landed his men in the Gila County Jail early next morning. It was well he did for a crowd of about 500 townsmen had been meeting every train. 

THE BITTEREST legal battle in a murder case the state ever has witnessed was not long delayed.  The two were indicted by a territorial district court jury October 3, pleaded not guilty November 17, and were granted separate trials. These trials were for the murder of young Kibbe. Goodwin's started November 29. The jury found him guilty December 2, fixing the penalty at life imprisonment, and sentencing was set for December 10. Stewart's trial started December 3 and the same verdict was returned December 6. 

District Judge Ernest W. Lewis sentenced both men the same day. Mr. Flannigan defended both in this trial and W. G. Shute, now a Phoenix attorney, was district attorney and prosecutor.

The case probably would have ended there, but for an old-time Globe lawyer, known as Judge Sniffen who had a penchant for argument when in his cups. He argued the pros and cons of the case with Mr. Flannigan, also with the editor of the Arizona Record, insisting the district court lacked jurisdiction to try the murderers because the crime was committed on the Indian reservation by white persons. He insisted they could be freed from prison by habeas corpus on this technicality. Finally Al Cohen, editor of the Record, wrote a series of articles, based on Judge Sniffen's arguments.  These articles came to the attention, of Mr. Shute, district attorney, who called the matter to the attention of his chief, District Attorney Joseph E. Morrison.  

MORRISON had the men indicted by a federal grand jury and they were taken back to Globe to stand trial again before the same judge, only this time sitting as federal judge.

Flannigan again defended Goodwin, but Stewart was represented by Fred Jacobs, later a U. S. district judge, now retired.  

Goodwin was tried first, this time for the murder of young Hillpot, and received the death penalty. Then Stewart was tried for the murder of Hillpot and received a life sentence in the Atlanta, Ga., federal penitentiary.

Again the case might have rested there, but Flannigan fought bitterly for his client, who ironically received the death penalty for killing a man all of the evidence disclosed actually was murdered by his accomplice, Stewart. The district attorney, Mr. Morrison, motivated by much the same feeling, also would not give up easily. Flannigan appealed Goodwin's conviction to the Arizona Supreme Court, but while the appeal was pending Arizona became a state and the appeal was transferred to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The conviction was upheld October 28, 1912.

Meanwhile, Mr. Morrison had Stewart brought back from Atlanta to be tried for the murder ot young Kibbe in U. S. District Court in Phoenix and he was convicted and also given a death sentence. Thus, Stewart was to be hanged for a murder committed by Goodwin while Goodwin was to pay the supreme penalty for a murder committed by Stewart.

There was no doubt about this strange turn of events for it was proven in the trials that Goodwin stood in front of Kibbe and shot him through the head with a revolver, while Stewart stood in the kitchen door of the log stage station and fired several shotsat Hillpot, wounding him, then clubbed him over the head with the rifle, breaking the stock. 

The evidence showed the men went out and caught their victims' horses and came back to th cabin to rob them, and that Stewart then cut Hillpot's throat to make sure he was dead. 

(Photo of Flannigan)

DEFENDER: Thomas Flannigan, widely known pioneer Arizona attorney, who defended Goodwin to the last, even obtaining a presidential stay of execution in his effort to save him from the gallows.

FLANNIGAN never gave up his fight to get Goodwin off despite the fact Stewart had tried, in every trial to place the blame for the murders on his partner. The execution was set for March 14, 1913, but Mr.

Flannigan was successful at the last minute in obtaining a 60-day stay' from President Wilson. The telegram notifying the U. S. marshal the stay had been granted arrived only a few minutes before Goodwin was scheduled to die. When the 60 days were up, May 13, 1913, Goodwin was brought from his cell in the county jail at Tucson, where he was transferred from the state prison during the course of his long wait and hanged in the courtyard behind the Gila County Jail.

It was on the scaffold the rose entered the thread of Goodwin's life to soften the hearts of two of the principal characters. 

A fearless sort with a steady eye, Goodwin stacked up as more of a man than his shifty-eyed partner, Stewart.

His last request to Flannigan was for a pair of oxford shoes, a silk shirt, a black tie and a rose to pin on his shirt. "Pin it on so it won't fall off," he asked, "and bury me with it on." He asked Flannigan and Joe Dillon, deputy marshal, to walk up the 13 steps of the gallows with him, then took them two at a time. Standing on the trapdoor he cursed a townsman employed to cut him down, who was standing on the platform with a knife in his hand. "I'm going to put the Indian sign on you, so you'll choke to death, too," he told the owner of the knife.

HE DIED at 10:42 a. m. and the man who cut the Tope collapsed as he reached the foot of the steps, and was visibly shaken when he recovered. He lived to a ripe old age, dying only a few years ago of cancer of the throat. Goodwin's body was placed on display that afternoon and hundreds viewed it.

It was buried at sundown, the rose, still pinned on his silk shirt, the only flower at his funeral.  Stewart was hanged in the same place about a year later. Both went to their deaths without confessing.

Goodwin failed to even testify at his trials.  The reason for this was explained by Flannigan, who defended Goodwin, a man of some culture who claimed to have trawled all over the world and to have worked once as a newspaperman. "Goodwin told me that Stewart had a dog that bit Hillpot on the leg, starting a melee which resulted in the double slaying," Flannigan said. "I am free to say that I believed this story, but the fact that they carried away the boys money, guns and ammunition and also attempted to set fire to the cabin, as their attorney, convinced me it would be perilous to put them on the witness stand." 

IT WAS Walter Judd Scott's editorial in the Arizona Record the day of Goodwin's execution that expressed the feelings of this pair: "For every little boy there is always some little girl with golden hair or braids brown. . . And while it is no excuse for all the things that happened maybe she never gave this little boy a rose . . . And he on his part maybe he never did really stop to look for the beautiful and the grand . . . Still if on the fateful night some good angel had only given him a rose . . .”