Three Rights Make a Left

The Real “Bad Bob” (Part 5) The Killing of Harrison Choate (Part 2)

After the shooting, a distant relative of Bonnie Barnett, Dr. Hennan was called and arrived at the Barnett house (the house where Lori and I now live). Barnett was upstairs and, with his Winchester pointed out of a window, he vowed to shoot anyone who tried to open the front gate.

By now young Grady Van-Landingham had arrived, and Dr. Hennan encouraged him to go in and help get Harrison to his car, reasoning that Barnett wouldn’t shoot a boy especially one who was friends with his own children. The young man put the danger to his own life aside and went to the aid of the badly wounded man and dragged him all of the way to the gate and into Dr. Hennen’s car. It was reported that Grady said that the whole time he was helping Choate he thought, “There’s a big itchy place at the point where my suspenders cross in the center of my back.” He fully expected “Backshooter Bob” would make him a victim as well.

Dr. Hennen reported that by the time Harrison Choate was dragged to his car, he was already dying and there was little that could be done to save his life. He died a short time later, and Hunt County Deputy Hugh Smith arrested Barnett for murder.

Choate left a young widow and two babies, the youngest was only a few months old. Several of the businesses in Lone Oak closed in an expression of sympathy for Nora and her two children.

This time Barnett did not get away with murder. He was found guilty in the death of Harrison Choate and sentenced to 25 years in the Texas State Prison in Huntsville. However, Barnett only served three years of the sentence because he was pardoned by none other than the infamous Texas Governor James Ferguson of Bell County, the only Texas Governor ever impeached and forced to resign from office for corruption. You might know his wife better, the famous Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, the first woman to become Governor of Texas after her husband’s resignation.

As locals tell it, a herd of angus cattle was sent 200 miles from the Barnett farm in Lone Oak to the Ferguson farm in Bell County as payoff for “Backshooter Bob’s” pardon. Besides the two killings of sharecroppers Price Thomas (1912) and Harrison Choate (1914), locals tell of two other deaths attributed to Barnett. One story is that there was a Hispanic man working for Barnett on a hot summer day. It was “Bad Bob’s” custom to sit on the big porch on the second floor of his house with his Winchester 30 30. He feared, probably for good reason, that someone would sneak up and try to kill him. On this day Bob watched the man as he worked and he decided to take a break from the hot summer sun and sat down under the shade of a pecan tree. Bob raised his rifle from the porch and shot the man dead under the pecan tree. Another variation of that story was that he hung the man in the pecan tree, but that version is probably the product of years of retelling. Both versions suggest that he heartlessly killed the man for no good reason.

A fourth killing is another that doesn’t appear in any newspaper, and the is no record of any legal repercussion. The story that has been passed down through locals is that Bob had a heated argument with one of his teenage sons and hit him in the head with a “Single Tree”, a crocked harness used for mules that has metal balls, usually brass on the ends. As the story goes the blow knocked his son unconscious. He was brought into the house and lain on the dining room table where he went without medical attention for two days until he died. As far as I know there was not a death certificate for the death of his son.