Watching the Detectives
This page is under construction
The young men were last seen alive as they were taken from the Pilot Point jail at 11pm on Thursday, October 20, 1921. One hour later, members of Klavern 136 scribbled on the back of an envelope and tacked it to the office door of the editor of The Pilot Point Post-Signal. Thirty minutes later, in the middle of the night, the Editor-in-Chief of the Denton Record-Chronicle asked Denton County Sheriff James Goode about the kidnapping in Pilot Point. Goode dodged the question quipping, "no one called in and reported a crime."
This timeline does not stand up to basic scrutiny.
Just after 12am on a weeknight and only ninety minutes after the Pilot Point community watched the Ku Klux Klan steal the young men from jail, both DRC editor Will C. Edwards and Denton County Sheriff James Goode were awake and alert enough to discuss a mysterious lynching in the far corner of Denton County. Meanwhile, Edwards (who ran for office as the Ku Klux Klan's candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 1924) had enough time to type the story of lynching in Pilot Point before newspapers across the country went to press overnight. Edwards' account of W. J. Miller finding a letter from the KKK on his office door was printed in papers hundreds of miles away before Miller awoke to discover the note and before the jailer arrived to deliver breakfast to an empty jail.
The following morning, the Denton Record-Chronicle ran an article on the attack. The third subheading of the article stated, “Sheriff Not Notified” in bold type. This is significant. When Sheriff Blakemon of Collin County was invited to naturalize into the Ku Klux Klan, he refused to join due to his oath of office. The Klan replied, “You need not let this deter you. Our plan is whenever one is to be whipped in Collin County to send for a whipping squad from Dallas Denton or some adjoining county. You can be at home asleep and not know anything about it. We of the McKinney Klan will return the compliment and send a whipping party to do the job when called upon in adjoining counties and you, being a peace officer, will not be delegated to go on such missions.” The October 1921 kidnapping of two prisoners from jail played out these roles perfectly. The Denton Record-Chronicle received word of the crime and contacted the Sheriff for comment at 12:30am on October 21. The Sheriff had heard nothing of the events prior to their notification and informed the newspaper staff that Deputy Sheriff Decker was headed to Pilot Point on other business later in the day and would investigate further. Because the Sheriff was not made aware of the crime contemporaneously, history may never know the fate of the two men taken from jail that night.
Later that morning, Goode indicated that Deputy Sheriff Decker had other business in Pilot Point that day and would investigate.
It was not until Saturday, October 22, 1921, that Sheriff Goode and County Attorney B. W. Boyd went to Pilot Point to investigate the incident. They concluded “that the negroes were taken out of the jail all right” and that Goode “thinks that they were whipped.” Goode informed the journalist that he had found out some additional information but desired to wait to release additional information until he could confer with District Judge C. R. Pearman who was "out of the city" until Monday morning.
Despite the national attention created by Associated Press reporting across the nation, local law enforcement still had not acted by Monday, October 24, 1921. The reason for delay was District Judge Pearman’s “busy schedule.” By Monday afternoon, Goode and Boyd were still waiting on a conference with Pearman that had yet to transpire. No further information was released about the case and no charges were filed; meanwhile, Sheriff Goode offered a $25 reward to anyone with information on a case of auto theft two days later.
By Tuesday, October 25 -- five days after the lynching of two young men in Pilot Point -- all newspaper coverage ceased. According to the many witness accounts and the “investigation” conducted by high-ranking Denton County law enforcement, “no trace of [the young men] was ever found.”
This story of racial violence in Denton County fell out of public memory, but not out of practice.