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Bartee Haile
A trivial incident on-board a Central Texas passenger train on Jan. 20, 1894 set in motion a series of violent events that led to a three-week manhunt and five fresh graves in the cemetery.
The dominoes began to fall when a conductor booted DeWitt “Dee” Braddock off a train in Colorado County for refusing to pay the fare. The hot-tempered freeloader chunked the nearest rock at the ticket-taker as the train pulled away and then fired a single shot through the sleeping car.
The irate railroad worker reported the incident at the next stop, the small community of Weimar. The mayor summoned the local marshal and several able-bodied citizens, and together they followed the tracks to the source of the trouble.
Dee Braddock surrendered without a struggle but gave his captors an earful all the way back to town. He informed the skeptical strangers they did not know who they were fooling with and that their ignorance could prove fatal. He already had killed two men and there was plenty of room on his pistol for a few more notches.
The tough talk from the 23 year old loudmouth did not impress much less alarm the watchdogs of Weimar. They had seen their share of dangerous desperadoes, and he did not look the part.
But Braddock was telling the truth. Three years earlier on his father’s farm near Flatonia, he shot to death two black sharecroppers. At his murder trial in La Grange, he pleaded self-defense and the jury gave him a free pass in spite of eyewitness testimony to the contrary.
In the three years since the double murder, Braddock had been suspected of numerous crimes and even arrested for train robbery. However, none of the charges stuck and the ne’erdo-well remained on the loose.
If Mose Townsend had known all this about his prisoner, he might have taken appropriate precautions while serving him dinner. Instead, the constable casually unlocked the cell door like a carefree bellhop.
Braddock met him with knife in hand and demanded the six-gun from his holster. Angered by Townsend’s refusal to hand over the weapon, he buried the blade in his chest.
Braddock ran from the jail with the mortally wounded constable in slow-motion pursuit. Townsend got off one wild shot before collapsing in the street, and the escapee disappeared in the dark.
The well-liked lawman died four hours later without regaining consciousness. His slaying incensed the townspeople, who spent the rest of the night combing the countryside for the killer.
The aroused residents were out for blood, according to a report in the Houston Post: “The feeling against the murderer here is at fever heat, and in case he is captured he would perhaps be safer in the Austin jail than he would be in the hands of the friends of Constable Townsend, his victim.”
The next morning, Colorado County Sheriff Light Townsend took charge of the search for his nephew’s assassin. In the days that followed, the massive manhunt spread to five more counties (Fayette, Wharton, DeWitt, Gonzales and Karnes) but the elusive fugitive was nowhere to be found.
By early February, most folks believed Dee Braddock was long gone. They sympathized with Sheriff Townsend’s loss and respected his dogged determination but felt further pursuit was a waste of time and resources.
Events soon showed the veteran lawman was not merely grasping at straws. He had a hunch that Braddock was hiding out in the vicinity of Egypt in Wharton County with a partner in crime named Henry Moore.
Tipped to the killer’s exact whereabouts on Feb. 7, Townsend hurried to Egypt where he rendezvoused that afternoon with his colleague Hamilton Dickson. After putting Moore, who just happened by, under guard, the two sheriffs and four deputies went after Braddock.
Townsend and Dickson were working their way through a dense thicket, when the sharp crack of a rifle confirmed they had come to the right place. The Wharton County sheriff clutched his chest and cried out, “He has shot me!”
Townsend grabbed his Winchester and fought a long-range duel with Braddock, who was firing from behind a log. Every time the outlaw raised his head, the badge-toting marksman put a bullet in him. Townsend’s fifth bull’s-eye finished the job.
Just as the victorious posse emerged from the underbrush, Henry Moore rode up intent on avenging the dead Braddock. He fired a couple of rounds before Sheriff Townsend and the Egypt constable blew him out of the saddle.