Getting Away with Bloody Murder: J. B. Brockman, the Best Criminal Lawyer in Texas

By Mike Vance

James Brockman rose from shady character to preeminent defense attorney in Houston, Texas representing clients including gang leaders, jilted spouses, wealthy storekeepers and drunken on-duty policemen. These high-profile true crime and murder accounts take place between 1895 and 1910. They cross racial lines, revealing instances of separate and unequal justice in segregated Texas that had a lasting effect on the city and the state. His career gained national recognition, including his involvement in the most famous American murder case of the young twentieth century, when he himself was murdered leaving a dubious legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pelican Publishing
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781455626212

Book preview

Chapter 1

FROM THE SINKHOLES OF VICE

The respectable society of Houston viewed Queen Caroline Riley as a dangerous, one-eyed whore. She could swear with the rowdiest dockworker, sucker-punch a fellow harlot, fence the spoils of a shop heist, and weather a knifing from an unhappy john. Her realm was Vinegar Hill, a ramshackle collection of tenements and lean-tos centered around the triangular intersection of Preston and Washington avenues. The Hill was a mixed-race enclave alive with groggeries, gambling dens, and houses of ill fame such as the one presided over by Caroline Riley. Very likely born into slavery in Tennessee, she had been in Texas shortly after Emancipation, and she was run out of Galveston at the start of the 1870s. As the census taker came around at the dawn of that decade, Caroline was a resident of the Galveston County Jail. When the Island got too hot, she moved north and brought several partners in sin with her.

The local reporters reveled in calling the Hill’s denizens Duchess and Duke, and readers sopped up the tales of dusky nymphs including Big Foot Jennie Johnson, Alice Kelsey, Mattie Flynn, and Letitia Richmond, who was known as Baby Elephant. But Queen Caroline was the most renowned, and her every trip before city authorities, her kept White lovers, and her every jail-cell fracas were recorded in titillating detail. When Hermaphrodite Dick Rogers, dressed as a woman, lured a randy St. Louis visitor through the darkened streets and across the Iron Bridge to rob him of over three hundred dollars, the police nabbed him at Caroline’s cathouse, where the money was being divvied up by the Queen herself. A few months later, Houston Police Chief Henry C. Thompson led a few newspaper scribes on a tour of the city’s dens of depravity. Before they enjoyed the glimmering faro banks, keno halls and gambling saloons along Main Street, they began the night with a visit to Riley’s bordello. Her visage, viewed by kerosene lamp, bore fearful record of years of dissipation, sin and crime.

By the end of the 1870s, the nearby Rough and Ready Company No. 6 of volunteer firemen was making a regular practice of setting blazes in Vinegar Hill by breaking a kerosene lamp inside one of the ramshackle houses and then washing out the mostly Black residents with firehoses. For good measure, the firemen pushed some of the huts into Buffalo Bayou. Those were not the only cases of arson by the firemen, and more than once, they were forced to manhandle a policeman in order to make their getaway in the dark. In a typical Houston story, it was not only the harassment by fire and water but the encroachment of development related to business and industry, in this case railroads and cotton-oil mills, that brought about the demise of Vinegar Hill. The Dickensian characters, possessed of worn, haggard, suspicious, whiskey-beaten countenances, slipped away to other parts of the city. In April 1880, Queen Caroline Riley died in a rented room on Congress Street of causes unknown, though her ghost was said to haunt its old stamping grounds for a while longer.

Fifteen years later, Houston possessed a whiff of Victorian mores. The city’s anointed claimed that any frontier vestiges that had rubbed their stink on post-Reconstruction Houston had been cleansed by the fresh breezes of prosperity. These barons of business told all comers that the days of Vinegar Hill were distant memories. Modern Houston, they crowed, offered greater respectability and, presumably, less cheap fun. It definitely offered more money. Total property values within the city limits topped $19 million, and the banking clearinghouses put the total volume of Houston’s business at an unsurpassed quarter of a billion dollars.

The growth in citizens was certainly real. The population had almost doubled each decade since the Civil War, and by 1895, it was roughly 38,000, although the city directory boasted an absurdly larger number. Still, virtually the entire city and most of the suburbs fit within a circle only two miles from the intersection of Main and Congress. To the northwest of town, the planned community of Houston Heights was doing a booming business selling lots near the end of the new electric streetcar line. The powered cars had replaced the ones drawn by mules in summer of 1891.

That technology of electricity had arrived just two years after Queen Caroline Riley’s death, though how much her dissipated visage would have varied under the light of the dim bulbs is unknown. The Houston Electric Light Company began generating electrical current in 1882 with a central dynamo that was franchised from the Thomas Edison companies. The plant near Main and Commerce boasted a 125-horsepower generator. City fathers followed that up with thirty-two electric streetlights two years later: five on bridges, five on Main Street, and twenty-two to cover the remainder of the city. By 1895, some two hundred arc lights were scattered throughout Houston, and incandescent bulbs were found in most of downtown’s premier offices and hotels and in the toniest of Houston homes. The Cooley family on Heights Boulevard allegedly first got their power by throwing a metal hook with a long cord over the streetcar power cable.

Communication had changed radically. Houston’s first telephone exchange opened in 1880, just months after Galveston’s. Long-distance service between the two cities came three years later. Telephones in private homes were still somewhat of a rarity, though by 1895 there were tabletop models that need not be attached to the wall. Customers who had a phone would need to click the clunky cradle so that an operator at the nearby switching building could manually connect them to the party they wanted to reach. The biggest technological downer was undoubtedly the dearth of options to stay cool in the Gulf Coast swelter. Electric ceiling fans had been invented a decade earlier by adapting sewing-machine motors but were primarily limited to Texas’s commercial buildings. Cross ventilation with open windows was the thing, though window screens were still a novelty in most middle-class homes. Local hardware stores were hawking them, but thousands of Houstonians still slept under mosquito netting.

The five-story Kiam Building was two years old, but the novelty of riding its electric elevator had not entirely worn off. The Binz Building, at the northeast corner of Main and Texas, had surpassed the Kiam’s redbrick edifice to claim the title of tallest skyscraper in town by a single floor. It was one of the last tall buildings in Houston constructed with a wooden frame, and its hydraulic double elevator gave it bragging rights in that department, too. The man behind the skyscraper, Jacob Binz, was a German immigrant, and the principal architect, Ollie Lorehn, came to Houston from Sweden.

The city’s largest employer was the railroad industry, specifically the Houston & Texas Central that would soon become part of Southern Pacific. Their giant Hardy Yards in Fifth Ward was giving rise to new neighborhoods, the Chapman developments, and others that provided neat cottages for the workers. The primary commodity being moved down those tracks was cotton. Compresses and cottonseed-oil mills generously augmented the millions of bales of ginned cotton that passed through Houston on their way to more industrialized centers, where they became cloth.

Street paving was largely yet to come. Roughly fifty blocks of brick or wood pavement had been put down, but the vast majority of the city roadways were graded dirt that quickly became deep, rutted mud during the frequent rains. That meant that mud transferred onto the stone pavers made the surface almost sink from sight. Houston did take over management of the fire department for the first time in 1895, turning it from a volunteer outfit that survived on subscriptions and patronage into a paid municipal force. Schools, segregated by race, were sometimes hopelessly overcrowded, as the city government lacked money to keep pace.

If other strides were being made, water quality was still quite poor. The privately run operation mixed water pumped directly from the bayou with that from the huge artesian reservoir underneath the city. Citizens complained that tar water unfit for drinking or cooking flowed from their taps. When major fires broke out, sand was sucked up through the hydrants, and pressure was often insufficient to handle blazes. Untreated sewage and worse ran directly into Buffalo Bayou, which was called an immense cesspool . . . emitting a stench of the vilest character. Outhouses, cattle yards, dead livestock, an oil mill, and a smallpox graveyard were all found on the bayou’s banks above the Water Works Dam when the Houston Post investigated in 1895.

No improved infrastructure would have readied the city for the twenty-two-inch snowfall that greeted residents on Valentine’s Day morning. It was by far the most ever recorded before or since, to the point that the measuring methodology is highly questionable. Streetcars shut down, and an improvised snowplow was hastily constructed, likely for the only time in Houston’s history.

The city had a brand-new civic auditorium at Main and McGowen in 1895, built specifically to accommodate the national meeting of the United Confederate Veterans. Soldiers of the Rebellion, now fifty and older, came from across the nation to swap tall tales of battle and reminisce about lost comrades. The guest of honor at the multiday event was Winnie Davis, daughter of the late Rebel president. She addressed the veterans, fluttered about at grand parties, and was honored when the city attached her name to the auditorium. Though the building had Victorian neo-Gothic elements outside, inside it was a fairly plain wooden barn. Folding chairs were used for seating.

The longtime Houston professional baseball park was located diagonally across McGowen to the southwest. The area—called Fair Grounds Addition in reference to the Texas State Fair, which had been held there throughout the 1870s—became a happening spot. The old grandstand, however, was in such disrepair that the manager decided to house the team at the new Coombs Park near Shepherd and White Oak Bayou, on the south edge of the Heights. When the distance proved too great for most fans to travel, they returned to the old grounds. Another problematic distance for baseball in 1895 was that for the first time, pitchers were throwing from a mound sixty feet six inches away from the plate. The hurlers struggled. Ultimately, the Houston team proved as dilapidated as the seating, and they disbanded, along with Austin and San Antonio, well more than a month prior to the season’s close. By December, there was a new ownership group, a wonderfully expanded new ball yard was in the works, and the much improved squad had been renamed the Buffaloes, a moniker that would stick until 1961 when the team was superseded by the Major Leagues.

Houstonians could also travel to the three-story Magnolia Park Pavilion, about five miles distant from downtown. There they enjoyed band concerts and other amusements beneath a canopy of thousands of magnolia trees, some 100 feet tall and 25 feet in circumference. From their white blossoms wafted a delicate, yet penetrating, odor in such generous supply as to make the air heavy with perfume for miles around.

As with any growing city, opportunities abounded to make money. Houston’s financial sector proliferated. Shopkeepers prospered, and restaurants and bars sprang up like Johnson grass . . . especially bars. Large breweries such as the locally owned Magnolia, and the American, which was owned by August Busch of St. Louis, kept the populace supplied with beer. The big clothing stores like Levy’s, Zindler’s, Simon Roos, Mistrot’s, and W. L. Foley’s were dressing the citizenry in something just a step away from the latest fashions. It was a city of railyard workers and assistant clerks, washerwomen and blacksmiths. Unlike the city founders, many of whom hailed from New York or Massachusetts, most people moving to late-nineteenth-century Houston were originally from the smaller towns in Texas. They had come to the big city to make good, but the Post ran two dozen regular columns from places such as Waco, Brenham, Cuero, and Beaumont so the new arrivals would not forget the folks back home.

They no doubt noted an alarming presence of crime in Houston. Burglaries were commonplace, and many of the offenders were justice-system regulars. Alligator Ike Hyde was convicted and sentenced on nine counts before District Attorney J. V. Lea began filing nolle prosequi orders in the remaining cases. There was only so much time in the workday, apparently.

Vice was prospering, too. The prostitution district garnering the most complaints from the citizenry was Happy Hollow, a small enclave that centered around Louisiana Street between Texas and Prairie. It is likely that a few former denizens of Vinegar Hill now plied their trade in the Hollow, perhaps with senior discounts.

One of the neighbors of Happy Hollow was the Stonewall Volunteer Fire Company No. 3, and among their prizes was a particularly strong and well-trained horse named Gray Dick. The women of the Hollow, the firemen, and Gray Dick were apparently all on excellent terms because two of the young ladies, bedecked in harlot finery, borrowed Dick, hitched him to a rented gig, and headed out for a drive. Flaunting their wiles to best effect, the Hollow girls cut quite a swath on the streets before going out to the Fair Grounds for a spin around the race track. Just as they had passed through the large gate to head back to the city, a fire alarm sounded. Ignoring all of the women’s pulls and pleas, Dick made the three miles back to his station in about two minutes, leaving a trail of ruffles, ribbons and lingerie. The postscript for Dick is that he was retired out to a moving company and was the regular cause of much broken furniture and china, since he never failed to respond to an alarm. The city at large either tolerated the Hollow or, much like the firemen, embraced it, until Houston’s overall prosperity entered into the mix.

To keep the jailhouse and courthouse doors revolving, there were also lawyers—an explosion of them. Houston’s saloons were not the only crowded bar in town. The 1895 city directory listed at least 167 attorneys, with a particular concentration having their offices in the block of buildings across Congress Avenue from the courthouse. Most were single practitioners or shared the office between two partners. Only six firms listed three or more names on the shingle, and two of those involved family members. The lawyers were all male and almost all White. The biggest firm in town was Baker, Botts, Baker & Lovett, with offices in the Gibbs Building on Franklin.

The skill range and qualifications of Houston’s attorneys were twenty miles wide. Law school was not a requirement to set up practice. Though Galveston organized the first bar association in Texas in 1868, and Houston followed suit two years later, there was still not a mandatory State Bar of Texas. In fact, the association virtually vanished for several decades before reemerging with any heft. Of the more than 4,600 lawyers in Texas in 1900, only 315 were members of the state bar association. Many of the men listed a Lincolnesque frontier career path in which they read the law with someone more established and graduated when the old guy said they did. Law licenses were granted by any district judge in Texas after a cursory oral examination by an ad hoc committee of soon-to-be peers. The legislature finally instituted a standardized, written bar exam in 1903, but it was certainly not retroactive.

The Harris County judiciary in 1895 was an exclusive club. The district attorney, J. K. P. Gillaspie, also did work in Galveston. There was a single district court and justices of the peace. Concepts such as mandatory sentencing were yet to come, as were juvenile courts. A sentence of whipping was sometimes meted out to young boys accused of felony offenses, with the child’s father or mother doling out the lashes. When Katie Rasch racked up around two dozen counts of burglary, breaking into shops and homes and stealing things from jewelry to parasols to fabric remnants of cashmere, gingham, and crepe, she was sentenced to two years in the state prison. The sentence was suspended, however, because the girl was under twelve years old.

Among the mostly unnoticed newcomers to the Houston legal scene in 1895 was James B. Brockman, who had arrived in town the previous year. He was born in Cobb County, Georgia in February of 1857, the youngest of seven children of James P. and Almeda Brockman. His father, an enlisted man in the Confederate Army, died during the war, and his mother was said to have been blinded by an exploding shell. Their home was most definitely square in the path of General Sherman’s March.

Undoubtedly intelligent, and perhaps with an imagination that was compensating for family tragedy, James B. developed an acute talent for storytelling. His natural drawl gave him immediate credence in a Southern city such as Houston, though his smart mouth would often tempt some to punch him in the chops. Sharing drinks with many a reporter in later years, he spun a life story that included a stretched truth or colorful embellishment here and there. There were also a handful of things that, according to the modern records, appear to have been invented out of whole cloth. He regaled the scribes with charming tales of a poor urchin growing up among the orchards near Elmira, New York, where he supposedly took his blind mother, though James would have been a mere boy at the time. His mother passed away while he was still underage, but he said his upbringing was happy. He recalled reading voraciously of swashbuckling English sailors and dreaming of life as a pirate. A chance encounter with a local attorney led to his study with the man and a career in criminal law. He may have sometimes omitted his days in Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he and his next oldest brother, John I. Brockman, worked as clerks at R. G. Atkinson’s Dry Goods Stores in their mid-twenties. Other times, the Brockman backstory was that he had learned the law in Pine Bluff. One biographical piece had him going north to Ohio instead of New York. Another claim, easily disproved, was that Brockman arrived in Houston as a highly successful attorney in 1890. One article had him practicing law in New Orleans or even New York City. There are zero records at those places to suggest that he had been an attorney there. The details of his life’s backstory changed to fit his mood.

The 200 block of Main Street in the 1890s was the center of the fast-growing city in which James B. Brockman hung out his shingle. (George Fuermann Collection, University of Houston Special Collections)

Several facets of his early adulthood are total enigmas. It is clear that after leaving Pine Bluff, James and John Brockman continued farther south. James taught school in East Texas and spent most of a decade bouncing between opportunities and setbacks, moving from town to town. He showed up in Dallas, Temple, Fort Worth, and Waco. He is almost surely the enterprising James Brockman who successfully pitched a plan to Fort Worth city council in 1883 for erecting street signs at intersections and plotting house numbers. In 1885, he had a spot of trouble, pleading guilty to aggravated assault in Dallas County Court and paying a twenty-five-dollar fine. Shortly afterward, back in Tarrant County, James B. Brockman got a promising position as the general agent for the Overland Telephone and Telegraph Company. Telephone technology was less than a decade old, and for an up-and-coming smooth talker, it must have felt like a heady brew of opportunity. The trouble was Brockman’s timing. Overland Telephone had formed in New Jersey in 1884, and throughout Brockman’s tenure as the agent in Fort Worth, the company was one of several embroiled in a giant patent dispute with American Bell Telephone over who invented the machine and could profit from it. In 1888, the Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling and sided with Alexander Graham Bell. James B. Brockman was out of a telephone sales-agent job. While he held that position, he was boarding at the Grand Central Hotel. In spite of the word grand in the name, it was not. It was next to the train station and a notable far cry from the city’s top hostelries such as the Mansion House or Hotel Pickwick. He moved back to Pine Bluff for a time but was back in North Texas within a few years.

His life ambitions sent him flitting from point to point like a dragonfly on a shimmering pond. In March 1892, J. B. Brockman was among a group of Fort Worth men looking to organize a company to build a bridge across the West Fork of the Trinity River. In fact, the city directory listed his occupation as bridge builder. Clearly he had grand plans. His housing at that point was the Lindell Hotel at North Houston Street and West Bluff, a transient-level boardinghouse in all but name.

A year later, his appearance in the paper did not result from such high-flown pursuits. At five o’clock on Valentine’s Day morning, a Waco patrolman spotted Brockman trying to enter the Wortham House hotel through an alley window. When he yelled at the shadowy figure, Brockman fled. The officer fired a shot, which hit Brockman in the wrist, breaking his ulna. J.B. was cooperative and described himself as an insurance man, real-estate agent, and civil engineer. He said he had been drawn to town by the possibility of the Waco Dam project. Police told the Waco News reporter that the man whom they had moved to the hospital to be treated was a gentleman of education and fine address.

Papers and letters stuffed inside James Brockman’s suit pockets told a tale of recent woes. There was a legal notice, for a date two weeks prior, to appear in a case against the Noel P. Anderson cotton-buying firm, of which Brockman had recently been an employee. Another letter from a friend in Dallas sent to J.B. at a Fort Worth address advised him to keep out of the sheriff ’s way. Life had thrown Brockman a few more nasty curves.

Shortly after the Waco incident, his arm presumably healed, James Brockman surfaced as a lawyer, or more likely a law clerk, in Richmond, a town of about 1,200 folks in Fort Bend County. At least that was a story he once told reporters. A search of Fort Bend County legal cases and dockets shows nary a signature by James Buchanan Brockman. Conceivably, he was an apprentice helping one of the handful of established barristers who controlled most of the business at the Richmond Courthouse. The name of Thomas E. Mitchell, the oldest son from a family of lawyers, shows up most often, and though there was a living to be made, the cases were rarely exciting. The primary sport in legal circles was suing the railroads. On the criminal side, the occasional robbery presented itself, along with the common offenses of disturbing a religious worship or illegally carrying a firearm, or the rare chance to defend a woman who cussed like a sailor. If Brockman was there, learning from Mitchell, the young man may have split Richmond out of boredom with his lot.

By February 1894, Brockman was in Houston. His first months in town were checkered ones, but they foretell of the combative personality that would become his trademark in court and sometimes out. He was arrested that month by Officer Henry Lee for using insulting language. The next run-in with the police was much more serious. He and a man named Hugh Billingsley got into a fracas at one of the city’s gambling houses, and Brockman cut his antagonist on the side of the head. Both men were hauled off to the pokey, but the incident earned Brockman a charge of assault to murder. One of the men who signed on as bond surety was Jim Mitchell of Richmond. Also within his first year in town, Brockman racked up charges of illegally carrying a pistol and paid a fine of a dollar for disorderly conduct.

In spite of this rambunctiousness, or perhaps aided by it, James B. Brockman was on his way to a stellar career in criminal law. From occupying a distant chair in the courtroom, through a few years of scrambling for cases wherever he might get them, Brockman would emerge as the top defense attorney in Texas and define a style of frontier law that few realized was approaching its death rattles. Meanwhile, the headlines generated by Brockman’s clients put the lie to any pronouncement from city fathers that frontier days were in Houston’s rearview mirror, and his cases provide a glimpse into Southeast Texas’s turn-of-the-century underbelly.

Chapter 2

THE TRIPLE TRAGEDY AND LILLIE JARVIS

Jim Mitchell was described a few hours after the fusillade as remarkably cool and deliberate for someone who had just killed three people and wounded four more. It would become apparent that, for the most part, Mitchell felt he had done nothing wrong.

The gun battle was imported to Houston from points southwest and played out smack dab in front of the busy Grand Central Depot. After almost a century of handling railroad passengers, the location would later serve as the Downtown Post Office for forty years, but that cool winter evening, the scene was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a shootout in the middle of Intercontinental Airport.

The barrage resulted from a change of venue in the Wharton County trial of Frank Sparks, who was accused of killing Benton Dukes and O. H. Delno with a double-barreled shotgun. There had already been one hung jury in Wharton, and hopes were that Harris County could do better. With the trial opening in Houston the following morning, a spate of witnesses were aboard the 9:40 P.M. Southern Pacific that pulled into Grand Central from the southwest. They flowed out of the south-facing waiting room in knots, passing others who were heading inside. A score of hack drivers and idlers loitered on the surrounding sidewalks and grounds.

About twenty feet outside the station doors waited twenty-three-year-old Jim Mitchell of Richmond, Texas. His father, Capt. John Calhoun Mitchell, was the lead counsel for Frank Sparks’ defense, and initial reports were that young Jim, a newly minted attorney himself, had been in Houston assisting the old man. He said that he had recently arrived on the train from Fulshear and had returned to the depot to meet his brother Armistead. Nonetheless, there was no question that Mitchell carried a heavy grudge. Just over a year earlier, he had married Lizzie Morris of Eagle Lake, but his youthful bride did not stay with him long. Within a few weeks, she was residing back in her hometown at the boardinghouse of Milton Sparks. The constable there, Dave Sutton, was also watching out for her.

Mitchell made regular visits to Eagle Lake to see his estranged wife, but at some point, landlord Sparks told him to stay away. As Mitchell stormed off, angry words with Sutton ensued. According to young Jim, the constable had threatened to kill him. Sutton allies denied that charge, saying that Mitchell had ill-treated Lizzie. True or not, the bad blood between Dave Sutton and Jim Mitchell was said to be well known to everyone in Colorado, Wharton, and Fort Bend counties.

It was in Fort Bend County that the Mitchells were firmly entrenched. John C. Mitchell was the son of William D. Mitchell, who had brought his family and slaves from Kentucky to the Brazos in 1850, amassing a tidy sum in the process. John C. was a Richmond lawyer partnered with Fenton Gibson in the 1850s. He served as an officer in the Twenty-Fourth Texas Cavalry for the Confederacy and resumed his legal practice after the war, becoming district attorney for a multicounty area. Four of his sons had been active participants in the Jaybird-Woodpecker War, a long-running blood feud between the wealthy White planter-class Democrats who had been ousted from power by the Civil War and a small coalition of