LITMIR.BIZ

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but deepen that mystery." A near neighbor of Wooton was Prof. W. A. Sanders, who was regarded as one of the foremost educators in the county. As a teacher his specialties were arithmetic, botany and chemistry. At one time he was instructor at the Academy which was in the county the only institution where the higher courses could be pursued preparatory for entrance here to the state university. Sanders was a prolific writer on the subject of botany. He conducted an experimental farm and experimented with many foreign botanical importations. He was the man that introduced in this county the Johnson grass as a forage plant. It has become such a pest for the farmer that if had to be legislated against. And it has passed into a saying "that if Professor Sanders was not hanged for the murder of Wooton, he should have been for introducing Johnson grass in the county." Suspicion pointed to Sanders several months after Wooton's disappearance when he presented for negotiation a warehouse receipt for grain in the name of the absentee. Thereupon followed also his presentation of a deed to the Wooton property, fortified by an unlikely story that Wooton had left the country and had vested him with authority to dispose of his property without a power of attorney, and thus he came into the possession of the documents in question. Sanders was indicted for forgery May 19, 1894, and during his long incarceration several attempts were made to learn from him the mystery of Wooton's disappearance and Tyndall, the mind reader, had interviews with him to worm the secret from him. The interviews never had result, because Sanders never would subject himself to the test but resisted every advance on this line. A fourteen days' trial in June and July, 1894, had no result; another fourteen days' trial in April, 1895, resulted in his being found guilty and the sentence was ten years' imprisonment. Appeal was taken and new trial granted in a decision of October, 1895. The third trial in January, 1897, resulted in a disagreement of the jury and the fourth of sixteen days in April resulted in conviction with fourteen years imprisonment as the sentence. Sanders served his time and came out of the penitentiary broken in health. He entered it a bankrupt as the result of the long litigation. He died wretchedly an outcast in the county poorhouse. There was some testimony that might have connected Sanders as being in Wooton's company the night before a large brush fire on one or the other's premises about the time of the disappearance date, but it and other circumstantial details were so remote and lacked such definiteness that in connection with the inability to prove the death of Wooton no charge of murder could have been maintained. It was only when he made effort to realize on the Wooton property that he set for himself the trap that he fell into and raised the more than strong moral belief that he was the agency in the removal of Wooton. Various have been the theories how the body was disposed of. One has been that the corpse was buried in some secluded nook and with the lapse of years the place has been lost and all evidences of burial dissipated. Another was that the body was consumed in fire and still another that chemical means were employed to dispose of it. At any rate no one knows how, when or where Wooton disappeared from the face of the earth. Human bones or remains of skeleton have not been discovered these many years in the vicinity of Kingsburg in a circuit of miles but to revive in the newspapers the story of the Wooton disappearance, and the speculation as to whether they might be Wooton's or not. The latest such revival was in November, 1917, anent the finding of a skeleton on the Fortuna ranch northwest of Reedley. The assembled bones led to the conclusion that they had been buried "about twenty years ago," had been those of a man about fifty-five years of age and about five and one-half feet tall. The solution of the mystery of Wooton's disappearance was taken by Sanders with him into the grave.

       Tweedle-dee Tweedle-dum

      Sensation was made public in April, 1899, when the city attorney presented before the city trustees affidavit that City Clerk J. W. Shanklin was an absentee from the city and his whereabouts unknown. Examination of the book showed a defalcation but in how much never was ascertained because under the circumstances the fact could not be learned. The office was declared vacant and the vacancy filled. The absentee was and remained without the state until early the following year when the grand jury indicted him on January 13, 1900, four times for embezzlements of small sums. Shanklin was learned to be in a small town just across the Oregon line, where he was doing business openly as a potato merchant. Brought back he was placed on trial in May, the jury acquitted him and thereupon the other indictments were dismissed and the affair ended in a farce. The sums alleged to have been embezzled were business taxes, perhaps liquor license moneys, that had come into his hands. It was not the duty nor an obligation of the city clerk to receive or make these collections but the task of the city license collector, though the money was receivable at the office as an accommodation, with the clerk giving receipt. The acquittal was on instructions of the court that no public offense had been committed and no embezzlement from the city of public funds. Inasmuch as the money was not payable to the clerk, he was not receiving it for the city and if the city did not receive it, it was then a matter between the private and unofficial receiver of the money and the person to whom he had given receipt for the money. So ended Shanklin's Republican city political career and Fresno no longer knew him as a resident.

       The Case of the Helm Boys

      The verdict returned at a late hour on the night of June 19, 1908, by a jury in the city of Stockton, Cal., sealed the doom of the brothers, Elmer and Willie Helm for one of the most diabolical crimes ever committed in this community. The trial was had in Stockton on a change of venue because of the represented prejudice against the boy murderers in Fresno. The verdict was accompanied by recommendations of life imprisonment for both. The verdict saved Elmer from the death penalty passed upon him after conviction of murder in the first degree in Fresno in June, 1906, on first trial. The younger boy gained nothing by the second trial because after the first in September, 1906, the sentence upon him was life imprisonment at San Quentin. The case of the Helms was one of the most atrocious brought to the attention of a public prosecutor. Their crime was the wanton murder on the evening of October 30, 1905, of William J. Hayes and wife while camping out near a deserted cabin on the Whitesbridge road, about eighteen miles west from Fresno. The murderers rewarded themselves for the double crime with about three dollars taken from the person of the murdered man. Clues to the murderers were meagre. The authorities worked long and diligently with little success and they might have been baffled in the end but that the fiends, the elder aged twenty-one and the younger nineteen at the time, were not content with their work but undertook another man killing a few months later. Singularly enough the father of the boys was the one to discover the second murder and to report it. Circumstances directed attention to the Helm boys and they were connected with the three murders. The late Sheriff Walter S. McSwain, then a township constable, made a name for himself in working up a wonderful case of circumstantial evidence. The story of the crimes and the bringing of the youths to justice is replete with incident and detail. The Hayes were an aged couple who lived at peace with the world and no other motive for their taking off could be conceived than robbery. Hayes had been a justice of the peace at Mendota and lived in Fresno. They owned a tract of land on the West Side, which it was their habit to visit at intervals. The murder was on the home coming from one of these periodical visits. At Whitesbridge stop was made to buy hay for their horses and paying with check he received about three dollars in change. They were overtaken by night on the journey home and camped near a deserted Mexican cabin, having food and bedding with them. Horses had been fed and picketed and the evening meal was being prepared when the murderers pounced upon them, shot both to death and levanted with the paltry booty. Conditions at the camp indicated that the Hayes were taken unawares. The canvas bed lay on the ground as it had been taken down from the wagon and the uncooked potatoes were in the frying pan. Remains were discovered next day by a passing traveler. .Autopsy showed that Hayes had received gunshot wound, six inches in diameter in the breast and the heart was literally filled with shot. Her wounds were almost identical. Death came to both instantly. A single barreled shot gun with which the murders were committed was found not far from the scene of the crime, but whose gun was it? Two boys riding bicycles and carrying a package that might have been the shot gun wrapped in gunny sack had been seen on the Whitesbridge road on the day of the murder. But who were these boys? About February 8, 1906, Henry Jackson, a bachelor of over sixty years of age, was surprised in his little cabin home a mile or so out of Fresno and murdered. He had sat at the table and the murderer let loose through the window glass a charge of shot that shattered the old man's neck and almost tore the head from the trunk. The window sill was left powder-marked.

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