Edgar J. Watson: Serial Killer or Florida Myth?
Florida has an interesting and colorful history. With St. Augustine being the oldest city in the United States, Florida has been occupied by the English, Spanish, French and Confederacy. It’s a global tourist destination and has long been visited by revolutionaries, rum runners and people simply trying to hide. One of those people was Edgar J. Watson. From the late 1800s until 1910 Edgar J. Watson, who grew up in Columbia County, left a trail of bodies from Oklahoma to the Everglades.
A Troubled Young Man
Red haired, blue eyed, Edgar J. Watson was born November 11, 1855, in Saluda County, South Carolina. His father, Elijah Watson was a civil war veteran and reportedly an abusive drunk who routinely beat young Edgar. Conflicting stories followed Edgar his entire life; a result of the times and fading memories.
One story suggests that Edgar killed his first man in South Carolina when he was nine years old. He had been afraid that the man would tell his father that he had not planted peas correctly and would be beaten. Another version has his mother simply leaving his father and moving to Ft. White, Florida where she had relatives. Still another version has him involved in the death of a relative in South Carolina prompting the move to Columbia County. Years later, he married his first wife in Columbia County who died during childbirth.
O’Brien, Florida was the site of another murder Watson committed. While making a long-winded speech, his cousin asked him to calm down. He responded by kicking his cousin in the head leaving him dead. Fleeing authorities, he traveled to either Arkansas or Texas where Watson eventually met the famed female criminal Belle Starr.
Myra Maybelle Shirley was born in Carthage, Missouri on February 5, 1848, on her father’s farm. She received a classical education and learned to play the piano while graduating from Missouri’s Carthage Female Academy. When her father’s farm and inn were burned during the civil war, she left and became involved with different criminal gangs, committing horse thefts and robberies in Missouri and Texas. Married several times, she seemed to switch gangs when she switched husbands.
In 1883 she, along with her current husband, Sam Starr, moved to Indian Territory which was in present day Oklahoma. While there, the two were arrested for stealing horses by U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves. Marshal Reeves was the first black deputy marshal in Missouri and married to an Indian woman. The 1950s television series “The Lone Ranger” was loosely based on the exploits of Bass Reeves. Belle was convicted and served nine months in prison.
On February 3, 1889, Belle was shot and killed in Briartown, Oklahoma. She was riding home from a dance when she was shot twice by a shotgun. One version was that Edgar J. Watson had asked for a dance. When she declined, he followed her and killed her. Another version has it that Watson was afraid she was going to turn him in as an escaped murderer from Florida. There are also other versions and suspects.
Back to Florida
Suspected of other murders and assorted skullduggery in Oklahoma and Arkansas, Watson returned to Florida around 1891. At some point, he turned up in Arcadia and was arrested for killing Quinn Bass. A jury acquitted him. He also got into a dispute in Columbia County with Sam Toland and shot him. Again, he was acquitted but the Columbia County sheriff, J.A. Bethea, ran him out of town.
In 1892, he moved to the Ten Thousand Island chain in Southwest Florida where he bought a claim on the Chatham Bend River in Monroe County. He raised vegetables, Buttonwood trees for lumber and sugar cane. The Everglades was a perfect place to hide out in plain sight. Watson also acquired land in what would later, in 1923, become Collier County.
As he prospered, he sold his produce in Ft. Myers, Tampa, and Key West transporting it in his 70’ schooner. On one trip to Key West, he got into an argument with local resident Adolphus Santini and slit his throat. Santini survived the attack, and Watson paid him to drop the charges.
With his increasing wealth, he purchased and homesteaded more land in the area including acreage on Lostmans River. Labor for his farms was recruited from Tampa, Tarpon Springs and Key West. Watson generally hired men with no families. Rumors began to spread that he never paid his workers. When they asked for their pay, he would simply kill them, bury them in shallow graves or just dump them in one of the river tributaries. They were outsiders to the area and no one knew their names.
On one occasion, a young boy told a group of farmers and clam diggers that he had seen Watson kill a local woman named Hannah Smith. The boy took the men to where Hannah was buried and her body was recovered. Decades later, Lee County fishing guide and novelist, Randy Wayne White, used Hannah Smith as one of the characters in his books.
Everything seemed to come to a head when the Tucker family was murdered. The Tucker family was well known in the Chokoloskee Island area and had grown crops on property around Lostmans River that Watson had bought. Watson told them to get off his property and they responded that they would when their crops were ready to harvest. After all, they had been farming there for years. They were all murdered and thrown in the river.
Some of the local citizens went to Ft. Myers and reported the murders to the sheriff, Frank Tippins. Sheriff Tippins advised them that the Chatham River area was not in his jurisdiction.
Between October 9th and 23rd a hurricane struck the area with peak winds at 150 mph resulting in 101 deaths in Florida. The following day, October 24th, Watson sailed his schooner to the Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee Island where he was confronted by an angry crowd. Words were exchanged and he pointed his shotgun at the crowd and pulled the trigger, but the shotgun misfired. Before he could draw his Smith and Wesson revolver, the crowd opened fire and riddled his body with bullets. His body was dragged to Rabbit Key and buried in a shallow grave. Three weeks later, Walter Langford, Watson’s son-in-law and organizer of the First National Bank of Fort Myers, dug up Watson’s remains and took them to be buried in the Ft. Myers Cemetery located at 3200 Michigan Avenue.
Epilogue
Florida pioneers were tough and resilient. They had to be. In the 1800s to the turn of the 20th century there was no infrastructure and very little organized government. They took care of themselves and looked out for the welfare of their neighbors. When all efforts to address the misdeeds of Edgar J. Watson failed, the local gentry fixed the problem. They were not outlaws nor criminals and shouldn’t be considered such. The Smallwood Store still stands overlooking the bay on Chokoloskee Island in Collier County. On July 24, 1974, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and has been preserved as a museum.
