On December 27 1904 newspapers began to relay the news that the body of a young woman found on Cutler Mountain with a gunshot wound to the head and face burned beyond recondition was Bessie Bouton.

Bouton had been staying with a man at the Albany Hotel during the spring and though the couple were registered under the name of G. Bouton. It was believed that the man was a gambler named Milton Franklin.

It seems that Milton Franklin was long gone by the time the body was identified (and if you are interested in how you may want to read this article in The Desert Evening News about how Bouton’s hairdresser helped with some turn of the century CSI work) and the next place we catch up with him is at The National Sporting Club in Sydney, Australia where Andrews, now using the name Brush and traveling with Nulda Petrie, a beautiful young French-Canadian woman, meet J. William Ellis.

Ellis, Brush (Andrews) and his young wife board the Sonoma, a steamer headed for San Francisco, with a stopover in Honolulu, and eventually end up renting a house in Berkeley. This is where things go wrong and because these are real people I know the violence should not be glorified in any way but I can not keep myself from smiling every time I read Ellis’ account of the attempt on his life.

This is from the San Francisco Call November 7 1905

“I had just seated myself and was raising a spoonful of marmalade to my mouth when I was struck from behind. I fell off the chair. I was not entirely unconscious and got a glance of Brush standing behind me with a hammer in one hand and a dagger in the other. I attempted to rise, and as I did so he struck me two more blows, He then put his hands in my hip pocket and took five $100 American bills that I had with me. This seemed to bring me to my senses and I struck him on the jaw with my left hand. I then rose and found the woman standing and pointing a revolver at me. This I knocked from her hand with my right had and made for the door as fast as I possibly could in my dazed condition. Just as I arrived at the door he made a terrivle lunge at me with the hammer again.”

Ellis was very nearly killed but there is something about the marmalade and even though he had been hit in the head with a hammer three times being robbed of $500 was enough to ‘bring him to his senses and allow him to fight off two people armed with a hammer, a knife and a gun that put the story in to the better than fiction category.

I’ll wrap up the murder story next week and may even have my copy of Barton’s book by then so can start to discover the links between M. F. and EATCT.

I’ve spent the last week focused on The Mexican Turnover, for those familiar with the move I am sure you can agree this is almost as exciting to practice as dealing cards with your wrong hand. If you don’t know the move it is one of the reasons you can never win a game of Three Card Monte when the big money is on the table.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that a first edition of EATCT was up for auction in Chicago. It was expected to go for $3000 – $4000 according to the catalog. The final bid came in at $13 000!