James L. Courtney

Even after J. Frank Dalton's claim subsided, skeptics still believed that Jesse had survived his own "death" in St. Joseph,  and the James family still maintained their outlaw son was resting peacefully in Mt. Olivet Cemetery,

Back in 1902, Zerelda James had the remains exhumed from the yard at the farmhouse and interred in the James family plot in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, which is about four miles from the farm. Tim Howard, who had officially changed his name to Jesse Jr. by this time, was present at the exhumation, and he claimed the body was that of his father, and he called this father by the name "Jesse James." It is interesting to note that 1) Tim Howard was seven years old when his father, Tom Howard, was shot by Bob Ford, 2) Tim Howard only knew himself by the name Tim Howard while he was growing up…i.e., he at no time knew or suspected that Tom Howard might be Jesse James, 3) Tim Howard changed his name to Jesse Edward James and began calling himself Jesse Jr. only after the death of his father, Tom Howard, and 4) Tim Howard did know Tom Howard as his father. Simply put, Tim Howard, aka Jesse Edwards James, aka Jesse Jr., did know the body in the grave as his father, but this in no way is conclusive proof that Tom Howard and Jesse James were one and the same man.  In actuality, it's really hard to believe that he knew the man in the grave as his father, given the years that has passed since Tom Howard had been shot and the fact that Jesse Jr., had been very young when his father had died.

Other inconsistencies also surfaced at that exhumation. An examination of the skull did show a bullet hole in the back of the head, but there was no evidence of an exit hole. Initial reports in 1882 said Bob Ford shot Tom Howard with a .44-caliber bullet, that the bullet went right through the skull and embedded in the wall.  Further, a .38-caliber bullet was found in the coffin. No explanation was made to explain either of these discrepancies, and that is the way things stood for the next forty-five years.

In 1995, in an effort to end all the controversy and lay all the imposter claims to rest, the James family finally allowed the exhumation of the body buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri, under the name of Jesse James. By this time, DNA testing was an established scientific test, and hopes were high that all claimants could be proved false by being able to prove that Jesse James was, once and for all, buried in his own grave.

In preparing for the tests, it was found that in 1976, when Clay County took ownership of the James Farm, five teeth were found on the property. Two were human, two were dog teeth, and one was a hog tooth. In 1978, Clay County Park officials found more remains at the original burial site. A human tooth, a toe bone, an atlas vertebra, and an unidentified bone were put in a Tupperware container and reburied in the original gravesite. And that’s the way things stood until 1995, when forensics science entered the picture.  Keep this in mind, as you read the conclusion of this triangle legend.

The testing was done under strict laboratory conditions. When the grave was dug up in the cemetery, authorities found the body lying face down, indicating a reburial, which was a common enough practice when removing a body from one burial site to be re-interred in another, so it did not particularly alarm anyone.  Zerelda had moved the body from the farm in 1902 to the family plot in town, so reburial in a face down position was not unexpected.  However, the body was in a wooden coffin, which had decayed in the damp earth, and this astounded authorities, who had been led to believe the body lay in a metal coffin, which would have preserved the corpse. In point of fact, the James Farm has the metal coffin on display that they claim Jesse was buried in! All the bones in the grave were too deteriorated from water, which made Mitochondrial DNA testing impossible.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed down through the maternal line. For instance, Zerelda James Samuel would have passed her MtDNA on to all of her children, including her sons, but only her daughter could pass it on to the next generation. With the bones in the grave too far destroyed to be useful, authorities were forced to use other sources of DNA. They chose a tooth, the origin of which is very questionable, and compared the DNA found in that tooth to the MtDNA donated by Robert Jackson and Mark Nikkel, descendants of Susan James, Jesse’s sister.

The real problem with the 1995 exhumation and Mitochondrial DNA testing is that the chain of evidence is not from the grave. Professor of Law and Forensic Sciences James E. Starrs of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. did the test. Since no bones or teeth from the grave could be used, he got Judge Vic Howard to order the tooth encased in the Tupperware container in 1978 at the James Farm to be exhumed. When the container was unearthed, it was discovered that the tooth that was supposed to be there was missing! The result? Starrs’ report stated "only one tooth and one head hair retrieved from the James Farm Museum carried sufficient MtDNA for testing." The tooth used for MtDNA testing did not come from the questioned grave in Mt. Olivet Cemetery! Neither did the head hair! How can anyone postulate that Jesse James lies buried in his own grave when testing was not done on the man in that grave?

The results of the 1995 exhumation and DNA testing proved one thing and only one thing: Nothing. Whoever lay buried in that grave could be anyone, yet Starrs went on record as saying that he felt with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that the remains were those of Jesse James. It was all the James family needed to hear. They took the results of the DNA testing to heart, and as far as they are concerned, Jesse lies buried in his own grave.

It is true that the tooth and hair used in the DNA test definitely came from a James family member, but which family member? No one knows. They could very well have come from Jesse himself. The only fact known for certain is that they did not come from the body in the grave. Members of the James family have lived on the farm continuously since 1840, and the items used in the test came from the farm. Also, Starrs found no indication of a bullet hole exit in the skull in the grave. History records that when Bob Ford shot the man he knew as Jesse James, the bullet exited the skull and ripped open a wall in the house in St. Joseph. It is a major tourist attraction to this day. How do authorities explain this? They don’t. They make no attempt to explain anything, and it leaves a great deal of skepticism.

There are other problems with the 1995 exhumation, too. Remains exhumed in 1978 from the original grave of Jesse James revealed a 34 to 42 year old Caucasian who died from 100 to 150 years ago and had noticeable dental problems. The 1995 exhumation gave the height as between 5 feet 8 inches and 5 feet 10 inches. The bullet found in the 1995 exhumation was not believed to be the one which killed him. When Jesse was trying to surrender at the end of the Civil War, he was shot from a 1851 Colt Navy Revolver, a common sidearm used during and after the Civil War, and there exists a report that the bullet he received was not recovered by the doctor who treated him, so the bullet found in the grave could have been this bullet. A .38-caliber bullet had been found in the original grave and another .38-caliber bullet was found during the 1995 exhumation, yet where was the .45-caliber bullet that was claimed to be the fatal bullet fired by Bob Ford, if indeed, the bullet had not exited the skull as the scientists determined in the 1995 exhumation? Further, Jesse did not use tobacco products, yet the man in the grave certainly did. The teeth examined from the 1995 exhumation showed that they were corroded and heavily stained from tobacco use. It would appear that the man buried on the James farm in 1882 and the man exhumed in 1995 were the same man, but he could not possibly be Jesse James.

In 1998, the Jesse James legend took yet another twist. Betty Dorsett Duke debated for two years before going public that her great-grandfather was Jesse James. She has an astonishing amount of evidence to support her claim, and her book makes great reading. According to Duke, her great-grandfather, James Lafayette Courtney as Jesse James, did engineer his own death by taking advantage of the death of his first cousin, Robert Woodson "Wood" Hite. It is her supposition that Wood Hite and Tom Howard were one and the same person, and if she is correct, it answers a great many confusing and conflicting reports about the man shot in 1882 as Jesse James, alias Tom Howard.

The Duke research is not only surprising, it is most convincing, completely documented, and totally supported by scientists trained in the field of forensics.  It has also made believers out of most doubters embroiled in this controversy. Since 1954, when she was seven-years-old, Betty Dorsett Duke had heard stories that her great-grandfather was Jesse James. She didn’t know who Jesse James was until she was a teenager, and then, she was afraid to tell any of her friends about it because a relative had been in trouble with the law, and it had impacted on the whole family. She kept the information to herself. It wasn’t until years later that she realized the skeletons in her closet had real depth and meaning to historians.

Betty Duke’s research actually began in 1995 when she sat at her kitchen table reading her great-grandfather’s diary. It suddenly came to her that the family legend was true. She began a genealogy on her father’s side of the family tree.  Her story is simple. James L. Courtney came to Texas in 1871 with a small group of friends. On 4 July of that year, he left his friends in Fort Worth and met Thomas Hudson Barron, a former Captain of the Texas Rangers, in Waco. Duke also discovered on an old Wanted poster from the sheriff of Clay County, Missouri, that "Cole Younger rode with the Texas Rangers in Waco, Texas." Frank James also had a surgical operation on his leg in Waco after being shot in Northfield, Minnesota. Thus, there is a James connection with Waco, which historians have conveniently ignored for many years.

Thomas Barron moved thirty miles south of Waco to the small farming community of Blevins. Here, on 31 October 1871, James L. Courtney married Mary Ellen Barron, Thomas Barron’s daughter.  Mary Ellen was part-Choctaw, and she had to sign an affidavit that had to be filed with the government before she could get her Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. The couple had eight children, and through daughter Ida, who married William James Dorsett, son Jesse W. Dorsett was born…Jesse Dorsett being Betty Dorsett’s father. Jesse Dorsett would tell his own children tales of his grandfather riding with the Youngers, and at one time he said that Grandpa Courtney was Jesse James.  Mary Ellen and James L. Courtney were married thirty-nine years before Mary Ellen died in 1910.

Courtney rode up to the Barron ranch with the saddlebags of his horse, and the horse he was leading, full of gold. He purchased a 160-acre tract of farmland from Barron with the gold, and throughout the course of his life, he bought every new piece of farm equipment that came onto the market, paying for them with cash. As each of the children married, he paid cash for farms to give them a good start in life. It is known that Jesse James trusted no one, and with all the robberies attributed to him, he must have been a rich man. There is talk to this day in the Blevins area about the gold and silver Courtney buried in different places. In the front yard alone, at least two gallon jars of money were unearthed by his children, and he kept five-gallon buckets full of silver dollars sitting around the house. More than $50,000 in cash was found in one of his trunks. There is no way to explain how a man who was supposed to be an ordinary farmer was able to amass that amount of money from a 160-acre farm…unless he really was Jesse James, that is.

There are several things which compound the mystery. An old photograph of Courtney and his brother have them identified on the back as "James L. Courtney and his brother, Fletcher Bagley." Since they both had the same parents, why would they have two different surnames? It is a known fact that Zerelda James had been visiting her son Frank in Fletcher, Oklahoma, when she died on the train on her way back to Missouri. Could Fletcher Bagley and Frank James be the same person?

Oral family history says Courtney fought for the Union during the Civil War, but he named his favorite pair of horses John and Reb. Historical accounts also show that Frank James posed as a Union man to help conceal his true identity. Is this what Courtney did? Courtney was also a legendary shot. He could shoot the head off a chicken while riding his horse at full speed. And, he had no fear of anyone or anything.

James L. Courtney died in 1943 at the age of ninety-six, which means he was born in 1847, just like Jesse James. Included in his personal possessions were photographs, letters, diaries and documents, which were passed down from one generation to the next. Among the documents that Duke received from her Aunt Irene was the information that Courtney was born in Kansas City, Missouri, that he fought for the South, and that he was only sixteen when he joined the army. It must be remembered that Jesse James was born a few miles northeast of Kansas City, that he fought for the South, and that he was sixteen when he joined the guerillas. Courtney was also around six feet four inches tall, and Jesse has always been described as a tall man.

Courtney was most meticulous with everything. He kept accurate records of births, deaths, money earned and spent and even recorded the date and time that he saw the first flying machine fly over his house. Yet, he had to write Captain Oscar Smith for dates and locations of different battles that his company participated in during the Civil War, in order to get a pension for serving in the Union Army. This is totally out of character for such a meticulous man, unless he was not the "real" James L. Courtney.  Captain Smith thought this was unusual, too, because he made the following comment in his reply to Courtney: "All of us who were in that battle will remember the day and the date."

There really was a James L. Courtney who did serve in the Union Army as a bugler in Co. M under Captain Oscar Smith. This Courtney enlisted on 14 January 1864 in Warrensburg, Missouri, at the age of eighteen and is described as "five feet ten inches tall with dark hair and blue eyes" only the man buried in Blevins was six feet four inches tall, and it is not likely he grew six additional inches after reaching his maturity.  Bugler Courtney is listed as deserting at Columbus, North Carolina, on 21 August 1865, but it is Duke’s theory that he was killed in that battle and not reported because his personal effects went missing. It was common practice for the Confederates to search the uniforms of the dead in order to identify them, and she thinks this could have been one way for Jesse to assume the identity of the real James L. Courtney. Whatever the case, the Union Courtney is clearly not the same Courtney as Duke’s great-grandfather, who used this bugler’s name and service record to obtain a pension.

In doing her genealogy, Betty Dorsett Duke discovered that her great-grandfather lied about his birth. The family claimed he was born 31 October 1846 in Tennessee, and that he was Stephen and Dianah Courtney’s first child. According to the 1850 census of Jefferson County, Tennessee, Stephen and Dianah Courtney had only one child in the household, a girl by the name of Harriet. Where was their three-year-old son James L. Courtney, if he did, in fact, exist?

Ten years later, on the 1860 census of Post Oak Township, Johnson County, Missouri, James L. Courtney does show up in the family group. Zerelda James was very vocal about her Southern sympathies, and she seemed to bring unwanted attention from groups like the Redlegs and Jawhawkers. Did she send Jesse to live with her neighbors, and is this when Jesse W. James first assumed the name of James L. Courtney, a name he would use off and on for the rest of his life? There are several James L. Courtneys in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery. Did Jesse know one had died, and did he take the name from a tombstone? Jesse’s father, Robert James, baptized and married several members of the Courtney family, and several Courtneys lived in Clay County near the James farm. Jesse James was well-acquainted with the Courtney family, and it is not illogical to think he used the Courtney name as an alias.

By 1864, the Courtney family had moved from Missouri to Kansas. General Sterling Price was in Johnson County at this time, and the war may have made staying in Missouri too dangerous for the family. The militias were trying to track down Confederate guerrillas, and both Jesse and Frank were guerrillas. The Courtneys disappeared altogether in 1865, and Betty Duke finally found them on the 1870 Kansas federal census living under the name of Haun. Family lore said they changed their name because James L. Courtney was in some serious trouble and had to go to Texas to escape, and Duke believes that someone may have become suspicious of James L., his companions, and their activities. As further proof, Duke offers that by the 1880 census, James Wilkerson was listed as a member of the Courtney aka Haun household. James Wilkerson was a known James Gang member, as was his brother Bill, and Bill Wilkerson is mentioned in Betty Duke’s great-grandfather’s diary. Another young man by the name of Howard Carr from Ohio was also living with the Hauns at this time, and one of the aliases that J. Frank Dalton claimed he used was Carr. Was Dalton really Carr, and is this how he came to know so much about the James Gang’s activities? Betty Duke thinks so, and others agree with her. It has always intrigued Duke that J. Frank Dalton came forward to claim he was Jesse James only after her great-grandfather James L. Courtney had died. Why?

There are other similarities between Jesse James and James L. Courtney. For instance, they were both notorious for moving their camp after dark to another location miles away. Jesse did it as a precautionary measure in the event someone was following him, but why would Courtney have reason to do it, unless it was an old habit? Both men suffered an eye affliction with symptoms of an unusual amount of blinking. When leaving and returning to camp, both men would go off in one direction and return by another. Jesse is recorded as being anywhere from 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 11 inches tall with a "gracile" body build, yet according to John Edwards who knew Jesse personally from their days in the Civil War, Jesse "was tall and finely moulded." After a train robbery at Gads Hill, Missouri, on 31 January 1874, Jesse James himself handed the conductor a note that partially described the gang: "The robbers were all large men, none under six feet tall." If Jesse himself said he was over six feet tall, why would it be written that he was anywhere between 5 feet 9 inches and 5 feet 11 inches tall? With his mother standing six feet tall and photographs of his father showing he was a tall man, it is not unlikely that Jesse James would take after his parents.

Although all of this information is still circumstantial evidence and in no way proves that James L. Courtney and Jesse James were the same man, other evidence seems to contradict that the man killed by Bob Ford on 3 April 1882 was Jesse James. History reports that Jesse married his first cousin Zee Mimms on 24 April 1874, but there is no marriage license proving the marriage ever existed. Further when Zee was questioned about her husband Jesse, she was unable to provide information most wives would know about their husbands. For instance, when asked at the inquest how old her husband was, she wasn’t sure. And when asked if he was disfigured in any way, her response was "no sir, I believe not." Then when it was explained they were referring to any wounds on his hand, she said that he had the end of his finger shot off, but she was unable to say which one. A logical explanation for this is that Zee Mimms was married to Tom Howard, but that Tom Howard was not Jesse James.

It is Duke’s theory that Tom Howard and Robert Woodson Hite were one and the same man, and Zerelda Mimms married Wood Hite. According to her research, Coroner Richard Bohanon, acting on a tip, retrieved the body of Wood Hite from Bob Ford’s farm. Wood Hite was Jesse’s first cousin, and it’s ironic that his body just happened to be found on the very night that an autopsy was being performed on the purported head of Jesse James. Further, the people who lined up to identify the body as Jesse James were told that it was Jesse James, that very few people actually knew him personally. It’s the main reason he was never caught.

What Betty Duke finds intriguing is that the description of Hite’s wounds appeared to be identical to the coroner’s description of the wounds on the purported body of Jesse James…namely, both shot in the head, shattered skulls, wounds over an eye, and both shot by Bob Ford. Further the coroner made mention of a slight wound on Hite’s right arm that was not described on Jesse’s arm, but which shows up as a slight wound on the purported body of Jesse James in a photo picturing him in a coffin. The similarities were more than coincidental, and it is Duke’s contention that the body buried as Jesse James was, in fact, Jesse’s first cousin, Wood Hite. Adding more fuel to the fire is the Winchester rifle, model 1873, owned by Wood Hite and marked with the initials W. H. and T. H. It provides strong evidence that Wood Hite and Thomas Howard were one and the same man. Further, there is no way to prove that Jesse James used the alias of Thomas Howard.

Perhaps the best physical evidence of all are the Courtney family photographs. Not only does Betty Duke have photographs of James L. Courtney, she also has them of his parents and other members of the Courtney family, and they came to her from aunts and uncles and cousins, as well as handed down in her own family. Guess what? James L. Courtney’s mother is missing her right arm below the elbow. Dr. Rueben Samuel was also known to have suffered severe cuts on his left hand during the bombing of the farm, which left Archie dead and Zerelda crippled. In the Courtney family photo collection is a man positively identified as Dr. Samuel, and it clearly shows the same deformity on his left hand.

Betty Duke took all her family photos to the private Visionics Corporation lab and also to the Austin Police Department’s Forensic Multi-media Crime Lab for comparison to the authenticated photos of the James family. The historically accepted photo of Zerelda James Samuel exactly matched James L. Courtney’s mother. In fact, there were several photos which matched those known of Zerelda James Samuel. The photo of Dr. Rueben Samuel was positively matched to a photo in the Courtney family collection. A photo of Archie Payton Samuel, half-brother of Jesse James, was positively matched to a boy in the Courtney family collection identified as "a relative." The boy Tim Howard, who later changed his name to Jesse Edward James, positively matches a boy in the Courtney family photo album. He is standing next to unidentified man and woman, and the woman is thought to be Jesse’s half-sister, Sarah Louisa Samuel Nickolson. The historically identified Sarah Louisa Samuel Nickolson is remarkably similar to the portrait of the unidentified woman from the Courtney family collection. Also James L. Courtney named one of his daughters Louisa. A Courtney family photo of an unidentified woman is positively matched to Zee Mimms. And the creme de la creme? James L. Courtney’s photograph was positively matched to the historically accepted photograph of Jesse James!  For two separate families to be matched forensically to the accepted and authenticated photographs of Jesse James and his family members by two independent crime labs is impossible, unless the two families were one and the same family!

If Wood Hite was Tom Howard, and if Wood Hite was married to Zee Mimms, and if Wood Hite was the man shot and killed by Bob Ford, then Wood Hite’s DNA would match any DNA of the James family, since Wood Hite’s grandmother and Jesse James’s grandmother were the same person, namely Mary Polly Poor. Further, Wood Hite used tobacco products and was known to need dental care. The body in the grave in Missouri had this problem, whereas Jesse James never used tobacco products. Neither did James L. Courtney.

Wood Hite was also a member of the James Gang. Since her husband was now dead, there would be no reason for Zee Mimms not to identify her husband as Jesse James, especially since he was a family member, and the pressure was on to put him behind bars. If this is what she did, she helped perpetuate the greatest hoax in history by identifying the wrong man as Jesse James, thus allowing the real Jesse to escape justice and live out his life in peace. It would also explain why Zerelda James Samuel initially blurted out that the dead man was not her son.

There is so much forensics evidence to prove James L. Courtney and the outlaw Jesse James were one and the same man that one would think the James family would jump at the opportunity to set the historical record straight.  No so.  They refuse to entertain any further DNA testing with any members of the existing family, and this brings up the question of why?  What can it hurt to rule James L. Courtney either in or out as a James family member?  What is the James family so afraid of?  It's almost is if they know the body in the grave is not Jesse.

Forensics science is very exacting and detailed, but if the 1995 DNA testing was never done on the actual exhumed body from the grave, how can the James family claim Jesse lies buried there?  All the DNA testing really proved was that the tooth examined from the farm came from a member of the James family, and this should be obvious since the family had lived there more than 150 years.  It also rules out Charlie Bigelow of J. Frank Dalton’s claim, since Charlie was not a member of the James family.  Since it has not yet been established that Jesse James does indeed lie in his own grave, might not he lie in Blevins, Texas, under the assumed name of James L. Courtney? 

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