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Galveston Daily News
Galveston, Texas
February 11, 1895
The Tucker Mystery
Ardmore, I. T., Feb. 10: The manner in which five members of the TUCKER family met their death in their lone log house on the bayou is still a mystery. Whether the family was murdered while they slept and the building burned to cover all traces of the crime or whether it caught fire and the sleepers became asphyxiated from the smoke and perished in the burning building will probably never be known. Certain it is that the remains of the five human beings is all that is left to mark the spot where the Tucker cabin stood. (The MARION MONTGOMERY TUCKER family of Washington Co., Tennessee)
The neighborhood in which the Tuckers resided is slow to accept the latter theory, arguing that, as the house was built of green logs, but lately and constructed with no inflammable matter but a pine floor, the cabin could not have been burned before the occupants could have made their escape and believe an atrocious murder has been committed.
Deputy U. S. marshals LEATHERMAN and STUART, who were sent to the scene to investigate, returned this morning. The burned cabin is about two miles from Mountain Springs. The officers brought with them FRED WILSON, a son-in-law of the deceased Tucker, whom they hold as a prisoner charged with the murder of the Tucker family. Wilson is a blacksmith living at HAUCKABEE’S Gin /HUCKABEE’S Gin, five or six miles from the burned cabin. Wilson has had trouble with the family and on several occasions threatened his father-in-law’s life.
The 15th of last November, on complaint of his father-in-law, Wilson was arrested. The case was tried in this city before Judge GIBBONS and the defendant acquitted. The trial engendered much bitter feeling between the two families. Wilson, when seen by the News reporter, talked freely of the affair, protests his innocence and says he can prove an alibi. He states that Friday about noon, 15 or 20 armed and mounted men came to where he was working and made him accompany them to the burned cabin. He thought they intended to lynch him and he pleaded for his life. It was while they had him at the burned cabin, he was placed under arrest by the marshals. D. B. REED has since been arrested as an accessory.
The marshals state the bodies are burned beyond recognition and that the remains of five bodies… The position of the remains of Tucker, as indicated by melted coin and suspender buckles and a small piece of skull, eight feet from where the bed stood in which he slept, and the supposed remains of his wife seven feet further away in a corner of the room, adds weight in the theory of murder. The Tucker family moved to the territory 14 years ago from Collin County, Texas.
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