Dead Woman’s Crossing: Weirder and weirder

Recap: It took less than three years for people in Weatherford, Oklahoma, to start calling the site of Katie James’s murder Dead Woman’s Crossing.

She was shot July 8, 1905, near Deer Creek northeast of the town, but her body lay undiscovered for eight weeks.

The last chapter of the saga took place two decades after the murder but has received little attention – until now. Here is the fifth and last layer of the onion that is Dead Woman’s Crossing.

For 7-year-old K.B. Cornell, stumbling upon the corpse of Katie James must have been gruesome enough. But K.B. nearly stepped on the murdered woman’s skull, which lay three feet away from the rest of the body.

Reports of the discovery in August 1905 did not explain how the head was severed but did note the body was badly decomposed. Perhaps animals were responsible.

K.B. went to Deer Creek to fish with a brother, Theodore, and their father, attorney George Cornell. The elder Cornell would later tell a grandson that he felt they were being watched, so he slid the skull into a gunnysack and they returned to town to report the find.

The grandson was Zel Harrell. In 1992, he wrote a five-part series about Dead Woman’s Crossing for The Southwestern, the student newspaper at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford. He attended the school in the 1950s.

Harrell’s final article recounts a startling conversation he had with his grandfather. It probably took place in the early 1940s.

“Grandad Cornell” moved his practice to Oklahoma City around 1922. One day, a man came to his office and said he needed to get something off his chest.

The man said he was cutting saplings at Deer Creek the day Katie James was murdered and saw her body in the back of a buggy going down to the creek. He was 11 years old.

Two women and a man were in the buggy. A second man was riding a horse.

One of the women said, “We have to kill him. He’ll tell.”

The man on the horse dismounted, drew a gun and said, “You’ve seen too much. Now you’re going to be guilty of murder, too. Cut off her head with your axe or join her.”

The rider put the body on the ground and ordered, “Do it.”

The first blow missed. “I raised the axe again and listened to it fall. The sound of it hitting her neck will haunt me forever.”

He told attorney Cornell that he threw up and ran home. “I lived in hell until your son found the body. I wanted to tell someone – anyone – but was afraid to.”

 Zel Harrell’s article does not identify the man who spoke to his grandfather, only describing him as tall and thin and in his 30s.

Within days, the murder victim’s husband, Martin Luther James, showed up at the lawyer’s home, along with a former deputy sheriff. They became uneasy when the attorney started telling them about the man and his story.

A few nights later, two men accosted the lawyer at his office. At least one had a gun, but he frightened them off by getting his own gun.

At the end of his article, Zel Harrell wonders if the two men were hired killers. He also asks whether Martin Luther James was the man on horseback who threatened the 11-year-old. And perhaps the women in the buggy were Fannie Norton, who killed herself after being accused of the murder, and Alta Hood, who allegedly confessed to the killing.

“Grandad couldn’t answer these questions then, and 60 years later, neither can I,” Harrell writes.

And that’s the story behind a place in Oklahoma known to this day as Dead Woman’s Crossing.

Someday we’ll have to share the story of Dead Woman Pond, in Texas.