Warning: This diary contains a sad story of murder and violent domestic abuse against a woman.
The more one researches family history, the more likely one is to find terrible things. Months ago I wrote about my distant cousin
Amos Buckman, who dreamed of riches bubbling up from California’s hot springs, and the Grigsby family into which two of his daughters married. This is the sad – and strange – story of a member of the Grigsby/Buckman family whose life ended in tragedy far too soon.
Loretta “Lola” Grigsby was born in Napa, California, on September 29, 1874, the fourth and last child of mine operator Robert Faires Grigsby (1839-1923) and his wife Harriet Buckman (1848-1940). Her father traveled a great deal to see to his mining interests, not only across California but throughout the western states and in Mexico. Sometimes the family traveled with him, but always returned to Napa County, with their official residence creeping up the Silverado Trail over the years from Napa to Yountville to Calistoga.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Lola and her siblings spent a good deal of time at their grandfather Buckman’s spa at Buckman Springs in eastern San Diego County. Perhaps that exposure to the southern desert led to her decision, when she was in her late 20s, to move to Tucson in what was then still the Arizona territory, a move that ultimately would cost her her life.
Turn of the century Tucson was a town of some 7,000 people, and the census reports reveal a diverse community particularly marked by a curious blend of Mexicans (both Arizona-born and Mexico-born), WASP transplants from other sections of the United States, and a decent-sized Irish Catholic community.
111 years ago this week, on St. Patrick’s Day 1904, there was a bit of an uprising at the University of Arizona in town. A group of students of Irish descent asked the university president to declare a holiday. He refused, saying “I am green but not that green,” and the students went on strike, rallying in the street in front of the campus. Lola Grigsby may not have been aware of that rally; she was busy celebrating that St. Patrick’s Day by marrying the Irish-American Humphrey O’Sullivan (often called just “Sullivan”).
Humphrey O’Sullivan had been born in Tucson on March 25, 1872. He was the son of William O’Sullivan, an Irish immigrant, and his wife Anna Mead, who was born to Irish immigrants in New York. It seems William and Anna had come to southern Arizona separately in the late 1860s, when there was a silver rush of sorts in the area and the population rose from 915 (860) to 3,215 (1870), numbers that are hard to imagine when you think of today’s Tucson having over a million people in the metro area. The boom ended and Tucson lost over a quarter of its population during the 1880s, but William O’Sullivan stayed and worked as a carpenter in the old town. Directories show about seven Sullivans in old Tucscon, including one other on the same street a stone’s throw from St. Augustine’s Cathedral.
St. Augustine's Cathedral in Tucson, where Humphrey O'Sullivan was baptized. The family lived just around the corner.
Humphrey (O')Sullivan's family in Tucson, 1880 census, when he was 8
The young Lola Grigsby lived over 700 miles to the northwest in California
The name Humphrey O’Sullivan was a fairly common one in those days; the Irish writer and relief worker Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin (1780-1838), who was a confidant of the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell, had taken Humphrey O’Sullivan as the Anglicised version of his name, and many other families named boys for him. (Another American Humphrey O’Sullivan, born in Skibereen like the Tucson Humphrey’s father, spent long days on his feet as a printer before joining his brother’s shoe business in Lowell, Massachusetts. He would patent the rubber sole in 1899 and become a wealthy man.)
My distant cousin Lola Grigsby would run into an "O'Sullivan heel" of a different kind
The Tucson Humphrey O’Sullivan learned carpentry and other useful skills from his father, and around 1900 he and a man named Whitehead formed a contracting partnership. In 1902 their company built the new kitchen and dining hall at the University for about $6,000. They also built a number of private residences and the “Murphy block” of stores downtown. He joined a number of civic associations and was well-known in Tucson and beyond.
But all was not well. By all accounts the marriage between Lola (the spirited child of New England Yankees and Appalachian Mountaineers who came together in early Napa) and Humphrey (a hot-tempered Irish Catholic raised in the Sonoran desert, far from his ancestor’s rainy green land) was a match made in hell. The couple fought over money, Humphrey passing bad checks all over town and Lola forced to make good on his debts. Humphrey became violent when he drank heavily, which was often, and one or the other fled the isolated ranch they shared two miles northwest of Tucson with some regularity.
The couple had been married for less than 20 months when, on November 9, 1905, neighbors reported to the local authorities that the O’Sullivans’ dogs had been howling for days and neither Lola nor Humphrey had been seen in some time. Constables Jack Dufton (who had helped Lola during many prior incidents of domestic violence) and Charles Birkenfeld went out to the ranch and found moldy bread on a plate on the dining room table. In the bedroom was a woman’s body, badly decomposed, beneath a quilt. A hatchet and a hammer were near the body and blood was spattered around the room, which was in disarray as if a protracted struggle had taken place. The doctor would conclude that the body was Lola’s, that her skull had been badly fractured by a blunt instrument, and that she had been dead for 10 to 14 days.
Headlines of Lola's murder appeared across the southwest
Lola's death certificate
Suspicions immediately fell on Humphrey O’Sullivan, who had not been seen in almost two weeks either. Felix Levy, administrator of Lola’s estate, would testify that he had seen Humphrey in Tucson around October 20. Levy said Humphrey was very drunk and had long whiskers. People had presumed he had left town, but he said he had been “hiding” on the ranch the whole time. He invited Levy for a beer, which Levy refused because he did not drink. “I wish I could say the same of me,” Humphrey replied. Levy never saw him again.
Humphrey had attended a “smoker” at the Eagle’s Club in Tucson on October 24 and was seen drinking at a saloon in town the following evening, where he reportedly asked for a job tending bar and was refused. R.D. Woodell, a local liveryman, would testify that he had seen Humphrey at the ranch when he was rounding up a carriage full of horses to sell in Los Angeles. He stopped by the ranch to ask if the O’Sullivans wanted to sell any horses. Woodell said he spoke to Humphrey, and saw Lola walking between the house and barn. This was on October 27, thirteen days before Lola’s body was found.
After a search of the ranch for Humphrey proved fruitless, the Pima County Board of Supervisors and the Arizona territorial government authorized a reward for his capture. Many people speculated that Humphrey had killed Lola and committed suicide, but others doubted he would be able to go through with killing himself. Rumors abounded that he had fled south into Mexico (where he had once lived) or even sailed for Central or South America. In January 1906 Sheriff Nabor Pacheco would travel into Mexico looking for the suspect, but would find no trace of him.
On February 22, 1906, Professor C.A. Terrell of the University, a modern languages scholar, went picnicking with his wife in the mountains outside Tucson. Terrell spotted a skull with a hole in its right temple and his wife found a pistol near it. Other than bones, only one foot remained of the body. The clothing was torn and tattered. Terrell went back into town and led a large party (which included the DA, sheriff, coroner, and a host of other officials) back to the site. Within days a coroner’s inquest would determine that the remains were Humphrey O’Sullivan’s and that he had died by suicide not long after Lola’s death.
The young Humphrey O'Sullivan (standing) with his father William sometime in the 1880s. Did anyone predict then that he would come to such a bad end?
The finding seemed to solve the mystery of what happened to Humphrey, but the case wasn’t over. John Reilly, a local undertaker, asked to be appointed administrator of Humphrey’s estate. Litigation was a distinct possibility, because the story had taken some very strange turns between the discovery of Lola’s body on November 9 and the discovery of Humphrey’s body on February 22.
About a week after Lola’s body was found, a man calling himself Phil Naugle had arrived in town. The newcomer said he’d read about the murder in the newspaper and traveled to Tucson from Florence, about 70 miles north. Naugle claimed that he had married Lola long before Humphrey O’Sullivan did, and that he and Lola were separated but not divorced at the time of her second marriage.
Lola already was married to someone else? Phil Naugle arrives in town.
In his telling, he was the one who purchased the ranch with plans of starting a dairy, and hired Humphrey to build the structures. Humphrey and Lola took a liking to each other, Humphrey offered to pay off the mortgage, and Naugle had decided to go back to Florence, all the while remaining legally married to Lola. Now Naugle put in a claim to the ranch, and to Lola’s estate generally, with Felix Levy, who had been appointed estate administrator.
In a twist nobody saw coming, Phil Naugle soon revealed that his real name was Willis Preston (W.P.) Grigsby. He was Lola’s second cousin, once removed, but still claimed to have been her husband. The Tucson authorities appear to have taken this claim at face value, but no marriage record between Lola and W.P. Grigsby ever has turned up.
Who was W.P. Grigsby? He was born in Yountville, Napa County, California on December 14, 1851, some 23 years before Lola. His grandfather, George A. Grigsby (1781-1851), and Lola’s great-grandfather, Samuel Harrison Grigsby (1794-1873) were brothers, born in Virginia in the days of George Washington. They had no way of knowing then that their young uncle, William Henry Harrison, would also be President one day.
As young men in the days of Madison and Monroe, George and Samuel Grigsby each moved to the mountains of eastern Tennessee, where their children were born, then moved their families west to Missouri in the 1830s. Samuel’s sons, who included the pioneer John Grigsby and Lola’s grandfather Terrell (T.L.), moved on to California in the 1840s, and Samuel himself followed in the early 1850s. George’s children, including W.P. Grigsby’s father Jesse, largely did the same. Thus it was that there were Grigsbys all over Napa County from its earliest days of American settlement.
In 1872 W.P. Grigsby married Evaline Eudora Obsorn, an Illinois-born girl of 19 whose family had come to California when she was young. Over the next decade the couple, who moved back and forth between Napa County and San Francisco, would have four children. Another child was born in 1893, when the couple had been married for more than two decades.
W.P. Grigsby's write-up in "History of Napa and Lake Counties, California." At that time he was living a quiet family life and Lola was just a seven-year-old girl living nearby.
By the turn of the century, though, W.P. apparently was feeling restless. With his youngest child only about 6, he abandoned his family and headed for the Arizona desert, where he may or may not have married his cousin Lola. Just as no record of such a marriage has been found, no record of a divorce between W.P. and Evaline appears to exist either.
Perhaps he was merely envious of his firstborn, Willis O. Grigsby, who was actually 18 months older than Lola. In mid-1899 the papers of Bakersfield, California, celebrated the heart-warming story of Willis O.’s marriage to a young lady from that town. As the story went, the young Grigsby had enlisted in the First U.S. Infantry within days of the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, weeks before declaration of war with Spain. War did come and young Grigsby’s unit was sent to Bakersfield to prepare for it. As they shipped out for glory in the Caribbean in June 1898, the townspeople came out to cheer. And during that parade through town Willis O.’s eyes locked with those of a beautiful young girl. The dashing young sergeant survived a bout of disease due to camp conditions in Cuba, far more deadly to American soldiers than actual battle during the war of 1898, then returned home and married the girl he’d kept in his mind’s eye the whole time.
The only problem was that, a year earlier, Willis O. had married another young lady in San Francisco and he hadn’t bothered to divorce before marrying Wife No. 2. Nor did he divorce either of them before marrying Wife No. 3 when another fair lass caught his eye. Pretty soon Willis O. was on the lam, wanted for multiple counts of both bigamy and improper use of official postage envelopes. Before long he was arrested in Colorado.
In the summer of 1899, the San Francisco Call followed with glee the exploits of Willis O. Grigsby
Like father, like son? Married to Lola or not, W.P. Grigsby testified extensively at the coroner’s inquest into her death. In fact, it was he who definitively identified the body as Lola’s based on certain broken teeth with which he was familiar. The remainder of his testimony painted a grisly picture of Lola’s life with Humphrey.
W.P. Grigsby (who testified that Lola always called him “Pres” but then quoted her as calling him “Phil” several times) told the coroner’s jury that on December 14, 1904, almost 11 months before Lola was found dead, she begged him on the telephone message to come from Florence to Tucson. He came and she told him Humphrey O’Sullivan had beaten her. She had two black eyes. The cause of the dispute, she said, was some property Humphrey had deeded to her and now wanted back. W.P. Grigsby said that, after lengthy discussion, he advised Lola to deed the property back to Humphrey in the interests of piece. She did, and things calmed down for a time.
Several months later Lola called again, telling W.P. “You must come over if you want to see me alive. He will surely kill me this day.” W.P. said he couldn’t come for 10 days and she said, “Then there is no use coming.” He came immediately and she met him on the road to the ranch, saying Humphrey had beaten her. Again, she said, “He is going to kill me.”
W.P. Grigsby said he advised her convince Humphrey, who had worn out his welcome in Tucson’s building community, to seek regular work elsewhere while Lola stayed at the ranch. She said that, if Humphrey could support her somewhere else, she would go to him. W.P. then says he told her second husband, “Humphrey, you are in trouble again. It is very strange that you children cannot live together.” Humphrey replied, “Why, there is no particular trouble, I was drunk a few days ago and damned drunk and I don’t deny mistreating her, but as far as my threatening to kill her, that is all idle talk. If I did, I didn’t mean it.” But he agreed to go away.
It doesn’t appear that Humphrey ever left for real. One day, in the summer of 1905, Lola fled the ranch with horse and wagon about 9 p.m. and arrived at W.P. Grigsby’s home in Florence the next morning, where she waited for him to return from a mining expedition. He testified that she badly bruised all over from a beating at Humphrey’s hands and told W.P., “I have lived with him for the last time; he will kill me sure.” After consulting with the sheriff, W.P. Grigsby wrote to O’Sullivan, who called him up and begged him to send Lola home. W.P. said “I cannot do it. She won’t go home, she is afraid of you. You have threatened her life. She is satisfied in her own mind that you are going to kill her.” Humphrey promised to deed her the property and leave, and told W.P. that he would kill himself if anything ever “if anything ever happens between Lola and I.” Lola returned to the ranch.
The O'Sullivan ranch was in this area, which a century-plus later is a curious mixture of suburban development and untamed desert
On October 20, 1905, Lola called W.P. on the phone once again. She said she was “in worse trouble than she had ever been.” He came to Tucson, where she said “Pres, he is going to kill me.” She told W.P. that Humphrey was hiding $800 from her, and that thanks to his failure to pay for anything he bought she had been covering his bills. She had only $350 left. They had sold off much property just to stay afloat, and Lola was telling Humphrey to go find regular work or they’d have to sell the ranch. She refused to deed the property back to Humphrey outright, saying she would die first. She also refused to “bother” Constable Dufton, who she said had been “too good to me,” any more.
Again W.P. Grigsby talked to Humphrey. As he told it, on the morning of October 23 both O’Sullivans saw him off and seemed in good spirits. He said that Humphrey told him, “Everything will be all right from now on. We will have no more trouble.” Lola took a different view, telling W.P., “If there is anything that happens, it will happen in a very few days, because if he gets to drinking again, he will surely kill me.” W.P urged her to move into town and leave him, and Humphrey said, “By God, I will never touch her again.” Days later she was dead.
Other witnesses gave similarly chilling testimony. Carlos Pacheco, a neighbor who had rented a small house to Lola (for Humphrey to stay in when he wasn’t welcome at the ranch house) and a horse from her, testified that he visited the ranch three straight days in November to deliver a letter to Lola and return the horse, but nobody answered his knocks or calls. He left the horse he’d rented inside the inside the O’Sullivans’ gate, but a day later it came back to his house looking for food and water. Pacheco and his wife were concerned because he knew Humphrey to be a “very bad hombre” who “might have killed her” and he rode to town to alert the sheriff. At that point he had not seen Lola in over 8 days.
Another neighbor, Guadalupe Leon, used to rent a room to Lola while Humphrey stayed at the ranch. This had last happened about two weeks before Lola was found dead. Lola often appeared at her home weeping and with scratches, saying that Humphrey was a very bad husband and grabbed her by the throat trying to kill her. Lola wanted help from the sheriff because she was afraid of Humphrey.
The liveryman R.D. Woodell, who lived on an adjacent ranch, testified that in October Lola had called him from a restaurant, asking him to send her a horse and buggy. She said she didn’t want to walk back to the ranch from town. He complied. When she got home she called him again and said she would return the horse the next night instead. He asked why, and she said Humphrey was drunk, she was afraid he would kill her, and she was planning to spend the night elsewhere.
W.F. Robinson testified (by way of hearsay) that his friend Ed Rochester said, shortly after Humphrey was seen drunk in town, that “if anything ever happened down at the ranch, he knew the cause.”
Constable Jack Dufton testified that, on October 6, Lola had come to his office with two letters she’d written asking for protection. In his telling:
She came in my office there, crying and said that O’Sullivan had visited and beat her. She was in a horrible shape, that she had bruises all over her body and that she could hardly stand up and that she was going home and that she was afraid he would kill her. She said that he had threatened her time and time again, which I know to be a fact…I have been going out to the O’Sullivans’ ranch trying to straighten matters up between O’Sullivan and her. He has driven her from home time and time again. I know several times where she has come here and he stayed at home and let everything starve to death, and I know a half dozen times that I was there and jacked him up and told him if he didn’t quit it, I would arrest him.
Lola wanted Dufton to ride out to the ranch with her. As he testified at the inquest, “I said I wouldn’t go out to the ranch anymore; that I wouldn’t go out anymore because I got tired of going out there so often and fixing up their troubles. I asked her to call up the judge and get out a warrant and I agreed to bring him in.” Lola refused to have Humphrey arrested, told W.P. Grigsby two weeks later that she wouldn’t bother Dufton anymore, and the constable never saw her again alive. He was the one who found her body on November 9.
Jesus Corella, a hand on a nearby ranch, testified that Lola had come in late October to borrow an axe. He gave her the large hatchet Dufton found next to her body. When found, she seemed to be holding it in a defensive posture. The coroner concluded that the hammer found in the room had been used to kill her.
The evidence was overwhelming that Humphrey was violent toward Lola on a regular basis, that she feared for her life and asked for help, but refused to press charges or leave him definitively.
Lola's case was extreme, but Tucson in 1905 was a rough place. In the early 1900s the town's leaders were in the midst of "cleaning it up," which in many cases just meant marginalizing non-white citizens. During this period of "reform" the "red light district" was destroyed (1902), a shiny new business block was built on what had been a Mexican neighborhood (1905), and women were banned from saloons (1906). In 1908 gambling was outlawed across Arizona and Tucson's taverns were forced to close at midnight. Within a few years Arizona would adopt prohibition -- and mandate racial segregation in its public schools. Personally, I can't believe that prohibition, had it been adopted a decade earlier, would have kept Humphrey from drinking any better than it prevented drinking anywhere else in the nation in the 1920s.
Old Town Tucson, near Humphrey's childhood some, as it looked the year Lola died. For all we know, she and Humphrey are in this image. Like many American cities, they probably had better public transportation then.
In the end, the estate situation was resolved without litigation. On February 20, 1906, Administrator Levy announced a deal to sell the O’Sullivan house and about a third of their 39-acre ranch to an Ohio man for $1,225. By late March, Levy had decided to sell the remaining 26 acres of the ranch. In early May he closed Lola’s estate, dividing the money between Lola’s parents and Willis Preston Grigsby.
This article in the Tucson Citizen of March 2, 1906 says W.P. Grigsby "went by several names," one of which was his given name, Willis. The article claims Lola was known to some as "Mrs. Willis" when she first arrived in Tucson.
Lola’s neighbor, Carlos Pacheco, testified that her mother had come to visit just before Lola’s last, frantic call to W.P. for help, but one can only speculate what Lola’s parents knew, or thought, about her relationship with their second cousin. Her parents, who both outlived her by many years, may not have wanted to get tangled in litigation over her estate. Or they may have been genuinely grateful to W.P. for trying to help their daughter. It’s one of the great mysteries of this story for me.
Lola’s parents, after a brief visit to Tucson to settle the estate, went back to California. W.P. Grigsby stayed in Arizona for the rest of his days. In 1910 he was nearly 60 and working as a prison guard in Florence. He called himself a “widower” even though his original wife, Eudora, was still alive back in Napa. There’s no indication he ever contacted her again after he left their home. W.P. probably was still in Florence when Arizona became the 48th state in 1912. The 1920 census finds him renting a room in a family’s home. Soon thereafter, he was admitted to the state hospital in Phoenix, where he died in 1922 and was buried on the grounds.
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Lola's story makes me not only sad, but angry. Angry that, over a century later, so many women still live in fear of the men around them. Angry that so many men, suffering from alcoholism or not, continue to attack the women in their lives in this way. Angry that our system still hasn't figured out a way to protect women against this kind of violence. I believe it's good to remember her so long after her untimely death, but better to resolve to be part of the solution.