A gunfight in the family

In February of 1938, my mother’s stepfather was shot dead by his stepfather  — in broad daylight, on the streets of Baxter Springs, Kansas.

Here’s what seems indisputable. Ted Roy, my mom’s stepfather, was walking home on a cool and cloudy Saturday morning when he spotted his mother’s ex-husband, Mike Giyer, driving down the street. Ted ran up to the car, pulled open the passenger door, and fired twice. By that time, Mike had reached for his own pistol and, though seriously wounded by Roy’s second shot, returned fire. He killed Ted with a single shot to the heart. Mike recovered and was charged with murder, but the jury deadlocked at the trial. He was never tried again.

My brother, the family historian, has done some careful research and says that’s all we know for sure. Almost everything else is up for grabs.

I didn’t hear about any of this when I was young. I didn’t even know my mom had ever had a stepfather. I knew only that, after her father’s death in 1936, my mom and her family had been extremely poor. It wasn’t until I was in college that she told me that my grandmother Nellie Lee had remarried once, very briefly. With obvious distaste, my mother called her stepfather a “bad man.” She said Ted had taken her one possession, a second-hand bicycle, and sold it. She also said that, when Nellie found out about it, she’d kicked Ted out of the house.

After my mom retired, my brother heard a different version. In that darker story, Ted had done worse things to my mother than selling her bicycle. From my mom’s tone, my brother inferred that Ted had abused her, physically or sexually – or that at least he’d tried to. (My mom was always feisty. Shortly after she was widowed, she was cleaning up the church hall when a friend’s husband tried to fondle her. She kneed him in the balls. As he doubled over with a startled yelp, she whispered that she’d do worse if he ever tried it again. I’m sure he believed her.)

Since my mom’s death, my brother has gotten curious about the silences in her life-story, including her stepfather. When he searched the papers for information about Ted Roy—thinking there might be a divorce announcement at least—Hank ran across reports of the fatal shoot-out between Ted and Mike Giyer. So he settled down to serious research. He tracked down court records, newspapers, maps, the census, and marriage and death certificates of the people involved.

What he found was an ugly story.

It started when my mother was seven, and her father, Bruce, died of silicosis, a lung disease common in local miners of the time. My grandmother and her children slipped suddenly from the working poor to on-the-edge-of-starvation poor, but Nellie refused to let the children be split up into different families. Some went to orphanages while she took in laundry. Two years later, she married Ted Roy. The marriage may have felt like a rescue at first: Ted had steady work as a machinist in the mines and maybe some insurance money left over from an earlier accident.

But Ted came from a troubled family. His mother, Alma, had several children from an early marriage, and her second marriage – to Mike Giyer – was now on the rocks. In 1935, Mike had published a notice that he wouldn’t be responsible for Alma’s debts; in August of 1937, he’d filed for divorce – on grounds of neglect of duty and extreme cruelty. (On the other hand, Mike’s former wife had sworn out an arrest warrant against him for beating her up during their marriage. This was mining country, during the Great Depression.)

The divorce created bad blood between Ted and his stepfather. In the next few months, things got nasty. The spark was yet another divorce, this time with the added fuel of a child custody trial. Ted’s younger brother Earl divorced his wife, Helen. Helen took one son with her; Earl kept the other son with him. As soon as Helen was settled in a new marriage—and that was really, really soon—she sued to get custody of both boys. In her formal complaint, she alleged that Earl and the whole Roy family were unfit caretakers of a child because they gambled, fought, and drank. Earl countered that Helen and her new husband were also unfit—for pretty much the same reasons.

Mike Giyer was pulled into the mess when he was subpoenaed to testify in the custody trial, against his stepson Earl. Ted apparently warned his stepfather that testifying against Earl would be “the sorriest thing he ever did.” But testify Mike did, and it must have been effective: In January of 1938, the judge awarded custody of the second boy to Helen. In the weeks following the custody trial, Mike asked the Sherriff’s department for protection against his stepsons.

About four weeks after the trial, Ted spotted Mike driving down a street near the Roy family home. (Why was Ted there? Was he visiting his mother? Or was he living with her again, having been kicked out of Nellie’s house? And why was Mike driving around in that neighborhood, anyway?) According to witnesses, Ted made some sort of offensive gesture, pulled a gun, grabbed open the passenger door of Mike’s car, and fired. Ted’s first shot struck the windshield. His second struck Mike in the chest. But by then, Mike had picked up his own gun. He killed Ted with one shot.   

At the trial a few months later , the courtroom was packed – so packed that the crowd spilled down the hallway. After three days of witnesses and seven hours of deliberation, the jury deadlocked. (The paper reported nine jury members for acquittal, three for conviction.) The judge declared a mistrial, and although the county attorney could have insisted on trying Mike again, he in fact dismissed the charges. (Did he conclude that Mike acted in self-defense? Or did he just shrug and decide that two angry men had fought with guns and that Mike had won the fight fair and square?)

That’s as much as the records say.

My mom’s lips always thinned when she mentioned Ted Roy. But her younger brother, my Uncle Gene, remembers the whole thing quite differently. To his recollection, Ted was a good man who worked hard; Ted’s mother, Alma, sometimes watched Gene after school, fed him sugar cookies and was kind to him. Gene remembers hearing about a fight over a card game the night before the shooting. (Mike and Ted were playing cards together?) And he remembers that, when Ted’s body was brought back to my grandmother’s house after the shooting, Nellie cried over the body all day. (Even if they were separated, that doesn’t strike me as implausible.) Nellie never married again.

Every family has secrets and silences, but I can’t help wishing that my grandmother and mother had been able to talk to us about what happened in those days. My grandmother didn’t tolerate personal questions, however, and my mom had a stroke before we knew about the shoot-out. My brother will someday publish a scholarly account of Ted’s death, with his sources cited. But even then, we’ll never really know the heart of the matter: what Ted did to my mom, how Nellie Lee felt about her second husband, or even why Ted and Mike shot each other.

It sort of makes me wish I were a historical novelist….