On the evening of February 3rd, 1889, Belle Starr was on her way home from a party.

As the shadows grew long, she made her way through the tall grass on the banks of the Canadian River.

She was not far from her cabin in Indian Territory, when a figure emerged from the trees and shot her in the She lived during dangerous times among outlaws and cutthroats.

There was no shortage of suspects, but no one was ever convicted.

More than a century later.

The question remains who killed Belle Starr, the bandit queen?

Myra Maybelle Shirley was born into turmoil and raised in western Missouri, at the height of the border wars with Kansas.

Her parents were southern sympathizers who made a good living despite the growing tensions of the time.

Her early life was shaped by both comfort and conflict.

Born in 1848 outside Carthage, Missouri, in Jasper County, Missouri, close to the border of Kansas, down in extreme southwest Missouri, and born into the Shirley family.

John and Eliza Shirley.

father farmed and raised quality horses.

And of course, that's where she gained her love of horses and her ability to ride.

She and her brother Bud would ride all the time She spoke French, she spoke Latin, she played the piano and was a very cultured, sort of exclusive existence.

She was so bright.

And she and her older brother Bud they were two peas in the pod that he was a few years older, And Bud was also a good marksman, and he taught her how to shoot and trick shoot and everything else One old timer said she could shoot a bee off of a thistle, In 1864, John Shirley sold his farm and opened a hotel in Carthage, Missouri that welcomed both guests from the north and the South.

But with Lincoln's election and the start of the Civil War, they're comfortable.

Lives were changed forever.

wealthy families, southern sympathizers tended to get raided from the Kansas side because there was a lot of hatred for slave owners at which Belle's family were.

They were slave owners.

Belle's brothers Bud and Ed joined the fight with Bud riding with a guerrilla group supporting the Confederates.

Bud became what they called in Missouri, a bushwhacker, And Myra especially worried about him.

And sometimes she'd even carry food and things out to those boys and kind of serve as a messenger.

And some folks say that she would pass along information to her brother about troop movements or things that were happening, that she overheard some of the soldiers saying.

She wasn't a spy.

I don't think, in the literal sense that she was official or anything.

This all came crashing down right in the middle of the war in 1863.

Bud, and one of his bushwhacker companions, were down in Sarcoxie, Missouri in lower Jasper County, Bud was in the course of jumping over a fence, and he was shot and fell dead.

Belle was devastated by this death.

that's when Belle really swore, which she did several times.

I will always stand up for any gallant man or outlaw.

True.

And that was shaping her as a woman.

in 1865, things are completely awry.

Missouri is decimated.

Carthage, her hometown, is burned by Union forces.

The family had to leave, Missouri, and they moved to North Texas.

And reportedly the.

James Reed, who was also known to her from her brother and and other people in Quantrill’s Raiders met her and they were married James Reed.

He rode with Quantrill a time, as did several of the other Missouri outlaws, of course, the Jesse and Frank James Cole Younger and others.

In 1865, after four long years of blood and ruin, the war finally ended, but the violence in many places refused to lay down its arms.

Quantrill's Raiders were guerrilla raiders, unofficial.

They were coordinated with the Confederacy, but not in official part.

So they got no amnesty.

They were outlaws.

Afterwards, They couldn't get jobs.

Economy was awful.

And turning to crime was what they did.

And they learned pretty quickly that if you can hide out in Indian Territory, the tribes can't arrest you.

There was no legal force law force here that could arrest white man.

The Cherokee Mounted Police were known as the Light Horseman.

The Creek Light Horseman could not arrest a white.

So after the Civil War, this became a refuge for a lot of people who were running from things.

And it became the real Wild West.

This was the Wild West.

They were not above robbing trains in stagecoaches and mercantile.

We didn't have banks in the earliest days, but I have heard that the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, which built through in 1871 72, when it was completed into Texas, it became the most robbed train in America because it ran through Indian Territory.

in September 1868 and Rich Hill, Missouri.

Jim Reed and Belle welcomed a daughter, Rosie Lee Reed.

They called her Pearl.

Three years later, their son Eddie was born.

Jim Reed is developing into quite an outlaw at this time, much to everybody chagrin.

And he's running with a bad bunch down in Indian territory, going across the river.

into Arkansas, For Jim Reed.

Fate had been following quietly, and in 1874 his luck ran out.

her husband was killed in Paris, Texas, by deputy, no doubt that James Reed was killed as a result of an outstanding warrant.

And that's what tripped Belle into the Indian Territory.

Jim Reed knew a Cherokee outlaw named Tom Starr, who lived in Indian Territory.

After Jim's death, Belle turned to Tom Starr for assistance.

for a white to reside officially in the Cherokee Nation, they had to be married to a Cherokee.

Okay, so he happened to have a son named Sam who was about the appropriate age.

So Belle marries Sam Starr Tom Starr son, and becomes a intermarried white in the Cherokee Nation.

They had a, I think, a good marriage.

But he was on the run all the time as an outlaw.

He'd be gone.

He'd be on the scout, as they called it.

He'd be gone and he'd sneak back in.

He get fresh clothes and get some grub and ride back out.

she made a statement that she thought after moving here to youngers bend, that this is the place that she would spend the rest of her life peacefully with Sam.

that Belle came from a very rich, affluent.

She lived in a hotel.

She had a grand piano in the lobby, very cultured.

And she lives in a 14 by 14 cedar log cabin in the middle of the Indian nations.

Quite a change.

Tucked into the rough hillsides.

The cabin near Stigler had long served as a shadowed refuge where Belle sheltered some of the most notorious figures in Western lore.

Jesse James, Frank, James, those people had been here before visiting under Quantrill's Raiders.

They wintered here in 1862 and 1863.

Cole Younger supposedly scouted this location and it's why it was listed as Youngers Bend.

she must have found some excitement in that in the in the Bad Boys, and was.

Comfortable with being connected with them in some way.

Some she married and some she just considered friends, By 1875, President Ulysses Grant had had enough of the mayhem in Indian Territory and appointed Isaac Parker to clean it up.

Judge Parker sent over 300 U.S.

marshals into the vast and dangerous territory.

Judge Parker actually sentenced, I think, 160 people to death and actually executed 79 from the Indian Territory.

In 1882, Belle Starr and her husband were arrested.

She liked those horses, but sometimes she liked other people's horses, and that's what happened.

The only time she was convicted of a crime.

Horse Theft.

They went before hanging Judge Parker over in Fort Smith and that big old courtroom.

His.

It was unusual for Parker to be presiding over a trial of a woman.

So that fact alone would have gotten local media attention.

And the eastern newspapers were very quick to pick up on interesting bits of information and stories from the Western press.

she very quickly got the bad reputation based on just being in the court and being being tried for a crime that's typically connected with men.

And they were both convicted of horse theft.

Sam and Belle.

Sam went off to prison in penitentiary in Illinois, and she was sent up right near Detroit to a women's correctional facility.

She was sentenced to one year in prison, but she served just nine months and got out for good behavior.

Sam, they say, was incorrigible.

John West testified against them and got their conviction.

Frank was his brother.

So, yes, there was ugly between them and Frank.

But Frank had also shot at Sam, pursuing him, trying to arrest him.

And he had shot Belle's favorite horse, Venus.

And that really that really made them mad at Frank West.

Sam Starr decides to take take revenge at a Christmas party when he showed up at the dance where they were in Whitefield, they were both determined that something be done to Frank West.

You know, I've heard people say that she was playing piano for the dance.

Pearl and Eddie, her children were there.

Sam was just sitting there listening to her play, and somebody came in the house and said, Frank West is here.

And Belle turns to Sam and she says, get him, Sam.

Sam Starr and Deputy West had a shootout.

And it was in a true case of the West, when two people got close and drew their guns.

They both died as a result.

And so that was kind of the the double loss.

Belle lost her horse and then lost her husband.

For years.

Her name was little more than a whisper beyond Texas till Richard Kay Fox, the publisher of a dime novel called The Police Gazette, set her legend ablaze and transformed Belle from obscurity into a frontier femme.

Fatale.

dime novels, love rags to riches stories.

But they also like riches to rags stories.

And then a woman outlaw.

That was a unique spin.

Women were not supposed to be in that kind of role, you know, being a criminal or being associated with criminals.

boom, boom, boom, boom boom.

Once it's in print, they passed it on.

They weren't doing any research.

They were just trying to sell a magazine or a newspaper.

There was really no ethics at all to that yellow journalism.

So she was painted with with that brush.

mean, they claimed that she had slept with everybody from Youngers Bend to the Pacos, and she didn't.

But that was the claim.

nobody bothered to get her side of the story.

You know, they just told the story in often a very salacious fashion.

And yeah, she was aware of it and it was upsetting to her.

those old pictures, tin types and the daguerreotypes and all that old photography.

It could sometimes not be very flattering.

She is consistently described as a handsome woman.

In the instance where those two known photos over.

That was a tough time for her.

She looks grim.

She was quite thin and gaunt.

the lawyers, had her stand next to this blue duck in shackles And sure enough, then all the stories came out that Blue Duck was her lover, I like to think those pictures.

I'm glad we have them, but I don't think they really do her justice.

With Sam gone.

Belle felt the ground shift beneath her boots without a Cherokee husband.

The Cherokee Nation would not allow her to stay.

She had no right to property because she was white.

And so Tom Starr and I guess Belle together kind of schemed how she could stay on the land, and that would be to marry a Cherokee.

And so she married Jim July.

He was quite a bit younger than her, He was just a little bit older than her children, but he took up residence with her in Younger's Bend.

So she got to stay there, It was a relationship of convenience.

He irritated her son and daughter, Eddie Reed was at this point getting a little bit older, and she was living with Jim July, and they didn't get along.

Pearl didn't get along with Jim July either.

Her marriage.

All of her marriages were were sort of rough and tumble.

Their time together would be short.

The evening Belle was killed.

She had gone with Jim July to Fort Smith.

He was facing some kind of criminal charge himself.

She had convinced him to turn himself in at Fort Smith and not wait to be arrested, and she had gone with him to a certain distance, but turned back, and he went on to Fort Smith, and she returned home.

on her way back home, she stopped at a party food and drink and dancing and music.

And so she stopped and she visited a while, and after a while she decided to go back up to the house.

It was getting dusky, but her horse knew the way home, so she wasn't worried about getting home even after dark.

she was shot from behind on her horse and hit and knocked off.

And then the person came up and put another load in her with a shotgun, left her her horse was loose and ran, as it was known to do, right back up.

to youngers bend and Pearl came out.

And here's her horse with no rider And there's blood on the saddle.

So she jumps on the horse and rides back down there and went looking for her mother and found her dying.

Belle wasn't able to say anything to her though, so she died very shortly after Pearl arrived.

It may have been a comfort to her, though, that Pearl was there.

There in the tall grass beside the Canadian River.

Belle Starr died in her daughter's arms.

February 3rd, 1889.

Who killed the bandit queen?

In a turbulent life surrounded by violence, there was no shortage of suspects.

a lot of people have written suggesting that she was killed by her son because they were sort of estranged, which is not true, that she was killed by Jim July, which is not true because he was in Fort Smith.

This, that and the other, all these candidates and There's one that sort of sticks out, a man named Edgar Watson.

The primary suspect in her murder was a man who had tried to rent some of her land as a tenant farmer, and they had had words.

He was a notorious bad man.

When he was drunk.

He wore a size seven shoe, which was the same size as the boot prints.

but he thought he wanted this land in particular more fertile and less less problems.

So he threatened Belle So Belle called off the deal and rented it out to somebody Else.

Well, Watson wouldn't have And Watson was at that party that night.

He didn't live too far away They brought her up to Younger's Bend and dug a grave in front of the house.

At the funeral, guests dropped a bit of cornmeal in the coffin for her journey.

There was one uninvited guest.

Edgar Watson was there with his wife and everybody else.

And that's when Jim July called him on it.

And he said, you killed Belle.

And they grabbed him and made like a citizen's arrest and tied him up.

her son, her husband and a few men took Watson to stand trial in Fort Smith, but this prime suspect had a good attorney.

If you don't have eyewitnesses, how are you going to prove someone murdered someone?

And that rascal got off, and he didn't waste too much time.

And packing up and going east up to Arkansas for a while again, and then back down to Florida.

He ran sugar cane plantation.

He wouldn't pay people.

He'd killed people.

He'd kill workers and have them throw them out in the Everglades He became really what I would call a serial killer.

And ultimately, this is years later, in 1910, he killed this young family child, and parents brutally killed him.

And that's when the community said, this is it.

And a big posse of men came up with rifles and handguns, and he came out of his boat up on the dock, and they shot him 33 times.

Boom.

And that was the end of Mr.

Watson.

of course when she died, that made the newspapers all over the place.

And the fact that there was so much mystery surrounding who had killed her and for what reason, that was, of course, contributed to the fame.

And it just continued to grow.

It snowballed Belle was noted in her obituaries that she was buried in Younger's Bend with her babies at her side, which meant her two pistols.

Then in 1890, her grave was dug up and the they left her remains and the pistols were gone.

Pearl made sure no one could dig her mother up again.

She put a stone memorial over the grave.

Eddie Reed, Belle’s son, later wore a badge, but died in a Claremore saloon while Pearl ran bordellos in Fort Smith and Van Buren.

Jim July met his end from a marshal’s bullet.

You cannot deny that Belle was involved in violence and lived a very violent life.

If you just look at her husbands Jim Reed shot, killed to, you know, Sam Starr, shot by a deputy, Jim July, shot by a deputy, Belle's brother, husband, second husband, third husband all died of lead poisoning.

a lot of people maligned her and made her out to be either.

She was this avenging, crazy Amazon, or she was a harlot that a groupie for outlaws that passed around.

And of course, neither one of those are true.

But but also, you have to remember, even historians, it didn't so much pay much attention to women in the West.

Women were either on a wagon in a gingham bonnet with their man going out, or they were a saloon girl.

There were all kinds of women, independent thinking women who went by their own drummer.

And that's what Belle was.

You can watch this and other episodes of Back in Time on the PBS app or at.