William Daniel Jones (1916-1974)

    W. D. Jones was born on May 15, 1916 to a poor sharecropper family. In 1921, his father moved them all to Dallas where Jones met and became friends with Clyde Barrow, seven years his senior. When Clyde left town to begin his criminal career, William stayed behind, learning the "trade" on his own by stealing cars and working for bootleggers. Clyde returned home during Christmas 1930 with his new girlfriend Bonnie, met up with his childhood buddy and asked him to keep watch over their car while the two slept. The next morning, Jones did some quick repairs on the car and accepted Clyde's offer to ride with them. In a matter of days, he was involved in his first murder. In Temple, Texas, Clyde spotted a car with the keys left in it and instructed Jones to start it up while he and Bonnie switched their things from their old car to the new one. When the owner showed up and tried to struggle over the door, Clyde shot him in the head and ordered Jones to step on it. From then on, Jones was a member of the Barrow gang and would remain so for eight months.

   He was more mechanic or driver than gunman, usually remaining in the car with Bonnie while Clyde and another member would rob gas stations, taking care of the steering while the others took shots at whomever was following them. He was involved in the several shootouts, from Joplin, Missouri to Platte City, Iowa, driving the gang from one town to another in a perpetual quest to avoid capture. Once Clyde's brother Buck was killed and Buck's wife Blanche captured by police, Jones decided it was time to jump ship before he was shot or arrested for something more serious than he could handle. While the gang was in Mississippi, Jones took off and hitched his way to Houston, where he was quickly recognized and imprisoned. He claimed that he was a victim, a virtual prisoner of the gang, forced to work for them, and tied down at night to prevent his escape; the authorities didn't believe him, but having no evidence of hard crime, could only sentence him to six years in prison. After he served his term, he drifted from job to job, hooking himself on drugs and alcohol. He surfaced in 1968 to sue Warner Brothers over what he felt was a libelous portrayal of him in the movie Bonnie and Clyde. When the suit was thrown out, he gave an interview with Playboy magazine on his time with the Barrow gang, still insisting he was an unwilling dupe, caught up by circumstances. Six years later, on August 20, 1974, Jones was gunned down during a failed drug transaction.

Garden of the Apostles
Brookside Memorial Park
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 54.789, -095° 18.927

Abner Smith Lipscomb (1789-1856)

    Abner Smith Lipscomb, lawyer, justice, and secretary of state during the Mirabeau B. Lamar administration, the son of Joel and Elizabeth (Chiles) Lipscomb, was born on February 10, 1789, in Abbeville District, South Carolina. He studied law in the office of John C. Calhoun, was admitted to the bar in 1810, and began practice at St. Stephens, Alabama. In 1819 he was appointed a circuit judge of Alabama and from 1823 to 1835 was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He was a member of the Alabama legislature in 1838. 

    In 1839 he moved to Texas and established a law practice. He was secretary of state under Lamar from January 31 to December 13, 1840. Lipscomb was a member of the Convention of 1845 and served that year on the select committee that drew up a report on the General Land Office. He was appointed an associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court in 1846 by Governor James Pinckney Henderson and was elected to the same position in 1851 and 1856. Lipscomb married Elizabeth Gains in 1813. She died in 1841, and he married Mary P. Bullock of Austin in 1843. Lipscomb died in Austin on December 8, 1856, and was buried in the State Cemetery. Lipscomb County, established in 1876, was named in his honor. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.926, -097° 43.639

Harvey Homan (?-1846)

    A carpenter by trade, Homan was living in New Orleans when he was recruited into the Texas militia by Amasa Turner. He arrived at Velasco on January 28, 1836, aboard the schooner Pennsylvania. He officially enlisted the day after landing and was assigned to Captain Richard Roman's company, with whom he later fought at San Jacinto. Homan left service once his initial enlistment period was up, but re-enlisted January 18th as part of George M. Casey's company until December 17, 1837, when he left the army for good. He died in Houston in July, 1846 of unknown causes.

Note: This is a cenotaph. Founders Memorial Park, originally founded in 1836 as Houston's first city cemetery, was rapidly filled due to a yellow fever epidemic and closed to further burials around 1840. The cemetery became neglected over a period of time, often vandalized and was heavily damaged by the 1900 hurricane. In 1936, despite a massive clean up effort, a century of neglect had taken its toll. The vast majority of grave markers were either destroyed or missing and poor record keeping prevented locating individual graves. Several cenotaphs were placed in random areas throughout the park in honor of the more high-profile citizens buried there, but a great number of graves go unmarked to this day.


Founders Memorial Park
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.431, -095° 22.731

Larry Leo King (1929-2012)

    Lawrence Leo King was born on January 1, 1929 in Putnam, Texas, son of Clyde Clayton King, a farmer and blacksmith, and Cora Lee King (née Clark), who introduced him to the writings of Mark Twain. King dropped out of high school to join the United States Army. After his military service, and a year as a journalism major at Texas Tech, King worked as a sports and crime reporter for small newspapers in Texas and New Mexico. In 1954, King moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an aide to Texas Congressman J.T. Rutherford and subsequently to James C. Wright Jr. In 1964, King quit his Congressional job to concentrate on his writing, producing many magazine articles and fourteen books of both fiction and non-fiction, and became one of the leading figures in the "New Journalism." Many of his articles, covering a wide range of subjects including politics, sports, and music, were published in Harper's magazine, where his friend Willie Morris was editor-in-chief. His soul-searching Confessions of a White Racist was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972, and earned him praise from other writers, including Maya Angelou. In 1974, he wrote an article about the Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange, Texas; after the article was published in Playboy, King and fellow Texan Peter Masterson developed it into the Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

    King received an Emmy Award in 1982 for the CBS documentary The Best Little Statehouse in Texas. In 1988, Austin's Live Oak Theatre presented King's new drama The Night Hank Williams Died. The play went on to be produced Off-Broadway and around the nation. In 1989, it received the Helen Hayes Award for best new play, and King was awarded the Mary Goldwater Award from the Theatre Lobby Trust. Beginning in 1987 and continuing until 2008, King donated his extensive personal archives to the Southwestern Writers Collection/The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. In 2006, a 70-seat performance space dedicated to producing new works by local and national authors at the Austin Playhouse in Austin, Texas was renamed the Larry L. King Theatre. King died on December 20, 2012 at a retirement home in Washington, D.C. He was survived by his third wife, Barbara S. Blaine (who was also his lawyer and literary agent), five children, two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.932, -097° 43.613