PART II SWAMP COUNTRY #6
Known to his friends as ‘Tad’, his family was one of the oldest in the state. He was a big donor to the Republican Party and had donated to the campaigns of both of Louisiana’s current senators and its governor.
He had been married to his wife, Clara, for forty years and had two sons with her, Tad Jr and Beau.
He was worth $1.2 billion.
My search also led me to three articles about Tad Kingman that had appeared in Louisiana’s largest newspaper, The Advocate.
The first involved Tad’s business dealings. Apparently, he had a share in a business with a Florida mining magnate by the name of Montgomery Fisher.
The second article was about Tad’s wife, Clara.
She was, it appeared, the chairwoman of a ladies’ organisation that back in 2020, after the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter riots, had opposed the removal of a Confederate statue in Renton, a small town not far from Victorville.
Her group was called the Southern Christian Ladies Garden and Historical Society, Louisiana Chapter. It was a sister group to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the notorious builders of hundreds of Confederate statues and monuments across the South.
Interestingly, in her role as chairwoman of her society, Mrs Kingman went by her maiden name, Ms Clara Montpierre.
The statue had stayed.
The third article was more recent—not a month old—and it was in the social pages.
It breathlessly announced that Tad Kingman’s second son, Beau, was to be married in two weeks in Victorville, Louisiana.
Beau was to marry Miss Misty Dearborn, the daughter of Mr Henry Herbert Dearborn, a Texan billionaire.
The union of these two wealthy old families was to be the social event of the year, gushed the social pages writer.
But I wasn’t thinking about that.
A name in the first article had triggered my memory.
Fisher . . .
Montgomery Fisher . . .
A mine owner from Florida . . .
I knew the Fisher name. I’d encountered it before—and its connection to mines—during my initial investigation seven years previously.
Where had I seen it?
That was it.
I’d seen the Fisher name in connection with the very first group of four prostitutes to go missing . . .
. . . back in 1877.
I pulled up my notes on the 1877 case:
YEAR
VICTIMS
LOCATION TAKEN
INVESTIGATOR
1877
Four former slaves (female)
Carlotta Stone
Other 3 names unknown
Reported missing: December 15, 1877
NEVER FOUND
Tallahassee, Florida
Union Captain George C. McShane
Reported missing: December 31, 1877
NEVER FOUND
The four missing prostitutes had worked out of a brothel in Tallahassee.
Fifteen years before then, they’d been slaves on a cotton plantation in central Florida.
With the North’s victory in the Civil War, they’d been granted their freedom but it was a bitter one.
In a short time, like many of their fellow former female slaves, they’d found it difficult to find legitimate employment and so had ended up in the sex trade.
A local Union general by the name of Perry had been an eager client of one of the girls and when she’d vanished in mid--December of 1877, he’d ordered one of his junior officers, one Captain George C. McShane, to find her.
Captain McShane was a devout Christian and didn’t exactly like being dispatched on such a mission but he did as he was ordered.
I knew all this from a progress report McShane had sent to General Perry which I found in a collection of post–Civil War documents in a regional library in Tallahassee.
I’d spent sixteen days in the bowels of that library flipping through folios filled with reports from the 1870s, scanning them for mentions of missing prostitutes from Tallahassee.
As I’ve said, this is my thing.
I can devote myself to a task for days, weeks even, with intense focus.
Which was how I found Captain McShane’s progress report.
It read:
December 28, 1877
Sir,
Regrettably, I have been unable to locate the young lady you seek, Miss Carlotta Stone.
My inquiries have led to the following conclusions:
First, I sincerely doubt ‘Carlotta Stone’ is her actual name. Many former slave-women changed their names after the war, especially those who went into prostitution. I shall call her Miss Stone for convenience.
Miss Stone lived with the three other missing prostitutes in a room they rented from their madam in Tallahassee.
Their clothes and other personal possessions were still in their room when they went missing. From this I deduced that when they left they intended to return. Thus I believe they were taken against their will.
The last customer to pay for Miss Stone’s services via her madam was one Mr Cree Fisher, the son of a wealthy local salt mine owner, Mr Wallace Fisher III.
Mr Cree Fisher procured the four prostitutes to attend a ‘gentlemen’s gathering’ he was holding on behalf of a visiting friend, in honour of that friend’s upcoming wedding to Cree’s sister, Mary Rose.
The four prostitutes never returned from this gathering.
I am led to believe the gathering took place at a hunting lodge on the Fisher estate, out near their salt mine south of Tallahassee.
I visited the main house at this estate and spoke with Mr Cree Fisher and his father, Mr Wallace Fisher III.
To speak with them, you wouldn’t think these people lost the war. They answered my questions rudely and perfunctorily.
Cree Fisher said (and I quote): ‘Who gives a damn about some negro whores anyways?’
His father was somewhat more refined. He said, ‘Captain, we have a way of life here that you northern folks will never understand. We don’t know where your ladies went. Maybe they got an offer to go north. They could be in Chicago for all we know. Good day.’
I plan to visit the salt mine near the Fisher estate tomorrow and make further inquiries.
I will report back to you upon my return to Tallahassee next week.
Captain George McShane was never seen again.
By the time his report got back to Tallahassee, his superior, General Perry, had taken up a new posting in Texas and the report was filed away, also never to be seen again, until I came along a century and a half later.
Still sitting in my Winnebago in my rear garage in the dead of night, I looked up the Fisher family’s salt mine.
It was still there today—south of Tallahassee, down near the Gulf Coast—except that it’d been converted into a far more lucrative phosphate mine.
The Fisher family, I discovered, owned a few dozen phosphate mines in Florida.
Like the Kingmans in Louisiana and the Dearborns in Texas, the Fisher family was extremely old and incredibly rich, their fortune originating before the Civil War.
I stared into space for a long moment, thinking.
Going through my old notes about the 1877 incident revived another memory from my own earlier investigations back in 2018.
The time I found LaToya Martyn’s pimp.
Or what was left of him.
2018.
Tyrone Brown’s mangled body lay face-up on a steel examination table in the Houston city morgue.
One of the junior coroners had let me in—for a fee—to see the corpse after hours.
Tyrone Brown had been a vain and vicious man, known for wearing extravagant gold chains, diamond ear studs and velvet jackets.
As a pimp, he was a tyrant, variously threatening and beating his women. He always carried a .357 Magnum and had been known to shove it in the face of anyone who owed him money or whom he felt had disrespected him.
After LaToya and the other prostitutes had vanished, the furious Tyrone had gone in search of them, gun in hand.
He ended up in the morgue.
By any objective measurement, Tyrone Brown had been an awful human being.
Even then, I didn’t think he deserved what had happened to him.
According to the junior coroner it had been done in the following order.
First, his tongue had been cut out.
Then he had been sodomised with a broomstick.
Then they’d cut off his penis and stuffed it in his mouth.
Then—by the way, he was still alive through all this—they’d sat him on a wicker chair facing a mirror, cut his throat and let him slowly bleed to death.
And that was how Tyrone Brown’s dead body had been found: sitting on a chair in front of a mirror, mutilated and drenched in blood.
It was the mirror that had been the truly strange part.
Whoever had done all that to Tyrone had wanted him to see the wretched wreck that he’d become before he died.
I thought about Tyrone’s injuries.
Wounds like the ones he’d received almost always had meaning. The broomstick and the penis, they weren’t uncommon in gang-related incidents or turf fights between pimps.
The tongue thing, though, was very unusual.
So I did some research.
Many cultures throughout history have cut out people’s tongues.
Germanic cultures did it to those who spread false accusations.
The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi ordered the removal of the tongues of those who committed perjury.
In medieval Europe, suspected witches had their tongues cut out to prevent them from uttering spells.
It was also used as a specific punishment in the American South: slaves who talked back to their white masters had their tongues cut out.
And in A Game of Thrones, one of my favourite book series (for some reason, the TV show changed the title, dropping the ‘A’), Tyrion Lannister had said, ‘When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.’
It was almost 3:30 a.m., but there were still a few rabbit holes I wanted to explore.
First, the Kingman family.
Since Cyrus had mentioned the Kingmans a few times, I crosschecked ‘Kingman’ with all the other names on my whiteboard . . .
. . . and got a hit.
I frowned.
It wasn’t a hit I’d expected at all.
It was a connection between Tad Kingman and one of the missing investigators, the one from 1988 whom Cyrus had also referred to: Bill Brewster.
It seemed that Bill Brewster had once tried to sue Tad Kingman.
Bill Brewster.
I stared at his entry on my whiteboard:
YEAR
VICTIMS
LOCATION TAKEN
INVESTIGATOR
1988
Four prostitutes (female)