True Crime Chronicles: Bud Morris killed two people but went on the lam before dying in a New Orleans brothel

In the northern reaches of Crawford County in 1873 three horse drovers met a violent end. One was a white man, and the other two were half-breed Cherokee Indians. The men were killed for the horses they drove and the valuables they carried.

Their killers took a number of the animals and vanished into the rough country that still marked the western Arkansas frontier. The crime was regarded at the time as one of the most brutal in the county’s criminal record.

Bud Morris

The suspects named in the case were John Richmond Jr., Jack Richmond, Lafayette Schultz, and Bud Morris.

Years passed with no arrests. Then, roughly five years after the murders, Bud Morris was located in Tennessee. A letter written by his uncle, John W. Morris, also of Tennessee, reached authorities in Van Buren and detailed the younger man’s role in the Crawford County killings

. Morris was returned to Arkansas, indicted for murder in the first degree, and released after posting an eight-thousand-dollar bond. Certain that conviction would follow, he fled. The bond was forfeited.

Morris returned to Tennessee andkilled the uncle who had informed against him. He was never arrested for that second murder.

John Richmond Jr., Jack Richmond, and Lafayette Schultz likewise remained free. In October 1894 the governor of Arkansas issued a fresh proclamation offering a reward of two hundred dollars for the arrest and delivery of each of the four men to the sheriff of Crawford County.

Officials hoped the renewed offer might still produce results more than twenty years after the original crime. The notice was carried by the Little Rock Gazette and reprinted in the Crawford County Journal on October, 12 1894.

Although Morris escaped having to pay for his crimes in Arkansas and Tennessee, he could not escape death. It was said that he changed his last name to Ringo Budrow and moved to New Orleans, where he worked as a bartender at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, the establishment now known as the oldest saloon in the French Quarter.

In 1912 he was shot and killed in a New Orleans brothel by a "gentleman gambler" following a confrontation with the establishment’s madam. Only then was he identified as the long-wanted man from the Crawford County case. A female companion of Morris told authorities he had revealed his real identity to her two years before his killing.

Morris shares a grave site with a female named Linnis, but it is unclear if she was the one who identified him to authorities.

He was buried under the name Budrow Morris in Black Gum Springs Cemetery at Harrisonburg in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. No later public records have been located that document the capture or fate of the other three suspects.

The full names of the three horse drovers themselves do not appear in the surviving accounts.

The 1894 reward notice and the belated identification of Morris in death remain the last known markers of a case that began on the Arkansas frontier and ended, for one of its principals, in a New Orleans house of prostitution nearly forty years later.