True Crime Chronicles: Shotgun killed a Sequoyah County Deputy in 1933 and suspects walked free after three trials
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The last thing Deputy Sheriff Thomas Jasper Hood told his family in Short was that he was going to the bluff. It was late Monday afternoon, March 27, 1933, in the folded hills of northeastern Sequoyah County.
He said he was going to look for moonshiners. He left armed. He did not come home.
Neighbors near the Blackbird place told officers they heard a number of shots about six that evening.
By Tuesday his brother Albert, with a man named Burrow, had found him in remote timber not far from Short: body draped over a barrel of mash, a blood trail leading back from the barrel, a boiler nearby, paths running toward Jim Tune’s barn and house a short distance away.
Dr. S. B. Jones of Sallisaw counted fifteen pellet wounds in the face, head, and left shoulder. All six cartridges in Hood’s revolver had been fired. He was thirty-six or thirty-seven. He died where he fell.
The first theory was a trap, that lifting the mash-barrel lid would discharge a concealed shotgun. Sheriff Bill Bird’s ground and the emptied revolver killed that idea. Hood had apparently died fighting.
Short sat on the Ozark edge of Sequoyah County, near the Arkansas line, far enough from the courthouse in Sallisaw that a man could walk into the woods and vanish for a night. The county had been Cherokee country before statehood. In 1933 it was also poor; the 1930 census had already recorded a sharp drop in population.
National Prohibition was still federal law that March. Oklahoma had been dry since the 1907 constitution. Corn whiskey paid when cotton and timber did not.
Hood had been born in Arkansas on September 10, 1896. On April 2, 1916, he married Jennie Jewel Samples, born January 17, 1898, also in Arkansas. They made a life at Short. By the spring of 1933 they had seven children, and Jennie was pregnant with an eighth.
Jim Tune, 50, and his son Jess, 28, were taken to the county jail. They denied any part in the shooting when County Attorney Fred Green questioned them. They refused statements overnight. Green said no charges would be filed until Bird finished the work. Hood had previously arrested the Tunes for making whisky; they had served jail sentences.
At the preliminary hearing before County Judge R. O. Ingle, seven witnesses laid out the map: Albert Hood and Burrow on the finding of the body; the widow on the last errand and the gun; the sheriff on the still, the boiler, the paths, and the twelve-gauge taken from the Tune place.
Tune said it had not been fired recently; Bird believed it had. Deputy Albert Johnson said a mash barrel had sat in that country eight years though the Tunes had lived there only about a year. Robert Howell identified a mattock that had once been his. Jess Tune was bound over to district court. Jim Tune had been arrested with him. The charge that mattered most rode on the son.
What happened after that never settles. A local farmer stood trial. Two juries could not finish the work. A third acquitted him. Moonshine country is hard on prosecutors. Witnesses live next door to the accused. A deputy who walks alone onto a bluff at dusk has already accepted an evidence problem: there may be no living companion to say what he saw before the first load of shot.
Eight months later the Twenty-first Amendment ended national Prohibition. Oklahoma did not follow all the way. Hard liquor stayed illegal in the state until 1959.
The stills did not vanish in December 1933. They only changed their legal weather. Hood died on the winter side of that line, not as a federal revenuer with a column of men, but as a county deputy who told his wife he was going to the bluff and went.
Jennie Jewel Hood buried him in Allison Cemetery, a family ground near the state line that later compilers filed sometimes under Crawford County, Arkansas, and sometimes under Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, because the ridge does not care about the survey. The stone gives his dates as September 10, 1896, and March 27,
1933, and hers as January 17, 1898, and February 14, 1945. She lasted twelve years as a widow. When she died, their daughter Margaret packed seven siblings and left for California. The eighth child, the one Jennie had been carrying when Tom was killed, went with them.
In 1982 Margaret and an aunt planned a trip back. A ten-year-old descendant went along. They stood at the place where Tom was killed and walked through the house where Margaret had grown up.
Decades later another descendant found the cemetery again on back roads and wrote that the second visit felt different. He called Thomas Hood his great-great-grandfather.
That is how a 1933 shotgun case survives when the verdict does not: in a Times-Democrat column from March 29, a Democrat-American hearing report from April 13, a memorial panel in Washington numbered 35-E: 26, an Oklahoma panel numbered 10S-3-4, and a family that can still find the bluff.
True crime likes a last chapter in which the guilty man is named without remainder.
This one ends in a Sequoyah County jury box in the 1930s, with neighbors deciding what a shotgun, a mash barrel, and a blood trail were worth.
