![]() No way were the police going to let them go again, according to Williams. The others started to fire but were mowed down by the cops. As they began to cuff the others, Ashley began to drop his hands.Ī deputy shot and killed Ashley. They’ll never put those things on me.” All four died in the gunfight.īut Wlliams’ source says they cuffed John Ashley and made him raise his hands. The deputies’ story then was that the gang had raised their hands, but when Ashley saw the glint of the lantern on handcuffs, he dropped his hands and shouted, “Shoot boys. Sebastian River.Īt around 10:45, the Ford bearing Ashley and his gang – Hanford Mobley, Ray “Shorty” Lynn and John Middleton – came to a stop. They set up a chain and a red lantern across the bridge at St. Baker sent up four deputies, and seven officers were ready to ambush the gang. Lucie counterpart that Ashley might be heading his way. Sheriff Baker got a tip that the gang was headed toward Jacksonville. The fatal encounter took place on a wooden bridge over the St. As told in her 2016 book, Florida’s Ashley Gang, a retired deputy who’d been on the scene that night came clean before he died. “My father knew all these people,” recalled Williams to the Palm Beach Post. But author Ada Coats Williams, a retired teacher of creative writing at Fort Pierce’s Indian River Community College, has another take on that story. Palm Beach County Sheriff Bob Baker claimed at the time that John and three gang members were killed trying to escape. ![]() But two of his brothers disappeared on a rum-running excursion to the Bahamas and father Joe died in a raid of his moonshine camp. In the ensuing years, he and Laura eluded the police up and down the state. John remained in jail then but later escaped from a road crew. In a shootout, Bob killed another officer, took a bullet in the stomach and died. He finally busted into the Dade County Jail and shot the jailer. ![]() With John Ashley finally in jail for the crime, brother Bob – the most violent of John’s three brothers in the gang – was plotting. The Girtman Brothers said they bought the otter skins from a “husky young fella whose signature on the receipt was J. The body of DeSoto Tiger was found floating in a slough in today’s northwest Broward. All told, the Ashley Gang racked up what would be $12 million in today’s money before their careers were ended.Īfter the Stuart fiasco, John was held in Miami because he sold 84 otter skins stolen from DeSoto Tiger to the Girtman Brothers trading post there. While the Stuart robbery was slapdash, others were cruelly efficient. Upthegrove was said to be the mastermind of a slew of bank robberies, rum-running and kidnapping crimes, often casing the joints herself when necessary. Along the way Ashley brought his girlfriend Laura Upthegrove into the crime cult, and they called themselves “King and Queen of the Everglades.” That’s where their hideouts and moonshine stills were located. In short order, almost the entire Ashley family became nothing but trouble. The young trader was killed in 1911, becoming Ashley’s first documented crime since his father Joe had moved the family to Pompano Beach six years earlier. Ashley was sent to Miami to stand trial for the murder of DeSoto Tiger, son of a Seminole chieftain. The arrest for the robbery, though, took a back seat to a more serious crime. “He lay on a bloodstained bed of pine needles, too wracked by pain to resist.” After that, he was a one-eyed bandit with a glass eye. While the rest of the gang got away clean, Ashley was captured three hours later at a nearby hideout. One of his bullets struck the car’s rear window frame and ricocheted into John Ashley’s left eye.” Lowe, sitting in the front seat, turned and fired back. One patron agreed to drive the getaway car.Īccording to a Sun-Sentinel account: “As the Ashley gang sped away, four lawmen fired guns in a futile attempt to stop them. After snatching $4,500, Kid Lowe shouted at the bank’s customers: “All right, which one of you can drive an automobile? It’s either drive us out of here or get shot.’’ The gang, including Ashley’s three brothers and Chicago tough “Kid” Lowe, didn’t have much going in the getaway department. There was the 1915 raid on a bank in Stuart, for example. On more than one occasion, however, the gang’s escapades seemed like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film. ![]() To read the first part of this story, click here.įlorida newspapers in the 1920s compared outlaw John Ashley to Jesse James. John Ashley was one of Florida’s most notorious criminals, but he couldn’t evade the law forever.
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