Judge Hargis was shot and killed at his store in Jackson in the winter of 1908 by his own son, Beach Hargis. The young man was indicted for murder February 18th, 1908, tried and found guilty. He escaped the death penalty, and received a life sentence, but is already at large, having been paroled 1916.
The judgment of the court was appealed from and strenuous efforts were made by the widow of the slain man to secure a new trial and save her son from conviction for the murder of her husband. Hers was indeed a pathetic situation. Mrs. Hargis employed the best counsel obtainable. Senator William O. Bradley, a lawyer of national fame, argued the case exhaustively before the Court of Appeals. The judgment of the lower court was affirmed.
The case was one of widespread interest. The facts and circumstances attending the murder appear at length and are commented upon in an opinion of the Court of Appeals, written by Judge Hobson, and reported in 135 Kentucky Reports.
Judge Hobson, in his statement of the case, says:—
“The proof for the Commonwealth on the trial showed in brief these facts:—
“On the night before the homicide Beach Hargis had gone to his father’s store and asked one of the clerks for a pistol. The clerk declined to give him a pistol out of the stock, but told him that his father’s pistol was there in a drawer of his desk and he could take that. The defendant secured the pistol, but said nothing to his father, although he was then in the store. The next morning between nine and ten o’clock the defendant was sitting in the barber shop. His face was swollen. He told the barber that his father had hit him in the mouth and hurt him there. A man who looked like his father passed. He raised up in the chair, threw his hand back and said: ‘I thought that was the old man.’ About an hour later he drank a bottle of Brown’s Bitters, and said to a bystander: ‘Did you hear about the old man mashing my mouth?’ and added that it was hard to take. Some two hours later he appeared at a drug store kept by his brother-in-law, Dr. Hogg, drew his pistol, and was waving it about, pointing it in the direction of a bystander and his brother-in-law. From this drug store, after a few minutes, he went to his father’s store. It was a double storeroom. His father was in one room and he entered the other and took a seat in a chair not far from the front door. While he was sitting there in a chair, a man in the other room asked his father where Beach was. His father pointed him out to the man and said: ‘There he sits. I have done all I can for him and I cannot go about him or have anything to do with him.’ A few minutes later his father said to another man who was in the room: ‘I don’t know what to do with Beach. He has got to be a perfect vagabond, and he is destroying my business, and if Dr. Hogg let’s him stay there he will ruin his business.’ After saying this to the man the father walked in the direction of where the defendant was sitting. There were a number of persons in the store. As his father approached, the defendant got out of his chair and walked around behind a spool case that was setting on the end of the counter. No words were spoken. The first sound that anybody heard was the report of a pistol. His father was then about three feet from him. A struggle ensued between them, during which the pistol was shot four times more, all five of the shots taking effect in the father. Persons in the store ran up, and when they got to them the father had the son down and had the pistol, which he handed to one of them, saying: ‘He has shot me all to pieces.’ The father died in a few minutes.
“The proof for the son was in substance that the father came up to him, struck him in the face, and began choking him. When he felt his eyes bulging out, he drew his pistol and shot him, and his father continuing to choke him, he fired the other four shots in the struggle; the last two being fired from the floor. The proof for the defendant also showed that the father was drinking. Taking all the evidence, we think it reasonably clear that the father was unarmed and that he was shot by the son while he was approaching him, and before he had touched him. Two witnesses who were on the outside of the store, were looking through the windows, and their testimony, as well as the testimony of persons in the store, confirms this conclusion. We think it also reasonably clear that the son was maudlin drunk, and but for this the unfortunate homicide would not have occurred. He showed that he was under the impression that his father had left the store, and that he went there to meet an uncle, but expecting no difficulty. He also showed that about a week before his father had beat him unmercifully with a ramrod, that previous to this he had whipped him with a rope, and on the last occasion had struck him in the mouth with his fist, and got upon him on the floor and churned his head against the floor; that he had taken his pistol from him, and had threatened to shoot him with it and had been prevented from doing this by the interference of bystanders, and that he had then declared he would kill him. There was also evidence that the son had said that the old man had beaten him up, but that he would never get the chance to do it again. Also that he had declared when his father had taken the pistol from him when drunk, that every time he got drunk and was having a good time, they had to do something to him, and that he aimed to kill his father and certain other persons whom he named.
“The defendant offered to prove by his grandmother and others that his father had taught him to carry a weapon, encouraged him to drink whiskey, and had caused him to associate with disreputable men, thus rearing him in a manner calculated to bring about the result which followed.”
The lower court refused to permit this testimony and the Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling in this as in practically all other respects.
To the opinion of the court Judges Barker and Nunn dissented. Certain excerpts of Judge Barker’s opinion are of prime importance here and corroborate what has been said concerning Judge Hargis in even stronger language than we have employed.
This opinion says (in part):—
“James Hargis is shown in this record to have been a savage, cruel man; that he had a high, vindictive temper, and allowed neither fear, nor remorse, nor pity to come between him and the objects of his passionate resentment.... James Hargis was a man of violence and of blood. He had established in the county of Breathitt a reign of terror under the influence of which the law was paralyzed and its ministers overrun. He is pictured as a man of gigantic frame, savage temper and indomitable courage. He had surrounded himself with armed mercenaries, whose minds he inflamed with drink, and who seemed to be willing to do his bidding even to the point of assassinating his enemies without fear of the consequences of their crimes and without remorse or pity for the result.
“He had not only broken down the law and terrorized its officers, but he had made the temple of justice itself the rendezvous for assassins who, sheltered behind walls, reddened its portals with the blood of its votaries. He literally ingrafted upon the civilization of the twentieth century the savagery of the fifth, and introduced into a community of law and order the merciless ferocity of the middle ages.”