The Winsett Springs Murder

Brutal Winsett Springs Murder

Chills History of Tranquil Place

By Jeff Clark

            Travis Winsett has gone missing.

            The backroads of Eastland County look like fields of fireflies tonight. Folks drive up and down, spotlights shining inside bar ditches. Flashlights sweep across empty pastures, peer inside silent barns looking for 52-year-old Travis Winsett.

            It isn’t like him to take off like this.

            Winsett Springs is located just east of Ranger on Hwy 571. Horse drawn wagons stopped here, the spring’s pipe ending so close to the trail one could almost catch water in cups, never leaving their buckboard seat.

Winsett water was cold and pure. Fill your containers. Let your horses drink. John “Milton” Winsett came to Ranger in 1900, planning to continue to Arizona. He ran into Sam Philipps in Ranger, who offered him a job and a room at his Colony Creek spread. Milton later married Philipps’ daughter Lucy, having two kids Veda and Travis during the marriage.

Milton was an outdoorsman, learning about a spring Indians once camped around. He found its waters seeping weakly from the ground, as the Indians had “spoiled it,” driving large timbers into its mouth. Winsett bought this land around 1902 and through hard work released the spring waters once again.

Winsett Springs helped save Ranger during the 1912 typhoid epidemic and the 1917 oil boom. Stagnant cisterns invited typhoid – treated by lots of water and not eating. Men made livings hauling water from Winsett Springs in wood barrels by mule-drawn wagons during the oil boom. It sold for $1 a barrel.

Some thought Texas Rangers might have used the springs as a camp. Caddo and Comanche may have called this place home.

Ranger’s 1935 Cooper School kids hiked here, spending the day roasting wieners and marshmallows on a camp fire. Alameda schoolmates visited during their 1940 senior trip.

Activity at Winsett Springs had tapered off by 1970, however.

            Travis Winsett has always been an enigma to locals. He’s described differently, depending on who you ask. Published accounts say he was well-respected. Anecdotal words paint the picture of a loner, a nice man who tipped his hat to school kids driving his mom to town.

Travis was arrested by the FBI for draft evasion during WWII. Some said he traveled with pacifists, giving speeches downtown on a portable loud speaker. Strange, as Travis might’ve been exempt from the draft being a farmer. His best friend was a WWII airplane gunner.

“His distance came about because he kept to himself,” niece Lucie Olson told me. “He didn’t want to cause any trouble or bother anybody. He was a very quiet, introspective artist/engineer type. Not anti-social at all, but he didn’t go out looking for things to do either. He had plenty with the gardening, farming and animal tending he did on a daily basis.”

By 1970, his parents had passed away. Townspeople noted the bachelor rarely spent money. Perhaps, some thought, it was hoarded up in that old Winsett house somewhere.

“To me he was a kind, gentle person,” Lucie remembered. “He took flies outside, without killing them. The only thing I ever saw him kill was rattlesnakes. It would have been much easier for him to go along with the draft, but killing violated everything he was about.”

Travis had a mechanical mind, once building a device to scare deer away tailored from a windmill and disk hammer. “Eccentric, but smart,” neighbors said. A nice man.

“Travis meant no harm to anyone. He was not un-American. He was a pacifist and if he had been a Quaker or Seventh Day Adventist, he would have been left alone,” Lucie said. “My grandmother had a stroke in 1968, and Travis and my mother cared for her at home until the very last. His patience and care was amazing to me.”

Lucie’s mom Veda, Mrs. Hubert Capps always thought of Travis as “her other child”, a touchstone connection that continued into adulthood. She was 11 years his elder. She had written him two letters that June, receiving no answer back. That wasn’t like Travis.

            Mrs. Capps arrived at the frame Winsett Springs farm house Saturday, June 27, 1970 to see what was up with her brother.

The front door was unlocked. His car was in the garage but he was nowhere around. She found the letter she’d written him the previous Sunday, still inside his mailbox.

The locals hadn’t missed him, until his sister raised the alarm.

The police were called. Sheriff Lefty Sublett, Ranger Police Chief J.W. Vinson, Deputy Sheriff Loy Williams, Ranger Constable Ralph Veal, Eastland Constable Bill Hunter, Game Warden Kenneth Payne, Ranger Justice of the Peace M.D. Underwood, Eastland Justice of the Peace L.W. Dalton and later District Attorney Emory Walton converged on the house.

            Walking inside, they sensed something wasn’t right. Moving Travis’ recliner chair near the front wall aside, they found dried blood on the hardwood floor. A small round hole was found in the front screen door. A rifle cartridge was located on the ground outside the front fence, below the left gate post some 50 feet away.

Mrs. Capps noticed a “Long Tom” shotgun absent from Travis’ bedroom. His arrowhead collection, valuable coins, and other items were also gone.

What the group didn’t find was Travis Winsett.

            Dozens of officers and volunteers spread out across the Winsett Farm. More hopped in their cars and pickups, searching high and low around the area. Neighbors said they hadn’t seen Travis since the previous Monday evening, right before supper time.

            Buzzy Rutledge was a high school senior in 1970. That previous Monday, he and his girlfriend noticed a house burning south of town at the Hathcock Farm. He drove to Ranger, hopped in a volunteer fire department truck and rushed to put out the blaze. There was no gas or electricity connected at the homeplace, making the fire’s cause a mystery. The house was totaled, its debris fallen all the way to its foundation.

After the Winsett manhunt got under way, that Monday’s mystery fire hit radar screens quickly. When searchers returned to the Hathcock Farm, they were greeted by a horrible smell. An old cistern under the back porch was covered by fallen debris. Flashlights shined down the dark cistern. Floating face up in the black water 22 feet below was the bloated corpse of Travis Winsett.

The search for Milton and Lucy’s only son was called off.

A killer was on the loose.

The fire department arrived, the body hoisted to the surface. One shot to the temple was visible. Justice of the Peace Underwood pronounced Travis dead, his body taken to Ranger’s funeral home. The cistern was searched with a magnet for a weapon and later drained. No clues were found.

            Constable Veal said, “I can think of a half dozen fellows around here we should talk with to find out where they were last Monday night.” One of the people interviewed remembered seeing someone in town with a new box of old arrowheads.

James Henry Bishop was a collector of old artifacts and antiques. Prior to Travis’ body being found, 32-year-old Bishop was investigated for burglary by Palo Pinto County Deputy Bill Harris. The deputy interviewed Bishop about a home burglary in the town of Palo Pinto. He remembered seeing a rifle in Bishop’s home, but it wasn’t connected with the crime he had been investigating.

Bishop was still in the Palo Pinto County Jail concerning that burglary. Eastland County lawmen were in luck. Meanwhile Travis’ body was sent to Abilene’s Hendricks Hospital for autopsy.

            The suspect appeared before a Palo Pinto County Justice of the Pace and was advised of his rights. Sheriff Sublett and District Attorney Walton then started asking questions.

            The rifle Harris had seen was bought at Weatherford’s First Monday Trade Days, Bishop told them. He couldn’t remember the seller’s name. Travis Winsett’s murder was news to him, Bishop maintained. The Long Tom, a .22 rifle, arrowheads, several silver half dollars, and other items of interest were found in Bishop’s home. A spent .22 cartridge similar to that found outside Winsett’s gate was found in Bishop’s vehicle.

            Sublett and Walton questioned Bishop a second time. His story didn’t waiver, other than admitting being near the Winsett place, finding one of the stolen items in a ditch. He acted like he wanted to help, lawmen said.

            The Hendricks autopsy found that a single shot had entered Travis WInsett’s right temple and remained in his skull. The slug was virtually destroyed. Local ballistics tests wouldn’t be able to tell if the bullet had been shot from the rifle taken from Bishop. Travis’ sister identified some of the items taken from Bishop as being her brother’s.

            Texas Ranger H.R. Block took possession of the spent slug. It joined the seized .22 rifle, two cartridges and dust samples from the Winsett and Bishop homes at the Dept. of Public Safety lab in Austin.

            Two days later on July 8, James Henry Bishop was charged with Travis Winsett’s murder. Bail was denied. Bishop was moved to the Eastland County Jail.

            The Austin lab later concluded that the two cartridges were fired from the gun taken from Bishop’s house. An Eastland County grand jury indicted Bishop July 20, 1970. Bail was set at $10,000 by District Judge Earl Conner, though Bishop remained incarcerated. Trial began in 91^st District Court, with 12 witnesses called.

The defendant admitted he’d shot Winsett, but that it was an accident. A “little voice told him to do it,” reports said he testified. He said he was hunting near the Winsett home that evening. He had pursued a rabbit near the Winsett barn, but didn’t want to shoot that close to the house. Bishop is said to have testified that he didn’t see Travis in the house, but aimed at a window and pulled the trigger in a “childish gesture”.

Bishop took off, he said, thinking Travis might come after him. When no one did, he returned to the Winsett place, he said. He found Travis in his chair, like he’d fallen asleep. It became clear to Bishop what had happened, he said. Travis Winsett was dead.

Bishop panicked, he said, placing the body inside a blanket, hiding it in a closet. He stole several things to make it look like a burglary, he said. Bishop testified that he came back later, taking the body to the abandoned Hathcock farmhouse. Travis being placed in the cistern was an accident, he said, but he admitted setting the fire.

            The jury found Bishop guilty, assessing a 55 year prison term.

            Prosecutors had not asked for the death penalty.

            Travis Winsett is buried on a quiet slope beside his parents and grandparents at the Merriman Cemetery outside town. The man convicted in his killing is alive, and out.

Many actors in this tragedy have passed away. I still don’t feel like I know Travis Winsett. I didn’t catch a sense of the man, walking around his family’s old farmhouse. Maybe I felt a little of his sadness near the cistern out south of town. I’m not sure what his legacy is, beyond that of victim. Beyond that of a life not fully realized. But that too, doesn’t feel quite correct.

Tranquil Winsett Springs continues to run, cold and pure.

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Special thanks to Will Barrett, Kenneth & Salata Brown, Dorothy Elrod, Ken Falls, Lucie Capps Olson, A. J. Ratliff, Buddy Rogers, Buzzy Rutledge, Buddy Vinson, Roy Weekes (deceased) and the “Case of the Human Target,” by Bill McNeill, Startling Detective magazine, circa October 1, 1970.