Florida man’s murderous rage reverberates through family
Ethel M. Caldwell’s 15 minutes of fame arose from calamitous violence. Two hours after her wedding in Miami on May 6, 1925, her father, Arthur Cleveland Caldwell, ran the newlyweds’ car off the road, and fired three shots with his .38 revolver, wounding Ethel and killing her husband, Eugene Emery Hawkins. “ A.C.” Caldwell, as he was commonly known, eluded the immediate search by authorities in the citrus groves of Coral Grove as his daughter recuperated in a Miami hospital sufficiently to accompany her husband’s body back to Minnesota for burial on June 1. Given that her father was thought still at large, Ethel told authorities that “If he thinks he killed me, he will commit suicide”. The story repeatedly made the front pages of the Miami and Minneapolis newspapers.
Following funeral services in his Minneapolis suburb of Deephaven, Eugene Hawkins was buried in Groveland Cemetery in Minnetonka. Ethel remained awhile with his parents, who owned a successful nursery business, to more fully recover from her wounds. A.C.’s body was discovered on June 5, 120 feet from the spot where he killed his son-in-law. Police surmised that he returned to the spot a few days after the murder and turned his pistol on himself.
As with all murders, particularly intra-family ones, the first question is why. A.C. Caldwell was a successful partner in a Miami real estate company. However, his marriage to Lula T Hughes had dissolved a few years earlier, with Lula and their three youngest daughters fleeing to Texas where the family had lived before moving to Florida in the early 1920’s. A.C. and Lula had three other children: the eldest, Albert, who served a stint in the U.S. Navy before entering law school in South Carolina; Ethel who at age 21 remained in Miami in part to help tend her father’s house; and younger brother Gordon, who remained in Tampa, Florida on his way to becoming a bank clerk.
Ethel’s deceased husband had only moved from Deephaven to Miami in November of the previous year to start a roofing company. He had attended the University of Minnesota from 1915 to 1919, and then assisted his parents with management of the nursery through 1924. His parents were sufficiently well-to-do to take family winter vacations in Florida. He had notified his father by mail of his intention to marry Ethel only two weeks prior to the wedding.
Miami newspapers attributed the murder to A.C.’s jealous rage over his care-giving daughter being taken away from him. Minneapolis papers cited A.C.’s erratic swings between cordiality and hostility towards his future son-in-law. Ethel was the last female family member is his life, but she feared his violent mood swings and sought refuge in marriage.
Another member of the Caldwell family swept up in the storm swirling around A.C. was his son, Albert, who upon learning the news of his father’s crime and flight from justice, decided upon robbery to obtain money to help his father and was apprehended after a gun duel with the banker whose home he targeted. By June 12, 1925 he had been removed from the Dorchester County jail where he was being held to the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia. He served 5 years in prison until late 1930, when he returned to Hillsborough, Florida and married the first of his three wives. Stable marriages were not a hallmark of A.C. Caldwell’s children.
Edna May Caldwell, Ethel’s younger sister younger by 5 years, had moved to Texas with her mother after her parents’ separation. In 1925 at age 16, perhaps to escape the stigma of her father’s notorious murder and suicide, Edna hooked up with 23-year old, 6-month army veteran Edward Ruffall Waits, and in May, 1926 bore his child named Carl Eugene Waits. Their marriage didn’t last long and Edna and her son soon moved back to Florida, where she formalized their divorce in 1931. Edna sublet care of “Gene” to Ethel and her new husband since 1927, William Dozier Richburg. Gene lived with the Richburgs in Ocala, Florida the during 1930 U.S. Census, while Edna lodged separately in a 4-person household. Meanwhile his biological father, Edward R. Waits, in 1932 was sentenced to 4 years in the Texas penitentiary for theft exceeding fifty dollars.
Another of Ethel’s younger sisters who had fled with her mother was Mabel Rachel Caldwell. She reacted to her estranged father’s murder-suicide by bearing an illegitimate daughter at age 15 in 1926 to an unnamed father, followed by marrying Roy Jackson Hulen the following year. Roy would father his own daughter with Mabel in 1930. Distinguishing the two fathers would become more important 21 years later.
A.C Caldwell’s next legacy casualty was his second son, Gordon Theaty, who was 19 at the time of his father’s 1925 rampage. Gordon was employed as a bank clerk by the Exchange National Bank in Tampa until 1930, when he moved to Chicago to study commerce at Northwestern University while continuing to work as a clerk in a local bank. In April, 1932, Gordon, now age 26, met 21-year old Dorothy B. Smith at the First Presbyterian Church, and over the next three months developed an unrequited infatuation over her. On May 29, 1932, Dorothy told Gordon that she was breaking off the relationship with him. On Friday, June 3, 1932, Gordon confronted Dorothy at the American Academy of Art in downtown Chicago, where she was exhibiting one of her paintings at a gathering of about 100 visitors and art students. Gordon fired his new .38 revolver three times at Dorothy B. Smith, putting one bullet through her neck, before turning the gun on himself and fatally firing a fourth round into his right temple. Dorothy survived. Gordon’s body was transported back to Ocala, Florida for burial, the costs borne by his sister Ethel and her husband, William Dozier Richburg, his brother Albert, and least likely by his divorced sister, Edna Waits. The three siblings had lived in Ocala since at least 1930. But after paying for transporting the coffin by rail and a funeral in the depths of the Great Depression, there apparently wasn’t enough money to pay for a headstone or even a plot; thus Gordon’s grave is unmarked in a paupers section and the precise location unknown to this day.
As the 1930’s progressed, Ethel’s husband Dozier Richburg, nicknamed Dozie, went into the auto parts business with his brother, Trammel Herbert Richburg. In 1940 Dozie and Ethel were living in Fort Myers with her divorced sister Edna and her now teenage son Gene. Dozie and Ethel finally regained their independence when in 1943 at age 33 Edna married 51-year old William Scott Brandon, and her son Gene joined the Army Air Corps when he turned 18 in 1944. Sometime around then Dozie and Ethel moved back to Dozie’s home town of Andalusia, Alabama. Dozie sold his partnership in the auto parts business to his brother, and even tried his hand at running a notions store. Even with all the changes, in retrospect these were no doubt the most stable years of Ethel’s turbulent life, for which the coming 1950’s held additional shocks.
On April 25, 1951, Ethel’s sister Rachel Mabel (Caldwell) Hulen was bludgeoned to death by her husband, Roy Jackson Hulen. At least that was the conclusion of Texas authorities, who tried, convicted and sentenced him to death by the electric chair. Roy was executed on February 6, 1953 in Huntsville, and buried in an unmarked grave. Rachel’s obituary noted that her first daughter came from “another marriage”, an earlier mark of shame that now bestowed welcome separation from her mother’s murderer.
Around June of 1954, Ethel was confronted with another blow when Dozie became so ill that he needed to be hospitalized in Montgomery, Alabama. As his health worsened, he moved to Babbie, Alabama to live with his mother and his brother, as reported in his obituary. He died on January 6, 1956 and was buried in the Babbie Baptist Church cemetery. No mention was made of Ethel residing with them; in fact it gave her address as Ocala, Florida, where the city directory listed her employer as “Pick & Pay Supermarket”. It seems that Ethel had become estranged from the Richburg family. But she did remain a Baptist for the rest of her life.
Less than a year after Dozie’s death, on November 30, 1956, Ethel married Walter Murray Horne in Kingsland, Camden, Georgia. Ethel was age 52 and Walter was 36. It’s safe to assume that Ethel brought no dowry to the nuptials. Walter worked in the appliance business with his brother.
On October 1, 1958, Ethel’s mother Lula Hughes Canada passed away in Amarillo, Potter, Texas
(she had remarried shortly after fleeing to Texas with her three youngest daughters). Her second husband, Samuel Moses Canada, preceded her in death by about a year. Lula’s obituary cited Ethel and Walter Horne’s residence as Dade City, Pasco, Florida. For the next few years, they appeared to bounce between Savannah, Georgia and Miami, Florida. Walter was employed as a city policeman in Savannah.
Ethel and Walter Horne separated sometime in the early 1960’s. Walter married for the third time in September, 1966 in Florida, ending in divorce in 1974 shortly before his death. Ethel married her fourth husband, Robert Stacey Bouland, Jr., probably in the 1960’s in Hillsborough County, Florida. This time, Robert was only about 7 years younger than Ethel, and was long divorced from his first wife, Hazel Louise Peacon. Ethel and Robert resided in the Hollywood Trailer Park in central St. Petersburg. Robert was employed as a fruit packer, and Ethel worked as a maid in a hotel.
Ethel died at 8:00 A.M. on September 30, 1985 at the age of 81. Cause of death is not listed on Florida death certificates available to the public. Her obituary and death certificate wrongly listed her birthplace in 1904 as Arlington, Texas (which even her mother forgot was Alabama after the 1910 Census), her father “Arthur” was listed as “Albert”, which was actually the name of her deceased, oldest brother; her mother’s name was unknown; and there was no mention of her only surviving sibling, Bessie Ruby Gentry Shepard, who lived on in Austin, Texas until 1999. Ethel was a member of the First Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, while Robert was a Methodist. Her funeral arrangements were handled by Suncoast Funeral Chapel, and her cremation by International Crematory, Pinellas Park; both of which have gone out of business.
Robert S. Bouland lived on until March 15, 1993, when he, like Ethel, passed away at the age of 81. Presumably he also chose cremation through the All Faiths Funeral Home and Cemetery that handled his final remains.
Author’s note: The conclusion to the tumultuous life of Ethel Caldwell feels anti-climatic. She certainly did achieve anonymity after she and her family were repeatedly thrust into tabloid spotlight by criminal violence. Ethel and her fourth husband even confused the basic details of her life on her death certificate. It was only by coincidence that Ethel’s story piqued my interest. My neighbor lady’s uncle was the unfortunate Eugene Hawkins, so she had frequented the Deephaven Nursery as a child to visit her grandmother. Later, when she was married, she acquired a pamphlet titled “Picturesque Deephaven”, compiled and edited by Ellen Wilson Meyer and published in 1989 by the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Historical Society. She and her husband showed it to me when I was helping them build their family tree. In it were short biographies of Deephaven’s early notables, including Alfred O. Hawkins, founder of the nursery and father of Eugene. Ms. Wilson devoted one paragraph of Alfred Hawkins short biography to recounting the wedding-day murder of Eugene and the funerary visit of his beautiful bride, Ethel. But the fate of all the actors in this play other than Eugene was unknown – including that of the jealous father A.C. Caldwell. As I researched each character in A.C. Caldwell’s family, I was amazed that so much violence and chaos could befall one family group. No doubt as more newspapers and government records are scanned to enable digital searches, even more details of their lives can be uncovered. Ethel's short biography only lays down the framework of persons, places and traumatic events that beset one family nearly forgotten by time.
Finlandia # 48482101
November, 2019
Ethel M. Caldwell’s 15 minutes of fame arose from calamitous violence. Two hours after her wedding in Miami on May 6, 1925, her father, Arthur Cleveland Caldwell, ran the newlyweds’ car off the road, and fired three shots with his .38 revolver, wounding Ethel and killing her husband, Eugene Emery Hawkins. “ A.C.” Caldwell, as he was commonly known, eluded the immediate search by authorities in the citrus groves of Coral Grove as his daughter recuperated in a Miami hospital sufficiently to accompany her husband’s body back to Minnesota for burial on June 1. Given that her father was thought still at large, Ethel told authorities that “If he thinks he killed me, he will commit suicide”. The story repeatedly made the front pages of the Miami and Minneapolis newspapers.
Following funeral services in his Minneapolis suburb of Deephaven, Eugene Hawkins was buried in Groveland Cemetery in Minnetonka. Ethel remained awhile with his parents, who owned a successful nursery business, to more fully recover from her wounds. A.C.’s body was discovered on June 5, 120 feet from the spot where he killed his son-in-law. Police surmised that he returned to the spot a few days after the murder and turned his pistol on himself.
As with all murders, particularly intra-family ones, the first question is why. A.C. Caldwell was a successful partner in a Miami real estate company. However, his marriage to Lula T Hughes had dissolved a few years earlier, with Lula and their three youngest daughters fleeing to Texas where the family had lived before moving to Florida in the early 1920’s. A.C. and Lula had three other children: the eldest, Albert, who served a stint in the U.S. Navy before entering law school in South Carolina; Ethel who at age 21 remained in Miami in part to help tend her father’s house; and younger brother Gordon, who remained in Tampa, Florida on his way to becoming a bank clerk.
Ethel’s deceased husband had only moved from Deephaven to Miami in November of the previous year to start a roofing company. He had attended the University of Minnesota from 1915 to 1919, and then assisted his parents with management of the nursery through 1924. His parents were sufficiently well-to-do to take family winter vacations in Florida. He had notified his father by mail of his intention to marry Ethel only two weeks prior to the wedding.
Miami newspapers attributed the murder to A.C.’s jealous rage over his care-giving daughter being taken away from him. Minneapolis papers cited A.C.’s erratic swings between cordiality and hostility towards his future son-in-law. Ethel was the last female family member is his life, but she feared his violent mood swings and sought refuge in marriage.
Another member of the Caldwell family swept up in the storm swirling around A.C. was his son, Albert, who upon learning the news of his father’s crime and flight from justice, decided upon robbery to obtain money to help his father and was apprehended after a gun duel with the banker whose home he targeted. By June 12, 1925 he had been removed from the Dorchester County jail where he was being held to the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia. He served 5 years in prison until late 1930, when he returned to Hillsborough, Florida and married the first of his three wives. Stable marriages were not a hallmark of A.C. Caldwell’s children.
Edna May Caldwell, Ethel’s younger sister younger by 5 years, had moved to Texas with her mother after her parents’ separation. In 1925 at age 16, perhaps to escape the stigma of her father’s notorious murder and suicide, Edna hooked up with 23-year old, 6-month army veteran Edward Ruffall Waits, and in May, 1926 bore his child named Carl Eugene Waits. Their marriage didn’t last long and Edna and her son soon moved back to Florida, where she formalized their divorce in 1931. Edna sublet care of “Gene” to Ethel and her new husband since 1927, William Dozier Richburg. Gene lived with the Richburgs in Ocala, Florida the during 1930 U.S. Census, while Edna lodged separately in a 4-person household. Meanwhile his biological father, Edward R. Waits, in 1932 was sentenced to 4 years in the Texas penitentiary for theft exceeding fifty dollars.
Another of Ethel’s younger sisters who had fled with her mother was Mabel Rachel Caldwell. She reacted to her estranged father’s murder-suicide by bearing an illegitimate daughter at age 15 in 1926 to an unnamed father, followed by marrying Roy Jackson Hulen the following year. Roy would father his own daughter with Mabel in 1930. Distinguishing the two fathers would become more important 21 years later.
A.C Caldwell’s next legacy casualty was his second son, Gordon Theaty, who was 19 at the time of his father’s 1925 rampage. Gordon was employed as a bank clerk by the Exchange National Bank in Tampa until 1930, when he moved to Chicago to study commerce at Northwestern University while continuing to work as a clerk in a local bank. In April, 1932, Gordon, now age 26, met 21-year old Dorothy B. Smith at the First Presbyterian Church, and over the next three months developed an unrequited infatuation over her. On May 29, 1932, Dorothy told Gordon that she was breaking off the relationship with him. On Friday, June 3, 1932, Gordon confronted Dorothy at the American Academy of Art in downtown Chicago, where she was exhibiting one of her paintings at a gathering of about 100 visitors and art students. Gordon fired his new .38 revolver three times at Dorothy B. Smith, putting one bullet through her neck, before turning the gun on himself and fatally firing a fourth round into his right temple. Dorothy survived. Gordon’s body was transported back to Ocala, Florida for burial, the costs borne by his sister Ethel and her husband, William Dozier Richburg, his brother Albert, and least likely by his divorced sister, Edna Waits. The three siblings had lived in Ocala since at least 1930. But after paying for transporting the coffin by rail and a funeral in the depths of the Great Depression, there apparently wasn’t enough money to pay for a headstone or even a plot; thus Gordon’s grave is unmarked in a paupers section and the precise location unknown to this day.
As the 1930’s progressed, Ethel’s husband Dozier Richburg, nicknamed Dozie, went into the auto parts business with his brother, Trammel Herbert Richburg. In 1940 Dozie and Ethel were living in Fort Myers with her divorced sister Edna and her now teenage son Gene. Dozie and Ethel finally regained their independence when in 1943 at age 33 Edna married 51-year old William Scott Brandon, and her son Gene joined the Army Air Corps when he turned 18 in 1944. Sometime around then Dozie and Ethel moved back to Dozie’s home town of Andalusia, Alabama. Dozie sold his partnership in the auto parts business to his brother, and even tried his hand at running a notions store. Even with all the changes, in retrospect these were no doubt the most stable years of Ethel’s turbulent life, for which the coming 1950’s held additional shocks.
On April 25, 1951, Ethel’s sister Rachel Mabel (Caldwell) Hulen was bludgeoned to death by her husband, Roy Jackson Hulen. At least that was the conclusion of Texas authorities, who tried, convicted and sentenced him to death by the electric chair. Roy was executed on February 6, 1953 in Huntsville, and buried in an unmarked grave. Rachel’s obituary noted that her first daughter came from “another marriage”, an earlier mark of shame that now bestowed welcome separation from her mother’s murderer.
Around June of 1954, Ethel was confronted with another blow when Dozie became so ill that he needed to be hospitalized in Montgomery, Alabama. As his health worsened, he moved to Babbie, Alabama to live with his mother and his brother, as reported in his obituary. He died on January 6, 1956 and was buried in the Babbie Baptist Church cemetery. No mention was made of Ethel residing with them; in fact it gave her address as Ocala, Florida, where the city directory listed her employer as “Pick & Pay Supermarket”. It seems that Ethel had become estranged from the Richburg family. But she did remain a Baptist for the rest of her life.
Less than a year after Dozie’s death, on November 30, 1956, Ethel married Walter Murray Horne in Kingsland, Camden, Georgia. Ethel was age 52 and Walter was 36. It’s safe to assume that Ethel brought no dowry to the nuptials. Walter worked in the appliance business with his brother.
On October 1, 1958, Ethel’s mother Lula Hughes Canada passed away in Amarillo, Potter, Texas
(she had remarried shortly after fleeing to Texas with her three youngest daughters). Her second husband, Samuel Moses Canada, preceded her in death by about a year. Lula’s obituary cited Ethel and Walter Horne’s residence as Dade City, Pasco, Florida. For the next few years, they appeared to bounce between Savannah, Georgia and Miami, Florida. Walter was employed as a city policeman in Savannah.
Ethel and Walter Horne separated sometime in the early 1960’s. Walter married for the third time in September, 1966 in Florida, ending in divorce in 1974 shortly before his death. Ethel married her fourth husband, Robert Stacey Bouland, Jr., probably in the 1960’s in Hillsborough County, Florida. This time, Robert was only about 7 years younger than Ethel, and was long divorced from his first wife, Hazel Louise Peacon. Ethel and Robert resided in the Hollywood Trailer Park in central St. Petersburg. Robert was employed as a fruit packer, and Ethel worked as a maid in a hotel.
Ethel died at 8:00 A.M. on September 30, 1985 at the age of 81. Cause of death is not listed on Florida death certificates available to the public. Her obituary and death certificate wrongly listed her birthplace in 1904 as Arlington, Texas (which even her mother forgot was Alabama after the 1910 Census), her father “Arthur” was listed as “Albert”, which was actually the name of her deceased, oldest brother; her mother’s name was unknown; and there was no mention of her only surviving sibling, Bessie Ruby Gentry Shepard, who lived on in Austin, Texas until 1999. Ethel was a member of the First Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, while Robert was a Methodist. Her funeral arrangements were handled by Suncoast Funeral Chapel, and her cremation by International Crematory, Pinellas Park; both of which have gone out of business.
Robert S. Bouland lived on until March 15, 1993, when he, like Ethel, passed away at the age of 81. Presumably he also chose cremation through the All Faiths Funeral Home and Cemetery that handled his final remains.
Author’s note: The conclusion to the tumultuous life of Ethel Caldwell feels anti-climatic. She certainly did achieve anonymity after she and her family were repeatedly thrust into tabloid spotlight by criminal violence. Ethel and her fourth husband even confused the basic details of her life on her death certificate. It was only by coincidence that Ethel’s story piqued my interest. My neighbor lady’s uncle was the unfortunate Eugene Hawkins, so she had frequented the Deephaven Nursery as a child to visit her grandmother. Later, when she was married, she acquired a pamphlet titled “Picturesque Deephaven”, compiled and edited by Ellen Wilson Meyer and published in 1989 by the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Historical Society. She and her husband showed it to me when I was helping them build their family tree. In it were short biographies of Deephaven’s early notables, including Alfred O. Hawkins, founder of the nursery and father of Eugene. Ms. Wilson devoted one paragraph of Alfred Hawkins short biography to recounting the wedding-day murder of Eugene and the funerary visit of his beautiful bride, Ethel. But the fate of all the actors in this play other than Eugene was unknown – including that of the jealous father A.C. Caldwell. As I researched each character in A.C. Caldwell’s family, I was amazed that so much violence and chaos could befall one family group. No doubt as more newspapers and government records are scanned to enable digital searches, even more details of their lives can be uncovered. Ethel's short biography only lays down the framework of persons, places and traumatic events that beset one family nearly forgotten by time.
Finlandia # 48482101
November, 2019
Florida man’s murderous rage reverberates through family
Ethel M. Caldwell’s 15 minutes of fame arose from calamitous violence. Two hours after her wedding in Miami on May 6, 1925, her father, Arthur Cleveland Caldwell, ran the newlyweds’ car off the road, and fired three shots with his .38 revolver, wounding Ethel and killing her husband, Eugene Emery Hawkins. “ A.C.” Caldwell, as he was commonly known, eluded the immediate search by authorities in the citrus groves of Coral Grove as his daughter recuperated in a Miami hospital sufficiently to accompany her husband’s body back to Minnesota for burial on June 1. Given that her father was thought still at large, Ethel told authorities that “If he thinks he killed me, he will commit suicide”. The story repeatedly made the front pages of the Miami and Minneapolis newspapers.
Following funeral services in his Minneapolis suburb of Deephaven, Eugene Hawkins was buried in Groveland Cemetery in Minnetonka. Ethel remained awhile with his parents, who owned a successful nursery business, to more fully recover from her wounds. A.C.’s body was discovered on June 5, 120 feet from the spot where he killed his son-in-law. Police surmised that he returned to the spot a few days after the murder and turned his pistol on himself.
As with all murders, particularly intra-family ones, the first question is why. A.C. Caldwell was a successful partner in a Miami real estate company. However, his marriage to Lula T Hughes had dissolved a few years earlier, with Lula and their three youngest daughters fleeing to Texas where the family had lived before moving to Florida in the early 1920’s. A.C. and Lula had three other children: the eldest, Albert, who served a stint in the U.S. Navy before entering law school in South Carolina; Ethel who at age 21 remained in Miami in part to help tend her father’s house; and younger brother Gordon, who remained in Tampa, Florida on his way to becoming a bank clerk.
Ethel’s deceased husband had only moved from Deephaven to Miami in November of the previous year to start a roofing company. He had attended the University of Minnesota from 1915 to 1919, and then assisted his parents with management of the nursery through 1924. His parents were sufficiently well-to-do to take family winter vacations in Florida. He had notified his father by mail of his intention to marry Ethel only two weeks prior to the wedding.
Miami newspapers attributed the murder to A.C.’s jealous rage over his care-giving daughter being taken away from him. Minneapolis papers cited A.C.’s erratic swings between cordiality and hostility towards his future son-in-law. Ethel was the last female family member is his life, but she feared his violent mood swings and sought refuge in marriage.
Another member of the Caldwell family swept up in the storm swirling around A.C. was his son, Albert, who upon learning the news of his father’s crime and flight from justice, decided upon robbery to obtain money to help his father and was apprehended after a gun duel with the banker whose home he targeted. By June 12, 1925 he had been removed from the Dorchester County jail where he was being held to the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia. He served 5 years in prison until late 1930, when he returned to Hillsborough, Florida and married the first of his three wives. Stable marriages were not a hallmark of A.C. Caldwell’s children.
Edna May Caldwell, Ethel’s younger sister younger by 5 years, had moved to Texas with her mother after her parents’ separation. In 1925 at age 16, perhaps to escape the stigma of her father’s notorious murder and suicide, Edna hooked up with 23-year old, 6-month army veteran Edward Ruffall Waits, and in May, 1926 bore his child named Carl Eugene Waits. Their marriage didn’t last long and Edna and her son soon moved back to Florida, where she formalized their divorce in 1931. Edna sublet care of “Gene” to Ethel and her new husband since 1927, William Dozier Richburg. Gene lived with the Richburgs in Ocala, Florida the during 1930 U.S. Census, while Edna lodged separately in a 4-person household. Meanwhile his biological father, Edward R. Waits, in 1932 was sentenced to 4 years in the Texas penitentiary for theft exceeding fifty dollars.
Another of Ethel’s younger sisters who had fled with her mother was Mabel Rachel Caldwell. She reacted to her estranged father’s murder-suicide by bearing an illegitimate daughter at age 15 in 1926 to an unnamed father, followed by marrying Roy Jackson Hulen the following year. Roy would father his own daughter with Mabel in 1930. Distinguishing the two fathers would become more important 21 years later.
A.C Caldwell’s next legacy casualty was his second son, Gordon Theaty, who was 19 at the time of his father’s 1925 rampage. Gordon was employed as a bank clerk by the Exchange National Bank in Tampa until 1930, when he moved to Chicago to study commerce at Northwestern University while continuing to work as a clerk in a local bank. In April, 1932, Gordon, now age 26, met 21-year old Dorothy B. Smith at the First Presbyterian Church, and over the next three months developed an unrequited infatuation over her. On May 29, 1932, Dorothy told Gordon that she was breaking off the relationship with him. On Friday, June 3, 1932, Gordon confronted Dorothy at the American Academy of Art in downtown Chicago, where she was exhibiting one of her paintings at a gathering of about 100 visitors and art students. Gordon fired his new .38 revolver three times at Dorothy B. Smith, putting one bullet through her neck, before turning the gun on himself and fatally firing a fourth round into his right temple. Dorothy survived. Gordon’s body was transported back to Ocala, Florida for burial, the costs borne by his sister Ethel and her husband, William Dozier Richburg, his brother Albert, and least likely by his divorced sister, Edna Waits. The three siblings had lived in Ocala since at least 1930. But after paying for transporting the coffin by rail and a funeral in the depths of the Great Depression, there apparently wasn’t enough money to pay for a headstone or even a plot; thus Gordon’s grave is unmarked in a paupers section and the precise location unknown to this day.
As the 1930’s progressed, Ethel’s husband Dozier Richburg, nicknamed Dozie, went into the auto parts business with his brother, Trammel Herbert Richburg. In 1940 Dozie and Ethel were living in Fort Myers with her divorced sister Edna and her now teenage son Gene. Dozie and Ethel finally regained their independence when in 1943 at age 33 Edna married 51-year old William Scott Brandon, and her son Gene joined the Army Air Corps when he turned 18 in 1944. Sometime around then Dozie and Ethel moved back to Dozie’s home town of Andalusia, Alabama. Dozie sold his partnership in the auto parts business to his brother, and even tried his hand at running a notions store. Even with all the changes, in retrospect these were no doubt the most stable years of Ethel’s turbulent life, for which the coming 1950’s held additional shocks.
On April 25, 1951, Ethel’s sister Rachel Mabel (Caldwell) Hulen was bludgeoned to death by her husband, Roy Jackson Hulen. At least that was the conclusion of Texas authorities, who tried, convicted and sentenced him to death by the electric chair. Roy was executed on February 6, 1953 in Huntsville, and buried in an unmarked grave. Rachel’s obituary noted that her first daughter came from “another marriage”, an earlier mark of shame that now bestowed welcome separation from her mother’s murderer.
Around June of 1954, Ethel was confronted with another blow when Dozie became so ill that he needed to be hospitalized in Montgomery, Alabama. As his health worsened, he moved to Babbie, Alabama to live with his mother and his brother, as reported in his obituary. He died on January 6, 1956 and was buried in the Babbie Baptist Church cemetery. No mention was made of Ethel residing with them; in fact it gave her address as Ocala, Florida, where the city directory listed her employer as “Pick & Pay Supermarket”. It seems that Ethel had become estranged from the Richburg family. But she did remain a Baptist for the rest of her life.
Less than a year after Dozie’s death, on November 30, 1956, Ethel married Walter Murray Horne in Kingsland, Camden, Georgia. Ethel was age 52 and Walter was 36. It’s safe to assume that Ethel brought no dowry to the nuptials. Walter worked in the appliance business with his brother.
On October 1, 1958, Ethel’s mother Lula Hughes Canada passed away in Amarillo, Potter, Texas
(she had remarried shortly after fleeing to Texas with her three youngest daughters). Her second husband, Samuel Moses Canada, preceded her in death by about a year. Lula’s obituary cited Ethel and Walter Horne’s residence as Dade City, Pasco, Florida. For the next few years, they appeared to bounce between Savannah, Georgia and Miami, Florida. Walter was employed as a city policeman in Savannah.
Ethel and Walter Horne separated sometime in the early 1960’s. Walter married for the third time in September, 1966 in Florida, ending in divorce in 1974 shortly before his death. Ethel married her fourth husband, Robert Stacey Bouland, Jr., probably in the 1960’s in Hillsborough County, Florida. This time, Robert was only about 7 years younger than Ethel, and was long divorced from his first wife, Hazel Louise Peacon. Ethel and Robert resided in the Hollywood Trailer Park in central St. Petersburg. Robert was employed as a fruit packer, and Ethel worked as a maid in a hotel.
Ethel died at 8:00 A.M. on September 30, 1985 at the age of 81. Cause of death is not listed on Florida death certificates available to the public. Her obituary and death certificate wrongly listed her birthplace in 1904 as Arlington, Texas (which even her mother forgot was Alabama after the 1910 Census), her father “Arthur” was listed as “Albert”, which was actually the name of her deceased, oldest brother; her mother’s name was unknown; and there was no mention of her only surviving sibling, Bessie Ruby Gentry Shepard, who lived on in Austin, Texas until 1999. Ethel was a member of the First Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, while Robert was a Methodist. Her funeral arrangements were handled by Suncoast Funeral Chapel, and her cremation by International Crematory, Pinellas Park; both of which have gone out of business.
Robert S. Bouland lived on until March 15, 1993, when he, like Ethel, passed away at the age of 81. Presumably he also chose cremation through the All Faiths Funeral Home and Cemetery that handled his final remains.
Author’s note: The conclusion to the tumultuous life of Ethel Caldwell feels anti-climatic. She certainly did achieve anonymity after she and her family were repeatedly thrust into tabloid spotlight by criminal violence. Ethel and her fourth husband even confused the basic details of her life on her death certificate. It was only by coincidence that Ethel’s story piqued my interest. My neighbor lady’s uncle was the unfortunate Eugene Hawkins, so she had frequented the Deephaven Nursery as a child to visit her grandmother. Later, when she was married, she acquired a pamphlet titled “Picturesque Deephaven”, compiled and edited by Ellen Wilson Meyer and published in 1989 by the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Historical Society. She and her husband showed it to me when I was helping them build their family tree. In it were short biographies of Deephaven’s early notables, including Alfred O. Hawkins, founder of the nursery and father of Eugene. Ms. Wilson devoted one paragraph of Alfred Hawkins short biography to recounting the wedding-day murder of Eugene and the funerary visit of his beautiful bride, Ethel. But the fate of all the actors in this play other than Eugene was unknown – including that of the jealous father A.C. Caldwell. As I researched each character in A.C. Caldwell’s family, I was amazed that so much violence and chaos could befall one family group. No doubt as more newspapers and government records are scanned to enable digital searches, even more details of their lives can be uncovered. Ethel's short biography only lays down the framework of persons, places and traumatic events that beset one family nearly forgotten by time.
Finlandia # 48482101
November, 2019
Ethel M. Caldwell’s 15 minutes of fame arose from calamitous violence. Two hours after her wedding in Miami on May 6, 1925, her father, Arthur Cleveland Caldwell, ran the newlyweds’ car off the road, and fired three shots with his .38 revolver, wounding Ethel and killing her husband, Eugene Emery Hawkins. “ A.C.” Caldwell, as he was commonly known, eluded the immediate search by authorities in the citrus groves of Coral Grove as his daughter recuperated in a Miami hospital sufficiently to accompany her husband’s body back to Minnesota for burial on June 1. Given that her father was thought still at large, Ethel told authorities that “If he thinks he killed me, he will commit suicide”. The story repeatedly made the front pages of the Miami and Minneapolis newspapers.
Following funeral services in his Minneapolis suburb of Deephaven, Eugene Hawkins was buried in Groveland Cemetery in Minnetonka. Ethel remained awhile with his parents, who owned a successful nursery business, to more fully recover from her wounds. A.C.’s body was discovered on June 5, 120 feet from the spot where he killed his son-in-law. Police surmised that he returned to the spot a few days after the murder and turned his pistol on himself.
As with all murders, particularly intra-family ones, the first question is why. A.C. Caldwell was a successful partner in a Miami real estate company. However, his marriage to Lula T Hughes had dissolved a few years earlier, with Lula and their three youngest daughters fleeing to Texas where the family had lived before moving to Florida in the early 1920’s. A.C. and Lula had three other children: the eldest, Albert, who served a stint in the U.S. Navy before entering law school in South Carolina; Ethel who at age 21 remained in Miami in part to help tend her father’s house; and younger brother Gordon, who remained in Tampa, Florida on his way to becoming a bank clerk.
Ethel’s deceased husband had only moved from Deephaven to Miami in November of the previous year to start a roofing company. He had attended the University of Minnesota from 1915 to 1919, and then assisted his parents with management of the nursery through 1924. His parents were sufficiently well-to-do to take family winter vacations in Florida. He had notified his father by mail of his intention to marry Ethel only two weeks prior to the wedding.
Miami newspapers attributed the murder to A.C.’s jealous rage over his care-giving daughter being taken away from him. Minneapolis papers cited A.C.’s erratic swings between cordiality and hostility towards his future son-in-law. Ethel was the last female family member is his life, but she feared his violent mood swings and sought refuge in marriage.
Another member of the Caldwell family swept up in the storm swirling around A.C. was his son, Albert, who upon learning the news of his father’s crime and flight from justice, decided upon robbery to obtain money to help his father and was apprehended after a gun duel with the banker whose home he targeted. By June 12, 1925 he had been removed from the Dorchester County jail where he was being held to the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia. He served 5 years in prison until late 1930, when he returned to Hillsborough, Florida and married the first of his three wives. Stable marriages were not a hallmark of A.C. Caldwell’s children.
Edna May Caldwell, Ethel’s younger sister younger by 5 years, had moved to Texas with her mother after her parents’ separation. In 1925 at age 16, perhaps to escape the stigma of her father’s notorious murder and suicide, Edna hooked up with 23-year old, 6-month army veteran Edward Ruffall Waits, and in May, 1926 bore his child named Carl Eugene Waits. Their marriage didn’t last long and Edna and her son soon moved back to Florida, where she formalized their divorce in 1931. Edna sublet care of “Gene” to Ethel and her new husband since 1927, William Dozier Richburg. Gene lived with the Richburgs in Ocala, Florida the during 1930 U.S. Census, while Edna lodged separately in a 4-person household. Meanwhile his biological father, Edward R. Waits, in 1932 was sentenced to 4 years in the Texas penitentiary for theft exceeding fifty dollars.
Another of Ethel’s younger sisters who had fled with her mother was Mabel Rachel Caldwell. She reacted to her estranged father’s murder-suicide by bearing an illegitimate daughter at age 15 in 1926 to an unnamed father, followed by marrying Roy Jackson Hulen the following year. Roy would father his own daughter with Mabel in 1930. Distinguishing the two fathers would become more important 21 years later.
A.C Caldwell’s next legacy casualty was his second son, Gordon Theaty, who was 19 at the time of his father’s 1925 rampage. Gordon was employed as a bank clerk by the Exchange National Bank in Tampa until 1930, when he moved to Chicago to study commerce at Northwestern University while continuing to work as a clerk in a local bank. In April, 1932, Gordon, now age 26, met 21-year old Dorothy B. Smith at the First Presbyterian Church, and over the next three months developed an unrequited infatuation over her. On May 29, 1932, Dorothy told Gordon that she was breaking off the relationship with him. On Friday, June 3, 1932, Gordon confronted Dorothy at the American Academy of Art in downtown Chicago, where she was exhibiting one of her paintings at a gathering of about 100 visitors and art students. Gordon fired his new .38 revolver three times at Dorothy B. Smith, putting one bullet through her neck, before turning the gun on himself and fatally firing a fourth round into his right temple. Dorothy survived. Gordon’s body was transported back to Ocala, Florida for burial, the costs borne by his sister Ethel and her husband, William Dozier Richburg, his brother Albert, and least likely by his divorced sister, Edna Waits. The three siblings had lived in Ocala since at least 1930. But after paying for transporting the coffin by rail and a funeral in the depths of the Great Depression, there apparently wasn’t enough money to pay for a headstone or even a plot; thus Gordon’s grave is unmarked in a paupers section and the precise location unknown to this day.
As the 1930’s progressed, Ethel’s husband Dozier Richburg, nicknamed Dozie, went into the auto parts business with his brother, Trammel Herbert Richburg. In 1940 Dozie and Ethel were living in Fort Myers with her divorced sister Edna and her now teenage son Gene. Dozie and Ethel finally regained their independence when in 1943 at age 33 Edna married 51-year old William Scott Brandon, and her son Gene joined the Army Air Corps when he turned 18 in 1944. Sometime around then Dozie and Ethel moved back to Dozie’s home town of Andalusia, Alabama. Dozie sold his partnership in the auto parts business to his brother, and even tried his hand at running a notions store. Even with all the changes, in retrospect these were no doubt the most stable years of Ethel’s turbulent life, for which the coming 1950’s held additional shocks.
On April 25, 1951, Ethel’s sister Rachel Mabel (Caldwell) Hulen was bludgeoned to death by her husband, Roy Jackson Hulen. At least that was the conclusion of Texas authorities, who tried, convicted and sentenced him to death by the electric chair. Roy was executed on February 6, 1953 in Huntsville, and buried in an unmarked grave. Rachel’s obituary noted that her first daughter came from “another marriage”, an earlier mark of shame that now bestowed welcome separation from her mother’s murderer.
Around June of 1954, Ethel was confronted with another blow when Dozie became so ill that he needed to be hospitalized in Montgomery, Alabama. As his health worsened, he moved to Babbie, Alabama to live with his mother and his brother, as reported in his obituary. He died on January 6, 1956 and was buried in the Babbie Baptist Church cemetery. No mention was made of Ethel residing with them; in fact it gave her address as Ocala, Florida, where the city directory listed her employer as “Pick & Pay Supermarket”. It seems that Ethel had become estranged from the Richburg family. But she did remain a Baptist for the rest of her life.
Less than a year after Dozie’s death, on November 30, 1956, Ethel married Walter Murray Horne in Kingsland, Camden, Georgia. Ethel was age 52 and Walter was 36. It’s safe to assume that Ethel brought no dowry to the nuptials. Walter worked in the appliance business with his brother.
On October 1, 1958, Ethel’s mother Lula Hughes Canada passed away in Amarillo, Potter, Texas
(she had remarried shortly after fleeing to Texas with her three youngest daughters). Her second husband, Samuel Moses Canada, preceded her in death by about a year. Lula’s obituary cited Ethel and Walter Horne’s residence as Dade City, Pasco, Florida. For the next few years, they appeared to bounce between Savannah, Georgia and Miami, Florida. Walter was employed as a city policeman in Savannah.
Ethel and Walter Horne separated sometime in the early 1960’s. Walter married for the third time in September, 1966 in Florida, ending in divorce in 1974 shortly before his death. Ethel married her fourth husband, Robert Stacey Bouland, Jr., probably in the 1960’s in Hillsborough County, Florida. This time, Robert was only about 7 years younger than Ethel, and was long divorced from his first wife, Hazel Louise Peacon. Ethel and Robert resided in the Hollywood Trailer Park in central St. Petersburg. Robert was employed as a fruit packer, and Ethel worked as a maid in a hotel.
Ethel died at 8:00 A.M. on September 30, 1985 at the age of 81. Cause of death is not listed on Florida death certificates available to the public. Her obituary and death certificate wrongly listed her birthplace in 1904 as Arlington, Texas (which even her mother forgot was Alabama after the 1910 Census), her father “Arthur” was listed as “Albert”, which was actually the name of her deceased, oldest brother; her mother’s name was unknown; and there was no mention of her only surviving sibling, Bessie Ruby Gentry Shepard, who lived on in Austin, Texas until 1999. Ethel was a member of the First Baptist Church in St. Petersburg, while Robert was a Methodist. Her funeral arrangements were handled by Suncoast Funeral Chapel, and her cremation by International Crematory, Pinellas Park; both of which have gone out of business.
Robert S. Bouland lived on until March 15, 1993, when he, like Ethel, passed away at the age of 81. Presumably he also chose cremation through the All Faiths Funeral Home and Cemetery that handled his final remains.
Author’s note: The conclusion to the tumultuous life of Ethel Caldwell feels anti-climatic. She certainly did achieve anonymity after she and her family were repeatedly thrust into tabloid spotlight by criminal violence. Ethel and her fourth husband even confused the basic details of her life on her death certificate. It was only by coincidence that Ethel’s story piqued my interest. My neighbor lady’s uncle was the unfortunate Eugene Hawkins, so she had frequented the Deephaven Nursery as a child to visit her grandmother. Later, when she was married, she acquired a pamphlet titled “Picturesque Deephaven”, compiled and edited by Ellen Wilson Meyer and published in 1989 by the Excelsior-Lake Minnetonka Historical Society. She and her husband showed it to me when I was helping them build their family tree. In it were short biographies of Deephaven’s early notables, including Alfred O. Hawkins, founder of the nursery and father of Eugene. Ms. Wilson devoted one paragraph of Alfred Hawkins short biography to recounting the wedding-day murder of Eugene and the funerary visit of his beautiful bride, Ethel. But the fate of all the actors in this play other than Eugene was unknown – including that of the jealous father A.C. Caldwell. As I researched each character in A.C. Caldwell’s family, I was amazed that so much violence and chaos could befall one family group. No doubt as more newspapers and government records are scanned to enable digital searches, even more details of their lives can be uncovered. Ethel's short biography only lays down the framework of persons, places and traumatic events that beset one family nearly forgotten by time.
Finlandia # 48482101
November, 2019
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