At that point, Ida gave us her account of the Haley-McCoy murders.

“Some man that lived down there at Hart had a business and Al Brumfield had a business,” she said. “Al Brumfield, he wanted to get rid of him so he would get all the trade and so he was supposed to paid them so much to kill him. And they hid as they come out of Harts Creek, they said, one Sunday afternoon, I believe. They were hired to shoot and kill Al, but they hit the woman. She was riding on behind him on a horse. I can remember seeing her. She married again after that — a Ferguson. She wasn’t a very large woman. She died with a big hole in her cheek there where they shot her. They said they went into Kentucky and got them and they was supposed to delivered them back to the law over at Hamlin, our county seat. And they stopped down there to stay overnight. That was supposed to been the house of John Fry across the track there, I was told. That was a stop-off place. Do you know where Lonnie lives now? Well now, there’s where the log house stood.”

Ida stopped, thinking, then said, “I used to hear Dad and them talk about it. He said where their horses were tied in those fences… You know how they used to build the old log rail fences? He said they tore that place apart that night, those horses and all the shooting and everything going on. And said when they were eating supper that night — Green McCoy and Milt Haley — said one looked over to the other’n and told him, said, ‘You better eat all you want because this will be our last meal.’ Sure enough it was. Started shooting them in the bed and they was handcuffed together. I don’t know what hour it was but it was some time in the nighttime, you know, after they’d gone to bed. Now Grandma Cat was at that house that night when those men were killed. And they said when that was going on she hid up a chimney — big open fireplace. She hid up in there. It was kindly a rough time, they said.”

I asked Ida if she ever heard anyone mention the names of the vigilantes.

“Who was in the pack?” she said, laughing. “People just surmised it, I guess. I wasn’t told but my daddy, he always thought Uncle Charley — that was one of his brothers — was in on it. He was a huge man, Uncle Charley was. As well as I remember, he was real fair-complected. He finally got killed afterwards. Uncle Charley, I went to his funeral. He was a big, fat round-faced fellow and he had bullet wounds in his cheeks. Back then, the undertakers, you know, they didn’t have all that stuff to work with then.”

Brandon asked Ida if Bill Brumfield was in the gang and she said, “Uncle Bill? Now, I never did hear his name mentioned. He was accused of murdering, you know, but not them.”

Billy said, “They was about 20 or 30 of them. Wild times.”

I asked Ida if she ever saw the “murder house” and she said, “No, but my mother told me about it. At that time, she was going to school around at what they call the Toney Addition. And she said when they went out of Green Shoal that morning to school, you know, Milt and Green was laying out in the yard still handcuffed together. Mother thought they was colored people. They were beat up, I guess, and shot, you know, and blood all together — that’s the reason she thought they looked like colored people. That’s what she said. Now, she seen them. And I remember tales they’d left a little stream of blood run down through the yard. There was blood all over. I remember that very clearly, her telling us that.”

Ida said the old Fry home at the mouth of Green Shoal was torn down years ago, probably when the site was “built up” by the railroad around 1904.