Burglar George Parrott - The Man Who Became a Pair of Shoes

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Life, perhaps, is wonderful because you never know what awaits you tomorrow. And it's hard to say how one of the most terrible criminals of the 19th century would have behaved if he knew how his adventures would end. After all, when he attacked trains and stagecoaches, it never occurred to him that he would turn into boots. Moreover, in the truest sense of the word.

George Parrott, known as George Big Nose, was a robber and cattle thief in the American Wild West in the late 19th century. He also robbed trains and stagecoaches with his gang. At that time, all transactions were carried out using cash, and stagecoaches often carried substantial amounts.

One day back in 1878, the Big Nose gang decided to try their luck with the Union Pacific train, which was carrying money to pay its employees. They found a secluded stretch of track near the Medicine Bow River in Wyoming, pulled a crutch out of the rail and hid in the bushes while waiting for the train. But a vigilant railroad worker noticed repaired the damage and alerted the sheriff.

George Big Nose and his men, when they saw that the train had quietly passed through their "trap", went to Rattlesnake Canyon near the town of Elk Mountain. They were followed closely by two law enforcement officers - Deputy Sheriff Robert Widdowfield and Union Pacific Detective Tip Vincent. When the officers arrived at Rattlesnake Canyon, they saw the ashes of a campfire that had recently been hastily trampled underfoot. When Widdowfield bent down to touch the ash, whether it was still warm (to understand how long the fugitives had left), he was immediately killed by a shot from the bushes. Vincent turned and tried to run, but he was also shot.

Union Pacific Railroad immediately offered a $ 10,000 bounty (which was a huge amount of money at the time) for the head of George Big Nose. Later, this award was doubled to $ 20,000. But for another two years, George and his people walked free until Big Nose got drunk in a bar and started bragging about the murders in Elk Mountain. He was arrested and taken to Rawlins, where the court found George guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

Ten days before the scheduled execution, on March 22, 1881, George Parrott attempted to flee. Using a pocket knife, he sawed off the rivets on the leg shackles, after which he smashed the head of the jailer Robert Rankin. Despite the broken skull, Rankin managed to call his wife Rose, who grabbed her husband's pistol and forced George Parrott to return to his cell at gunpoint.

When news of the escape attempt spread throughout the city, an angry mob broke into the prison, dragged George Parrott out into the street and hung him from a nearby telegraph pole.

Since Parrot did not have a family, the body of the dead criminal went to Dr. Thomas Magee and John Eugene Osborne, who wanted to study the brain of the criminal and discover where the addiction to crime comes from. Doctors trepanned Parrot's skull and examined his brain, but found no discernible difference between the criminal's brain and the brain of a "normal" person.

From that moment on, John Osborne's experiments became very strange. He sculpted George's death mask out of plaster, then stripped the skin off the dead man's thighs and chest, and sent it to a tannery in Denver with an order to make a pair of shoes and a medical bag out of it. When Dr. Osborne received the shoes, he was disappointed that the toes did not have the nipples as he ordered (recall that half of the skin was removed from the chest), but he began to wear them anyway.

The rest of George's dismembered body was kept in a whiskey keg, in a saline solution, and Osborne continued his bizarre experiments for a year. Eventually, a keg of whiskey with chunks of Big Nose was buried in the backyard of Dr. Magee's office.

Interestingly, after that, Dr. Osborne decided to go into politics, and he managed to become the first Democrat governor of Wyoming, and then Assistant Secretary of State under President Wilson. During his inaugural ball as governor in 1893, Osborne (at least that's what rumors say) wore those proverbial boots.

The sawed off top of the skull was presented to Dr. Osborne's 15-year-old assistant, Lillian Heath, who later became the first female doctor in Wyoming. Over the years, she used this top of her skull as an ashtray and then as a prop under the door in her office.

Then, George Big Nose was forgotten until 1950, when construction workers unearthed a whiskey keg filled with bones while digging a foundation pit for a new building. Inside the keg was a skull with a sawn-off top, a bottle with incomprehensible plant content, and a pair of shoes.

The local authorities knew perfectly well who the remains belonged to, but decided to make sure they were right. Someone remembered the ashtray of Dr. Lillian Heath, which at that time was already more than 80 years old, and contacted her. The top of the skull, which was preserved by the doctor, was taken to the police and turned out to be perfect for the skull found in the barrel. And decades later, DNA testing has confirmed the results again.

Today, George Big Nose leather shoes, along with his lower skull and death mask, can be seen at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, Wyoming. The top of the skull is in the Union Pacific Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. And the medical bag made of leather was never found …

Another mysterious story that remains a mystery is the story of the bloody Countess Bathory. And today it remains a mystery who she is - an obsessed sadist or a victim of intrigue.