The General and the Jaguar (35 page)

The prosecution then proceeded to put on the witness stand the same law-enforcement officials and civilians who had tramped
into the hospital tent and questioned the wounded Villistas. Only one of those witnesses—Constable T. A. Hulsey—said he actually
saw Charles DeWitt Miller being murdered, but admitted that he had witnessed the killing from the ignominious vantage point
of a tree hole in his backyard. The other prosecution witnesses did not see any of the actual killings, nor were they able
to positively identify the defendants as being among the raiders. Curiously, none of the actual eyewitnesses to the raid—including
Maud Wright, Bunk Spencer, Arthur Ravel, Rachel Walker, Laura Ritchie, or Laura’s three daughters—testified.

When it was Buel Wood’s turn to put on his defense, he didn’t call any of these eyewitnesses either. Instead, he put on only
the defendants themselves, a strategy that turned out to be a colossal error. The first was José Rodríguez, a Carrancista
soldier from the state of Nuevo León who had been taken prisoner by Villa in mid-February following a fight at one of the
lovely haciendas in the Hearst empire. Rodríguez was only twenty, but seemed prematurely aged, lacking in all frivolity.

“Now, what did you do the morning of the ninth?” asked Wood.

“I didn’t do anything. They left me where the horses was, and when they started to run I started to run ahead of them. When
we was on our retreat, that is when they wounded me.”

Prosecutor Vaught cross-examined Rodríguez closely, hoping that he would reveal himself to be a more willing and knowledgeable
participant in the raid, but Rodríguez stuck to his story. He testified that he had no idea that the troops were attacking
Columbus until he heard the shooting and saw the fires.

But you knew, Vaught persisted, that Villa did nothing else “except fight, didn’t you?”

“I just knew that he fought against Mexico; I didn’t know that he was fighting the Americans.”

The second defendant, Eusevio Rentería, twenty-four, had thick, taciturn features and a scowling, embittered profile. Rentería
talked of his long military career, beginning with his forced service under Porfirio Díaz, his imprisonment by the Yaqui Indians,
and his capture by the Villistas at the Cabrado mining camp. Villa “was very cruel to us,” he said. “If we would not obey
what he ordered us to do, he would have killed us.”

“And that is why, is it not, that you boys and the rest of Villa’s command was kept in ignorance of the true movements and
the real design that Villa and his officers had in mind?” asked defense attorney Wood.

“We were always ignorant as to what he intended to do. We just marched along when he told us to.”

José Rangel, twenty-three, suffering from gunshot wounds in both legs, was moved to the front of the courtroom on his cot
so that jurors could hear his testimony. Rangel testified that Villa and his men captured him as he was coming out of a store
in Chihuahua City about two and a half months prior to the raid. He was given a Mauser and some cartridges and served as an
orderly. He insisted that he did not come into town during the attack.

The fourth defendant, Juan Castillo, twenty-six, was another Carrancista soldier who had been captured by Villa. “When they
ordered us to do anything we would have to do it; if we would not, they would beat us up,” he testified.

Judge Medler then interrupted Wood’s questioning to ask Castillo if he was paid anything.

Nada,
Castillo responded.

Taurino García, a twenty-one-year-old bricklayer with big, round eyes and a wispy, tentative mustache, told jurors that he
was kidnapped by Villa’s men on a dusty road in Chihuahua. “He stood me up there in a ring. He formed a ring of some men and
had a fellow beat me up,” he testified. Five days before the raid, he continued, Villa gave him a gun and fifteen cartridges.
He said he knew it would probably be used in a battle but he could not resist taking it. García was wounded as he advanced
into Columbus. He lay on the ground until one of his fellow soldiers picked him up and carried him to the rear.

After García’s testimony, the judge halted the trial and the manacled prisoners were taken downstairs to the filthy jail where
three of their countrymen had died just a few weeks earlier. The next morning they were returned to the courtroom. Francisco
Álvarez, twenty-two, took a seat on the witness stand. His face was still swollen and wrapped in bandages. Álvarez denied
being in Columbus during the raid and denied knowing Villa. Apparently frustrated with his answers, defense attorney Wood
turned to the prosecutor and said, “Take him.”

During the cross-examination, Álvarez grew more voluble and reversed several of his earlier statements. He admitted that he
was, in fact, in Columbus and that he was given a gun and ammunition and had gone with the main troops into town.

The state called only one rebuttal witness—Jesús Paez, who resembled a Charles Dickens character as he hobbled to the front
of the courtroom on his crutches. Jesús’s testimony was brief, possibly an indication that Vaught already knew the boy’s story
was problematic. Nevertheless, hoping to inflame the all-male jury, the prosecutor prodded Jesús into saying that Villa had
promised each of the raiders an “American wife” when the attack was over.

Afterward, both sides rested and the judge and lawyers retired to prepare their instructions to the jury. Although Buel Wood
maintained that the defendants were simply soldiers following orders, Medler went out of his way to demolish this defense
in the instructions to the jury. Jurors were told that threats of duress and imprisonment or even “an assault to the peril
of life” did not constitute “legal excuse or justification” for murder. No state of war existed at the time between Mexico
and the United States, he added, “and unless a state of war did exist, there was no justification in law for a military expedition.”

The jury retired to deliberate at 11:29 a.m. Thirty minutes later, the panel filed back into the courtroom. The foreman handed
a piece of paper to the judge. Medler read it and then turned to the defendants: the jury, he intoned, finds you guilty of
murder in the first degree.

A
T 2:00 P.M.
on the same day, Juan Sánchez, the sixteen-year-old boy who was picked up on the battlefield, went on trial. (The charges
against Jesús Paez appear to have been dismissed in exchange for his testimony, and the trial of Pablo Sánchez, the alleged
spy who was named in the same indictment, was postponed “on account of lack of sufficient evidence.”) Although no transcript
of the second trial has been found, newspaper reporters observed that Sánchez’s trial proceeded even more quickly than the
first: “The state developed such a weight of evidence in the trial ending in the conviction of the first raiders placed on
trial that it did not place all of its witnesses on the stand.” After just two hours of testimony, a jury retired to deliberate
his fate. Thirty minutes later, they returned, grim faced. Juan Sánchez was also found guilty of murder in the first degree.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, A
PRIL 24,
the seven Villistas returned to the courtroom for sentencing. Before passing sentence, Judge Medler noted that the convicted
prisoners had been provided with competent counsel and a fair trial. But just how competent the defense was and how fair those
trials had actually been is a matter of debate. Defense attorney Buel Wood would later tell reporters that the admissions
the defendants made on the witness stand “supported the verdict” and Judge Medler himself later called their testimony “practically
a confession.” Another tactical error made by Wood was trying all six defendants at once, which even reporters at the time
described as highly unusual.

Nevertheless, a trial had been held and a verdict delivered. Medler gaveled the courtroom into silence. The defendants, Medler
instructed, were remanded to the custody of the Luna County sheriff until May 19, 1916. On that day, in an enclosure to be
erected by the sheriff, “you Eusevio Rente ría, Taurino García, José Rodríguez, Francisco Álvarez, José Rangel and Juan Castillo
be then and there by the said sheriff of the said county of Luna, hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have
mercy on your soul.” Juan Sánchez, looking almost as small and wan as Jesús Paez, was also sentenced to be hanged.

With the judge’s pronouncement of the death sentence, a sigh of relief went up from the spectators and they hurried out into
the wide breezy hallway. Wrote one reporter, “The attention of many was arrested however, by the quivering form of José Rangel
who could no longer stand the ordeal. He buried his face in the varied hue quilt that covered his rickety cot and wept hot
salty tears. As the folding doors bounded open and the sheriff’s assistants hurried past bearing the crippled foreigner, many
paused and turned away when they beheld him concealing his tear-stained face in his handkerchief.”

Instead of returning the condemned men to the local jail, Judge Medler ordered the sheriff to take them to the penitentiary
in Santa Fe for safekeeping. He also ordered Luna County officials to clean up the jail at once: “The present state of affairs,
which has been characterized by your grand jury as a disgrace to the county must be remedied,” he told the Luna County commissioners.

The seven prisoners were taken to the penitentiary by a train provided by the Santa Fe Railroad. The railroad car was old
and rickety and prisoners and their guards had to ride for miles in darkness. “It is true that a faint and evil smelling light
was obtained at each end of the car after about six attempts had been made to ignite the lamps, but in the middle of the car,
where the prisoners were herded, it was black as the inside of a cow,” the
Deming Headlight
reported.

W
ITH THE EXECUTION DATE
fast approaching, a Santa Fe lawyer named Edward C. Wade Jr. took it upon himself to send a telegram
to President Wilson, entreating him to contact the governor of New Mexico and ask for a reprieve for the condemned men so
that a thorough investigation of the Villista cases could be made by federal authorities: “They are ignorant, illiterate and
like children mentally; one is seriously wounded. They were, I am informed, taken prisoners in Mexico by Pershing’s expedition
and were brought out of Mexico without extradition proceedings and turned over to the state authorities for punishment. They
contend they are military prisoners, entitled to the protection of the United States. They have no friends, are in a strange
country and have no financial means to assert their innocence in higher court or to urge their contention that they are prisoners
of war and should be so treated.”

Judge Medler was incensed by Wade’s appeal and so were the local newspapers. “The people of New Mexico and the entire Southwest
owe no debt of gratitude to E. C. Wade, Jr. for interesting himself, without compensation, on behalf of the seven Mexicans
convicted at Deming and sentenced to be hanged in just fifteen days,” fumed the
Deming Graphic
in an angry editorial. Calling the seven prisoners “murderous scoundrels,” “Mexican curs,” and “yellow devils,” the editorial
writer reminded readers of John Moore, shot to death at his home; his wife, Susan, gunned down in “sportive fashion”; and
William Ritchie, the genial host of the Commercial Hotel, bleeding to death on the front steps of the hotel.

The White House felt differently, however, and Joseph Tumulty, President Wilson’s close adviser, sent a telegram to New Mexico
governor William McDonald asking for additional information on the seven condemned men. McDonald replied that he would investigate
the cases and get back to him. Keeping his word, the governor then made a special trip to the penitentiary to interview the
prisoners, accompanied by a stenographer and the secretary of state, Antonio Lucero, who also acted as interpreter. In their
discussions with the governor, all the condemned men now claimed that they were Carrancista soldiers who had been captured
by Villa and were given the choice of joining him or facing the firing squad. They pointed out that during the raid they were
left holding the horses because Villa was suspicious of their loyalty and was unwilling to take them into town. But McDonald
was not convinced. The horse holders, he theorized, were actually of great strategic importance because the horses “represented
their only means of getting away after the massacre.”

Following up on his inquiry, President Wilson then sent McDonald a letter and formally asked him to postpone the executions:

Would it not seem, in view of the existing conditions, that the executions of these men be deferred pending the active field
operations for the capture of the principal offender, Villa, whose case should be disposed of along similar lines? In view,
too, of the highly excitable conditions on the border and among the Mexican people, may not grossly misrepresented and exaggerated
accounts of the execution be circulated and lead to acts of so-called reprisal being committed upon American citizens resident
in Mexico? I respectfully request that you consider the propriety of reprieving these men for a reasonable period in order
that their present execution may not complicate the existing conditions in the manner stated above.

McDonald replied that the president’s suggestion was “in accord” with how he planned to handle the cases, adding that he was
awaiting a copy of the trial transcript. “I scarcely think that their execution would result in any serious reprisal on the
part of the Mexicans, though of course no one can tell just what might happen,” he wrote. “You will readily understand that
there is considerable feeling in New Mexico, and I believe these cases should be handled carefully in order to prevent, so
far as possible, any objectionable developments here as well as in Mexico.”

The following day, May 13, the governor granted a twenty-one-day reprieve to the condemned men, pushing back the execution
date to June 9.