Last Words: “If I’m Not Home by Midnight”

Christmas 1907. On December 8 at 2500 Hannah Avenue on the North Side three of the young sons of John J. and Donie Holley no doubt were delighted to see their letters to Santa printed in the Fort Worth Telegram.

Lee, age nine, asked Santa for a wagon and firecrackers. Melvin, age two, asked Santa for a bugle and a toy watch. Lon, age seven, asked Santa for, among other toys, a pistol and a knife.
Be careful what you wish for, Lon.

Twenty-two years later Melvin would be dead.
Twenty-five years later Lee and Lon would be hospitalized after slashing each other with knives.
Twenty-seven years later older brother Henry would be dead—stabbed with a knife by brother Lee.

And forty-one years later Lon would receive a telephone call late one night. After hanging up he would tell his wife that he was going out to meet a man who would take him to meet another man. Lon would give his wife the names of two men.
“If I’m not home by midnight,” Holley would tell his wife as he left their home, “you will know something has happened.”
He would not be home by midnight.

Alonzo (“Lon”) Holley was born in 1900, grew up on the North Side, and worked at low-paying jobs: laborer at the packing plants and stockyards, railroad brakeman, pool hall attendant, gas station attendant.

By 1948 he owned a café and liquor store in River Oaks.

Those were Lon Holley’s day jobs.

Holley also had a sideline: petty crime. He bootlegged, wrote bad checks, defrauded.

And his life was occasionally violent. He was charged with “assault with a prohibited weapon” in 1936; in 1941 he and future Jacksboro Highway gambler Elmer Sharp fought during what Sharp later called “an argument over some old business.”

At the intersection of North Main Street and Exchange Avenue Lon Holley shot Elmer Sharp (pictured) twice, then Sharp threw Holley to the ground and beat him. (Photo from University of Texas at Arlington Library.)

In the Holley family, brother even turned on brother. In 1932 Lon and Lee cut each other with knives and were hospitalized after an altercation—again at the intersection of North Main Street and Exchange Avenue.

And in 1934 J. Lee fatally stabbed Henry after the brothers argued over $10 during a drinking bout.

But violence aside, Lon Holley’s criminal career so far had been one of minor offenses. That changed in October 1943. Lon Holley began running with the big dogs of Dallas-Fort Worth gangland.

Hollis Delois (“Lois”) Green was the son of a prostitute and the brother of Fort Worth gangster Cecil Green. Lois Green was the leader of a gang of ex-convicts known as the “Forty Thieves.” He also was one of the enforcers of Dallas/Las Vegas gambler and gangster Benny Binion.

Gary Cartwright, writing in Texas Monthly magazine in 1991, described Lois Green as a “depraved gunman who liked to bury his victims alive.”

On October 8, 1943 two armed men entered the headquarters of the Renfro drugstore chain on North Ballinger Street southwest of downtown. While one bandit stood at the entrance twirling a .44-caliber revolver on his finger, the other bandit herded thirteen employees into a large concrete vault, where he forced an employee to open a small safe containing cocaine, morphine, and other narcotics. The bandit then locked the employees in the large vault. They were freed after one of them used the head of a nail to remove the screws of the vault door’s lock.

The bandits stole a car belonging to a Renfro employee and drove away with cash and narcotics totaling $17,000 ($260,000 today). After a few blocks they abandoned the stolen car and transferred to another car that was waiting.

One employee said the men seemed to have a detailed knowledge of the layout of the building.

The perfect crime?

Not with junior crimestoppers in the neighborhood.

Three ten-year-old girls had watched a man park an expensive car near the Renfro headquarters and then loiter at the car. The girls—readers of detective stories—used a chalky rock to write the license plate number of the car on a sidewalk. After the girls learned of the robbery, they contacted police, who traced the license plate number to Lois Green.

Police arrested Green, who implicated Lon Holley, Ray Sellers, and James Buchanan Cavanaugh.

All four men were released on bond. Ray Sellers—a former husband of Clyde Barrow’s sister Marie—had recently escaped from an Oklahoma prison by dressing in street clothes during a prison rodeo attended by thousands of civilians.

Two months after the Renfro robbery Sellers staggered into a Dallas County dairy office with a bullet wound in his chest. All thirteen Renfro employees later identified him as one of the armed robbers.

He died without divulging who shot him.

On the day Sellers died, J. B. Cavanaugh disappeared and was never seen alive again, although Doug J. Swanson writes in Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker that more than six years after Cavanaugh disappeared “a skeleton believed to be that of Cavanaugh was found in a ravine twenty miles west of Dallas with a bullet hole in its skull.”

The Star-Telegram wrote: “Rumor has it that Sellers and Cavanaugh were ‘dry-gulched’ [ambushed] when the men [Renfro robbers] all met in a Dallas pasture to split the loot.”

Police suspected that the dry-gulchers were Lois Green and Lon Holley.

Swanson tells a slightly different account: Benny Binion had financed the Renfro robbery and had ordered Green and gunman and gambler Johnny Grisaffi to kill “half-wit bit players” Sellers and Cavanaugh.

Soon after Ray Sellers died, Lois Green was arrested but freed on bond.

Swanson writes that Green sold some of his share of the narcotics and distributed the rest to the prostitutes in his employ.

During Fort Worth’s gangland era, when local law enforcement tried to bring gangsters to justice, lawmen faced an intangible and implacable enemy: time. If law enforcement did not get a gangster off the streets quickly, he would be killed by his own fraternity—his body found in a shallow grave, a well, a car—before he could be convicted.

And so it was with Lon Holley.

Fast-forward four years. The year 1947 ended with a series of robberies that would prove significant.

About 2 a.m. on November 14, 1947 Melvin Lucas, night watchman of the town of Rosebud in central Texas, was making his rounds in the rain when two men surprised him. The two men took Lucas’s gun, bound him hand and foot, and put tape over his mouth and eyes. They then took Lucas to a barn about a block away and left him in a dry place.

“You be careful, and we won’t have to hurt you.”

The two men then went to First National Bank, where they pried open a rear door with a crowbar, rifled fifty-two safe deposit boxes, and got away with cash and valuables totaling an estimated $100,000 ($1.1 million today).

Suspects in the robbery included Lon Holley, Que Miller, Charles Frank Cates, and Jim Thomas.

Thomas was a ruthless hitman. In 1943 Dr. and Mrs. Roy Hunt had been shot and beaten to death in their home in Littlefield. Thomas was arrested, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. But a mistrial was declared and a second trial ordered. Thomas was found guilty at the second trial and again sentenced to death. But an appeals court ruled there was insufficient evidence to warrant a death penalty and ordered a third trial. Thomas was found guilty at the third trial and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. But in 1947 an appeals court overturned Thomas’s third trial and ordered a fourth trial.

By then Thomas had moved to Fort Worth. He was free on bond awaiting his fourth murder trial.

On December 13, 1947 three men, including Lon Holley, were arrested and charged with a recent string of armed robberies of liquor stores and gas stations. Holley was charged with seven of the robberies.

Tarrant County District Attorney Al Clyde said Holley was the “finger man” for the robberies, all carried out within a period of three weeks. Clyde said Holley did not participate in the actual robberies but furnished the automobiles, the weapons, and the information about the targets.

Holley was freed on bond.

He would have been safer in jail.

While Holley was free on bond he began to talk with DA Clyde.

But on the morning of March 7, 1948—four days before Holley was to go on trial for the string of local robberies—two men found Holley’s body inside his car parked in the 2400 block of Roberts Cutoff Road near Lake Worth’s Inspiration Point.

The Star-Telegram wrote: “He had been shot twice in the back of the head with a heavy caliber pistol fired by an assailant who apparently had been seated in the rear of the late model sedan . . . An unfired .38-caliber revolver was found on Holley’s hip and a wallet containing $48.70 apparently had been untouched. The body had slumped sideward to the seat from a position under the car’s steering wheel. There was no evidence of a struggle between Holley and his slayer.”

Holley had been dead several hours when his body was discovered.

Lon Holley’s wife told investigators that about 10 p.m. the night before, her husband received a telephone call. After hanging up he told her that he was going out to meet a man who would take him to meet another man. Mrs. Holley said her husband apparently knew the caller.

Before Holley left the house he gave his wife the names of two men and said, “If I’m not home by midnight, you will know something has happened.”

The two names were those of fellow gangsters Charles Frank Cates and Jim Thomas.

Police suspected that Cates and Thomas had killed Holley to prevent him from implicating them in the Rosebud bank robbery. Both men were questioned by police about Holley’s murder but released for lack of evidence.

The late Fort Worth police sergeant Dale Hinz writes in Panther’s Rest: History of the Fort Worth Police Department 1873-21st Century that Thomas was suspected of masterminding the Rosebud robbery. Thomas, Hinz writes, feared that accomplices Lon Holley and Que Miller would turn state’s evidence against Thomas to receive reduced sentences.

In fact, District Attorney Clyde said he had offered to “talk swap” (plea bargain) with Holley if Holley could implicate Thomas and Cates in the Rosebud robbery or if Holley could provide new evidence against Thomas in the murders of the Hunts.

Ann Arnold in Gamblers and Gangsters writes that there was even speculation that Holley was in possession of the Hunt murder weapon and was withholding it as a bargaining chip.

But Clyde also offered an alternative theory about Holley’s murder: Floyd Allen Hill, “the number one man on the FBI wanted list,” also was a suspect in the Rosebud bank robbery.

Clyde said, “Floyd Hill is a nephew of Lon Holley, and we felt Holley might be able to put the finger on him. Floyd is a boy who wouldn’t mind killing his own uncle if he was asking too many questions and talking too much.”

Clyde said of Holley: “We had him sewed up good. . . . He knew we had him, and he was scared. When a man misses the penitentiary as many times as Lon Holley had, he hates to go. He had swapped out before, and he thought he could do it again. Maybe he could have, if he had lived long enough.”

Roberts Cutoff Road near Inspiration Point was just four blocks from Jacksboro Highway, the main artery of Fort Worth’s gangland. The area was sparsely populated in 1948. No one reported hearing gunshots when Holley was killed. Lon Holley was “taken for a ride,” but it was a short ride: His car (yellow circle on map) was parked less than a mile from his home at 5520 Notre Dame Avenue (now a vacant lot).

Seven months after Lon Holley was killed, it was Que Miller’s turn. On September 31, 1948 Miller’s body was found slumped in the front seat of his car near Oakland Park. He had been shot twice in the head.

Again Charles Frank Cates and Jim Thomas were suspects.

Thomas denied killing Miller, waxing pert-near poetic:
“No, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t shoot anybody. Why, human life is a flowering bud to me. I wouldn’t crush it.”

Fast-forward to 1949. Another year, two more gangland killings. On November 29 a car bomb intended to kill Dallas gambler Herbert (“The Cat”) Noble instead killed his wife.

Herbert Noble suspected that Lois Green had placed the bomb on the orders of Noble’s rival Benny Binion.

Five weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Lois Green was killed by blasts from two shotguns after a party at a Dallas nightclub. Green’s murder was never solved, but Doug Swanson writes that one of the shotguns was fired by The Cat.

And police suspected that Jim Thomas and Charles Frank Cates killed Green just as they had killed Lon Holley.

But dead men tell no tales. Thomas himself was shotgunned to death in August 1951.

Fast-forward to 1955. On May 2 Lois Green’s big brother Cecil was gunned down as he sat in his Cadillac at the By-Way Inn tavern on Jacksboro Highway. Police suspected that the hitman was Jacksboro Highway habitué Gene Paul Norris (whose sister owned the tavern) but could not prove it before Norris, too, was gunned down—by police. The front-page coverage of the Cecil Green murder in 1955 included a list of twelve gangland figures who had been killed or had disappeared in twelve years. Seven years after Lon Holley’s death, he was just a number on a list: number 3.