The ravine where Anna Brown’s body was found Credit 5The doctors shifted Anna’s head slightly in the wooden box. Part
of her scalp slipped off, revealing a perfectly round hole in the
back of her skull. “She’s been shot!” one of the Shouns exclaimed.
There was a stirring among the men. Looking closer, they saw
that the hole’s circumference was barely that of a pencil. Mathis
thought that a .32-caliber bullet had caused the wound. As the
men traced the path of the bullet—it had entered just below the
crown, on a downward trajectory—there was no longer any doubt:
Anna’s death had been cold-blooded murder.
Lawmen were then still largely amateurs. They rarely attended
training academies or steeped themselves in the emerging
scientific methods of detection, such as the analysis of fingerprints
and blood patterns. Frontier lawmen, in particular, were primarily
gunfighters and trackers; they were expected to deter crimes and
to apprehend a known gunman alive if possible, dead if necessary.
“An officer was then literally the law and nothing but his judgment
and his trigger finger stood between him and extermination,” the