Lewis took her daughter on a trip to Liberty, Texas, a small city
about forty miles from Houston, on the banks of the Trinity River.
Lewis was accompanied by two white men: Thomas Middleton,
who was a friend, and a companion of his. With Lewis’s money,
they bought a houseboat and stayed on the river. Then, on August
18, Lewis vanished. After authorities failed to investigate—“They
never would have done anything,” one of Lewis’s relatives said—
her family hired a private detective. He discovered that after
Lewis’s disappearance Middleton had pretended to be her adopted
son in order to cash several of her checks. In January 1919, after
the police detained Middleton and his companion, the private
detective interrogated them. He told Middleton that he would “one
hundred times rather find the old lady alive than dead,” adding, “If
you can give any information to locate her, that will help you.”
Middleton insisted that he didn’t know where she had gone. “I
am not a bit afraid,” he said.
He and his friend didn’t divulge anything. But two witnesses
revealed that on the day Lewis disappeared, they had seen, a few
miles from her houseboat, a car heading toward a snake-infested
swamp. On January 18, 1919, investigators, with their pant legs
rolled up, began to comb the thicket of vegetation. A reporter said
that one of the lawmen had “scarcely stepped in the water of the
bayou when his feet struggled for freedom. When he reached to
the bottom to disengage them he brought up a thick growth of
woman’s hair.” Leg bones were dredged up next. Then came a
human trunk and a skull, which looked as if it had been beaten
with a heavy metal object. GREWSOME FIND ENDS QUEST FOR MARY
LEWIS, a headline in a local newspaper said.
Middleton’s companion confessed to beating Lewis over the
head with a hammer. The plot was conceived by Middleton: after
Lewis was killed, the plan was to use a female associate to