EPISODE TWO — LOVE & THE RECORD The Machinery of Judgment · Stories Through the Static Final performed transcript · approved Preview 7 narration Caption wording confirmed by Sun: her record; Court documents call him Finnon Burks; notre petit soleil. Speaker labels omitted where not independently mapped. [00:00:00.530] Last time, sister mine, we left Joseph on a lonely road in Louisiana, [00:00:05.150] and we asked who else might have been on that road with him. [00:00:09.270] I know her record has something for us. [00:00:11.950] How many does the record say, Emmie? [00:00:14.790] There were three people in that car, Vangie. [00:00:17.370] Joseph Calloway, Toni Jo Henry, and a man the newspapers called Arkansas, [00:00:22.490] sis. [00:00:23.370] I have brought every story people have told about that road for the last [00:00:27.490] eighty years. [00:00:28.570] Some of them have been told so many times they feel like scripture. [00:00:32.270] Then here's how we'll do it tonight. [00:00:34.670] You tell me the story that lasted, and I'll lay down what the record [00:00:38.870] can show beside it. [00:00:40.170] You know, every time I look at this map, [00:00:43.150] I think about notre petit soleil. She grew up around this part of our world. [00:00:47.730] You know, our little sun. [00:00:49.110] She'd have something to say about it, too. [00:00:51.290] She always does. [00:00:52.870] God love her and all his angels protect her. [00:00:56.210] She would. [00:00:57.290] But tonight we're here for Joseph and for Toni Jo, [00:01:01.430] so let's give them the room. [00:01:03.050] Here's the way the story is usually told. [00:01:05.190] Toni Jo was working in a Shreveport house when a down-on-his-luck boxer called [00:01:10.090] Cowboy walked in, in the fall of 1939, [00:01:12.950] and the two of them fell hard. [00:01:15.810] Other tellings put that first meeting in Beaumont or in Austin or years [00:01:21.190] earlier. [00:01:21.690] The stories can't even agree on the doorway they met in. [00:01:24.810] And we haven't found a record of that first meeting at all. [00:01:28.170] What we have is a Texas newspaper that February, citing the sheriff, [00:01:32.930] dating their marriage to November 25th, 1939. [00:01:36.390] The marriage record itself is still missing. [00:01:40.290] Then comes the part people love: a honeymoon out in southern California, [00:01:45.130] and Cowboy getting her off drugs while they were out there. [00:01:48.550] That honeymoon has no source we've found yet. [00:01:51.270] The drug story is one Toni Jo herself told a reporter much later. [00:01:56.070] We're saving her own words for the final episode so she can say them [00:02:00.270] herself. [00:02:01.210] The story goes on that a telegram called Cowboy back to Texas to face [00:02:05.730] an old shooting charge, and that it came as a terrible surprise. [00:02:09.950] She begged him to run, and he went back to stand trial anyway. [00:02:14.390] Here the record pushes back a little. [00:02:16.670] A Texas appeals court had already overturned Cowboy's murder conviction [00:02:21.210] and sent it back for retrial in January 1939, [00:02:24.610] ten months before that wedding. [00:02:26.930] The case was already part of his life when she married him. [00:02:31.840] So whatever was in that telegram, it wasn't news that the case existed. [00:02:36.960] But I'll grant the story this much, dear heart. [00:02:40.480] A woman can know a thing, and still not believe it's really coming. [00:02:44.720] Then there's the courtroom. [00:02:46.580] The story says that when he was sentenced, [00:02:49.020] she shouted out loud that they'd taken her man, [00:02:51.740] and swore she'd get him out. [00:02:53.680] Prison records show the sentence. [00:02:55.880] Convicted February 2, 1940. [00:02:58.540] Received into prison on the 8th, a 50-year entry. [00:03:03.120] We haven't found any record of what she said that day. [00:03:06.160] Here's the telling of it everybody knows. [00:03:09.080] She meant to break Cowboy out of prison. [00:03:11.480] She needed money, guns, and clothes for him to wear when he walked out. [00:03:15.660] She found a partner who claimed to know the prison, [00:03:18.320] and they set out to rob a bank. [00:03:20.300] Court records we've read actually say the Louisiana Supreme Court's summary [00:03:24.980] in the partner's appeal says the two of them were carrying out a preconceived [00:03:29.300] plan to rob a bank. [00:03:31.400] And the jailbreak, Emmie? [00:03:33.200] Where does that part come in? [00:03:35.160] It isn't in the opinions we've read. [00:03:37.480] They don't say what the bank money was for. [00:03:40.040] We're still looking for an early source that ties the plan to Cowboy. [00:03:44.200] So the heart of the legend, the love story behind the whole plan, [00:03:48.500] is the one piece the record hasn't confirmed yet. [00:03:51.600] That doesn't make it false. [00:03:52.760] It means we hold it as the story people tell until we find it [00:03:56.720] written down closer to the time. [00:03:58.600] Court documents call him Finnon Burks. [00:04:01.640] The Lake Charles paper gave his name as Horace Finnon Burks, 23 years old. [00:04:06.960] In the papers, he was mostly Arkansas, or Arkie. [00:04:10.820] As the stories go, they make him an ex-convict and an army deserter, [00:04:15.580] a man who said he knew the prison and talked a big game. [00:04:18.980] We haven't checked his military or prison history yet, so for now, [00:04:24.040] that stays in your stack, Vangie, not mine. [00:04:27.540] 23 and 24. [00:04:29.420] Two young people out on the highway with a plan bigger than either [00:04:33.140] of them. [00:04:34.260] The way it's told, they were thumbing rides and posing as newlyweds, [00:04:38.580] and a salesman from Houston stopped for them on Valentine's Day. [00:04:42.420] Court summaries agree they were hitchhiking and that Joseph Calloway gave them a ride. [00:04:47.340] It says they held him up and robbed him of his belongings [00:04:50.560] and his car. [00:04:53.000] The story says they took his clothes so Cowboy would have something to wear [00:04:57.980] when they broke him out. [00:04:59.740] The court summary gives a different reason. [00:05:02.520] It says his clothing was taken to delay pursuit if his body was found. [00:05:07.000] So we're hearing even the clothes off his back got two different stories. [00:05:11.900] Our court summary says Joseph was on his knees begging for his life when [00:05:16.560] he was shot. [00:05:17.700] The Lake Charles paper placed it behind a haystack near the city. [00:05:21.100] Every single telling I've read rushes past this part to get back [00:05:25.200] to the love story. [00:05:26.540] I don't want us to. [00:05:28.260] That was a man with a wife and a daughter and brothers and sisters, [00:05:32.380] and he was asking to go home. [00:05:35.100] He truly was. [00:05:36.760] He wanted to go home to that family. [00:05:39.380] Whatever else we learn in this story that part doesn't change. [00:05:42.820] As the story goes, they drove on into Arkansas and that Arkie got scared [00:05:48.000] of how far she'd go and left her there with nothing. [00:05:51.500] That is indeed one place the old papers back the story up. [00:05:55.460] The Lake Charles paper reported they parted in Arkansas and that Burks said he [00:05:59.880] deserted her because he was afraid of her. [00:06:03.080] Then from there the story says she went back to Shreveport to a madam [00:06:07.640] she knew and the madam called her uncle the policeman. [00:06:10.540] In another she went to her aunt with the same result. [00:06:14.420] Sister, the court record tells us her aunt Emma Holt testified that her niece [00:06:19.820] came to her house near Shreveport and said she had shot a man. [00:06:23.660] Then her uncle, a state police captain was called and she was taken into [00:06:28.100] custody. [00:06:29.060] So we have the madam in the story and aunt in the record. [00:06:33.000] Either way she ran home to the people she had and they turned [00:06:36.580] her in. [00:06:36.980] I don't know whether to call that betrayal or love or both. [00:06:41.860] What I can tell you was what was promised to her in that house [00:06:45.360] is a question the courts took very seriously. [00:06:48.580] We'll open it up properly next episode. [00:06:51.200] Here's a part that touches my heart. [00:06:53.500] A piece of the telling I care about deeply on behalf of that young [00:06:57.340] lost girl. [00:06:58.800] The story I was always told is that those two truly cared for one [00:07:02.880] another. [00:07:03.540] That piece the record does help us with. [00:07:06.220] After Joseph was killed, the Lake Charles paper reported that authorities arranged [00:07:11.240] a midnight meeting between Toni Jo and her husband in Beaumont. [00:07:15.620] After that meeting, she named the man who had been with her. [00:07:19.220] So when they needed her to talk, they went and got the one person [00:07:22.720] she'd listened to. [00:07:24.020] And he told her to tell the truth, [00:07:26.360] knowing what the truth could cost her. [00:07:28.640] That's a complicated kind of love, sister. [00:07:31.300] Then we have another wire report from that week. [00:07:33.680] It says officials credited Cowboy with urging her to tell the whole story. [00:07:39.440] Those are officials' accounts reported in the papers. [00:07:42.720] We don't have a record of what was said in that room. [00:07:45.800] On February 23rd, 1940, [00:07:48.700] the Lake Charles paper reported that Toni Jo and Burks met again [00:07:52.440] in the main corridor of the parish jail for the first time since they'd [00:07:56.480] parted in Arkansas. [00:07:58.100] Two young people who'd been partners a week before, standing in a jail hallway, [00:08:02.980] each pointing at the other. [00:08:05.560] She said she'd left him because he was a little yellow rat. [00:08:09.580] And each one accused the other of firing the shot that killed Joseph. [00:08:14.200] The legend has mostly made up its mind about which of them pulled [00:08:17.320] the trigger. [00:08:18.340] That's why I want us to slow down here. [00:08:21.140] Burks told the same story at his arrest to the sheriff in front [00:08:24.920] of three witnesses and again at his own trial. [00:08:28.540] Toni Jo fired the shot. [00:08:30.400] He didn't ask his jury to acquit him. [00:08:33.300] He asked them to spare his life. [00:08:35.740] During her first trial, a wire report says Toni Jo acknowledged her earlier [00:08:40.380] statements, but denied firing the shot and blamed Burks. [00:08:44.700] A jury had to decide which of those accounts to believe and what [00:08:48.620] to do about it. [00:08:49.880] That's where we go next. [00:08:51.640] Look at these two piles, Emmie. [00:08:53.740] Mine has the honeymoon and the telegram and the clothes for Cowboy. [00:08:57.060] Yours has a marriage date, a prison ledger, and a court summary. [00:09:02.340] And both piles matter. [00:09:04.400] Yours tells us what people needed this story to mean. [00:09:07.740] Mine tells us what we can actually stand on. [00:09:11.160] Every one of these accounts, the old stories and the statements both, [00:09:15.440] came from somebody who had something to gain or lose by telling it [00:09:19.360] a certain way. [00:09:20.340] Which brings us to the question for next time. [00:09:22.600] What makes a statement reliable enough to use and who gets to decide? [00:09:27.960] We are keeping Joseph with us the whole way, [00:09:30.600] because he never got to tell his side of the story on that lonely [00:09:34.000] road.