WHAT THE RECORD KEEPS - EPISODE FOUR / SEASON FINALE
Final spoken transcript. Sun approved the full watch-through on October 17, 2026. Source qualifications remain as spoken and in the release notes.

[00:00:00.050] Last time, sister mine, we left her facing a third jury.
[00:00:05.090] Tonight, we finish her story, and I want us to do it right.
[00:00:08.970] Before we walk back into that courtroom, I think we owe folks a look
[00:00:12.790] out the window.
[00:00:14.150] Lake Charles in 1942 wasn't the same town that tried her in 1940.
[00:00:19.530] Bring it to life.
[00:00:21.050] Paint it for me, dear heart.
[00:00:22.970] What did this town look like while she sat in that jail?
[00:00:26.430] It looked like a town going to war.
[00:00:28.570] In 1941,
[00:00:30.810] the federal government bought and leased land in this parish for military use.
[00:00:35.470] By February of 1942, an advanced flight training squadron was flying out
[00:00:40.170] of the Lake Charles field.
[00:00:41.850] Many young pilots were in the sky over this parish while she counted days
[00:00:46.210] in a cell.
[00:00:47.510] That gives me a chill.
[00:00:49.190] So much industry came with it.
[00:00:51.770] Mathieson Alkali was already here, and the war brought a Cities Service refinery
[00:00:56.310] for high-octane gasoline and a Firestone plant for synthetic rubber.
[00:01:00.870] Then, there were whole neighborhoods that went up for the workers.
[00:01:04.790] Maplewood was called a war baby, wasn't it?
[00:01:07.890] Yes, it was.
[00:01:09.390] Built to house refinery families,
[00:01:11.750] money and strangers were pouring into Calcasieu Parish.
[00:01:15.630] Then, I want to tell folks about a man who was already a giant
[00:01:19.250] here.
[00:01:20.090] Our little Sun’s Paw Paw worked for W.
[00:01:22.270] T.
[00:01:22.810] Burton.
[00:01:22.950] Notre petit soleil.
[00:01:24.830] She told us that with a whole lot of pride, too.
[00:01:28.290] Here's what the record says about Mr.
[00:01:30.170] Burton.
[00:01:30.970] W.
[00:01:31.130] T.
[00:01:31.670] was born in Orange, Texas in 1884.
[00:01:35.130] He went to school through the seventh grade,
[00:01:37.230] then came to Sulphur at 17 to work for his uncle, a railroad agent.
[00:01:41.970] He went to school through the seventh grade.
[00:01:44.410] Hold that number, Emmie, because Toni Jo only made it through about the sixth.
[00:01:48.530] Then, over the years, he went into oil, roads, cattle, and contracting.
[00:01:54.610] His family's account, and our family's, too,
[00:01:57.570] says he bought a struggling bank in the Depression and rebuilt it as Calcasieu
[00:02:01.770] Marine National.
[00:02:03.090] Then, in 1936, Governor Noe assigned him State Lease 340,
[00:02:08.970] the rights to half a million acres of water bottom for $75,000.
[00:02:14.450] Within days, he reassigned part of it to the Texas Company for more than
[00:02:18.950] he'd paid.
[00:02:19.950] Think of that.
[00:02:21.390] Half a million acres with the stroke of a governor's pen.
[00:02:25.610] Lord, that's power.
[00:02:27.930] He also gave a gift to every graduating senior at Sulphur High year after
[00:02:32.830] year and started a scholarship for college students in Western Louisiana.
[00:02:37.990] People are wonderfully and sometimes aggravatingly more than one thing.
[00:02:43.310] Mr.
[00:02:43.730] Burton might be the finest example we've had.
[00:02:46.150] Let's both be careful here, Vangie.
[00:02:49.090] Nothing we've found ties Mr.
[00:02:50.790] Burton to her case in any way.
[00:02:53.070] Now, I'm not saying he did one thing to her.
[00:02:55.930] I'm saying, look at the town.
[00:02:58.050] Men could turn water into fortunes, and a Shreveport girl with a sixth grade
[00:03:02.650] schooling sat in the parish jail with her life written on paper.
[00:03:06.750] A life, I remind you, she couldn't tell about herself during at least one
[00:03:10.690] of her trials.
[00:03:11.970] Same parish, same courthouse square, and two very different kinds of paper.
[00:03:17.450] When we look close, that's the Lake Charles of her last year.
[00:03:21.650] Now take me back to that third jury.
[00:03:25.220] Again, the jury found her guilty,
[00:03:27.820] and again, she was sentenced to death.
[00:03:30.260] Toni Jo was 26 by then, hearing the same words a third time.
[00:03:35.580] Finding 12 jurors wasn't easy.
[00:03:38.280] The trial judge reported examining about 250 people to fill those seats.
[00:03:43.780] Can you believe this number?
[00:03:45.840] 250?
[00:03:47.160] That shows you how far her name had traveled.
[00:03:50.500] Of those 250, two of them already held opinions from the newspapers.
[00:03:56.000] Louisiana's Supreme Court said those opinions weren't fixed,
[00:03:59.580] and the defense used its own challenges to remove them.
[00:04:03.000] What else did her lawyers fight this time?
[00:04:05.480] In the trial's closing argument,
[00:04:07.560] the prosecutor called her earlier reversals technicalities.
[00:04:12.120] Technicalities?
[00:04:12.760] Emmie, those were a crowd shouting for a hanging,
[00:04:16.680] a promise from her own blood, and jurors who answered before they'd heard her.
[00:04:21.880] That's our comparison, and I share it.
[00:04:24.940] The court said the defense hadn't preserved a timely objection,
[00:04:28.420] and it accepted the judge's explanation that the remark answered a defense
[00:04:32.260] argument.
[00:04:33.220] So, on that day, that word got to stand.
[00:04:36.840] That brings us to May 25, 1942.
[00:04:39.680] The day the court affirmed her conviction and her death sentence.
[00:04:44.340] Chief Justice O’Niell agreed with the result and wrote separately about how juror
[00:04:49.020] challenges ought to work.
[00:04:50.700] Toni Jo had three juries, and every one of them had those three words
[00:04:55.280] open to them.
[00:04:56.540] Without capital punishment, not one chose them.
[00:05:00.020] So, that's the record.
[00:05:02.120] This time, the court found the trial followed the law.
[00:05:05.460] Meanwhile, as her case moved through the courts,
[00:05:08.060] Louisiana changed how it carried out death sentences,
[00:05:11.740] from hanging to electrocution.
[00:05:14.140] I heard this part.
[00:05:15.640] Her lawyers fought that too, didn't they?
[00:05:18.040] Indeed, they did fight it.
[00:05:19.980] They argued the new law shouldn't reach her.
[00:05:22.760] On November 4, 1942,
[00:05:25.460] the Supreme Court rejected those challenges.
[00:05:28.240] That brings us back to power, and the difference a piece of paper
[00:05:31.720] and the hand holding the pen can make.
[00:05:34.460] Fate came down to one man's pen again.
[00:05:37.060] The governor.
[00:05:38.660] The public heard early from that office what that pen intended.
[00:05:42.980] The reporting days before the date said Governor Sam Jones intended no
[00:05:47.260] intervention.
[00:05:48.460] We have two governors’ pens in one episode, sister.
[00:05:52.080] One handed a man half a million acres,
[00:05:54.660] and one wouldn't move pen to paper for a girl.
[00:05:58.040] Different governors with different powers.
[00:06:00.520] So, I'll mark that as yours.
[00:06:02.540] I do take your point.
[00:06:04.930] Now, I want to talk about the person who sat with her the most.
[00:06:09.290] That was a young priest named Wayne Richard.
[00:06:12.630] If you can believe it, Lake Charles' own paper put Father Richard beside
[00:06:17.370] her at the very end.
[00:06:19.350] Later accounts say he received her into the Catholic faith while she
[00:06:22.870] was in the parish jail.
[00:06:24.370] So, this is how his own family remembers it.
[00:06:27.630] This is the way of it.
[00:06:29.210] Lake Charles was his first assignment.
[00:06:31.050] A jailer brought him to her, and he prayed with her, baptized
[00:06:35.030] her, and buried her.
[00:06:36.930] Father Richard's family also tells a story from before he came home.
[00:06:41.470] He'd been studying abroad when the war began,
[00:06:43.870] and they say he and other young priests walked out of Europe to Portugal.
[00:06:48.610] So, he'd already walked through a war to get here.
[00:06:52.170] Then he walked of his own free will into a jail cell.
[00:06:56.470] One later account says he visited her three times a week.
[00:06:59.930] It also says she wrote to Cowboy every day and that Cowboy wrote back.
[00:07:05.890] Folks said she found jailhouse religion because she was scared.
[00:07:09.890] The way that account tells it, he never believed that.
[00:07:13.250] The father believed the faith she found was real.
[00:07:16.250] What we hear in that retelling, he said she wasn't afraid.
[00:07:20.510] She was pessimistic because she thought she didn't have a chance.
[00:07:24.310] That comes from a later book, and we haven't seen its original source.
[00:07:27.970] Toni Jo never thought she had a chance.
[00:07:31.750] sister mine, that might be the saddest sentence in this whole season.
[00:07:36.750] The priest's family remembers him as joyful.
[00:07:39.750] A man who loved his life.
[00:07:42.010] Later, he'd fly to Haiti wearing layers of clothes and come home in shorts
[00:07:46.250] and flip-flops, having given the rest away.
[00:07:49.050] I'm so truly glad she had somebody like that.
[00:07:52.510] Somebody who kept coming back, week after week, for no reason except her.
[00:07:58.090] Emmie, you know what I asked for in this episode.
[00:08:01.650] Every hardship we can find said out loud so she finally gets heard.
[00:08:06.490] Every gift as well.
[00:08:08.210] Okay, sister.
[00:08:09.490] Then I'll keep each one honest about where it comes from.
[00:08:12.670] As you know, in court, her aunt testified about her mother's early death
[00:08:17.030] and a father described as cruel.
[00:08:19.470] We won't forget how she grew up.
[00:08:21.130] So, on the day Toni Jo died,
[00:08:24.290] Lake Charles's paper described her as a woman who said she'd been a prostitute
[00:08:28.310] at 13 and a drug addict at 16.
[00:08:31.490] Did you really hear that?
[00:08:33.610] 13.
[00:08:34.610] Emmie.
[00:08:35.550] 13 is a child.
[00:08:37.490] A baby.
[00:08:38.590] Whatever name that paper gave it, a grown-up world did that to a child.
[00:08:43.250] Then we have a later historian wrote that she was born into poverty,
[00:08:47.230] had about a sixth grade education, and ran away at 13.
[00:08:51.790] Seems to me, a lot of folks failed her before they were asked
[00:08:55.110] to judge her.
[00:08:56.270] Here's the story folks tell about why she ran.
[00:08:59.210] She got a job at a macaroni factory.
[00:09:01.790] Lost it when they learned her mama had died of tuberculosis and her daddy
[00:09:05.930] beat her for losing it.
[00:09:07.890] That one I can't confirm yet, Vangie.
[00:09:10.690] It's a later retelling, not a record we've seen.
[00:09:13.890] Then I'll hold onto it for her as a story.
[00:09:16.490] Even as a story, it tells something true about how a girl ends up
[00:09:21.090] alone.
[00:09:21.850] Toni Jo told a writer that nobody had ever cared about her before Cowboy,
[00:09:26.710] and that he got her off cocaine.
[00:09:28.910] That's her account, through a later book, and we keep it as hers.
[00:09:33.150] Whatever else Cowboy was, she believed he was the first one who cared.
[00:09:38.090] Think of how she'd fight to hold onto the first one that cared.
[00:09:41.750] Then we hear the account of in jail,
[00:09:44.190] saying she sometimes got more than 200 letters in a single day from strangers
[00:09:49.390] who adored her and strangers who hated her.
[00:09:53.050] 200 letters a day, and hardly a soul in her corner when she
[00:09:57.590] was 13.
[00:09:58.970] She also kept a little black and white dog in that jail.
[00:10:02.570] Before the end, she arranged for it to go to Shreveport.
[00:10:06.270] Of course she did.
[00:10:07.770] She made sure something she loved made it home.
[00:10:11.760] In August, an Associated Press writer named Elliot Chaze interviewed
[00:10:16.420] her in the jail.
[00:10:18.140] We haven't inspected his original page yet, so everything I read tonight is marked
[00:10:23.420] for checking.
[00:10:24.460] So, read it anyway, Emmie.
[00:10:26.920] Let her talk.
[00:10:27.940] Toni Jo admitted the shooting.
[00:10:30.220] She said there was no use lying anymore, and that Burks didn't do it.
[00:10:34.760] After three trials of pointing at each other, she finally set it down.
[00:10:38.920] Toni Jo described that night as being like drunk.
[00:10:42.680] Drunk on pressure and worry over her husband.
[00:10:46.260] That's not an excuse, and I don't hear her offering it as one.
[00:10:50.560] It sounds like a girl trying to explain it to herself.
[00:10:53.720] Then she said something hard.
[00:10:55.920] She said she never thought of the man she killed,
[00:10:58.720] and that she'd known all along it would be her life for his.
[00:11:02.820] That stings, Emmie.
[00:11:04.820] Joseph deserved to be thought of.
[00:11:06.580] He absolutely did.
[00:11:09.080] She also said her life was worth as much
[00:11:11.360] to her as his was to him, and she wondered why it was legal
[00:11:15.260] now for somebody else to kill her.
[00:11:17.800] Both of those are hard to hear.
[00:11:20.300] My guess is she'd stopped letting herself look at him at all.
[00:11:23.880] And that's my guess, not the record.
[00:11:26.240] That's totally fair to mark as yours.
[00:11:28.760] One more line, and it's the one I can't shake.
[00:11:31.620] She said she was scared because her favorite radio serial,
[00:11:36.020] Abie’s Irish Rose, would go right on without her.
[00:11:39.360] Oh, lil sha.
[00:11:41.540] A girl afraid of missing her story on the radio.
[00:11:44.680] That's the most 26-year-old thing I ever heard.
[00:11:48.220] In November, she put another statement in writing.
[00:11:51.580] Reporting describes it as notarized and issued through her attorney.
[00:11:55.920] Burks's attorney, J.A.
[00:11:57.840] Williams, said she signed it on November 20th.
[00:12:01.160] It said she fired the fatal shot,
[00:12:03.380] and it hoped Burks would escape the death penalty.
[00:12:06.400] It went to the pardon board.
[00:12:08.180] So, eight days before her own death, she spent her ink trying to save
[00:12:12.940] Arkie.
[00:12:14.020] One later account gives her reason this way.
[00:12:17.060] He had a mother, and she didn't.
[00:12:19.620] He had a mother, and she didn't.
[00:12:22.000] Emmie, that's her whole childhood in seven words.
[00:12:26.580] We don't have the signed original, so we can't say for certain why she
[00:12:30.880] wrote it.
[00:12:31.660] We only know what it reportedly said.
[00:12:34.140] I'm still going to hold it gently either way.
[00:12:37.180] It was one of the last things she could give anybody,
[00:12:40.080] and she gave it to him.
[00:12:42.520] On November 23rd, an individual escaped from a Texas prison farm.
[00:12:48.200] Their prison register records the escape, then another entry two days later.
[00:12:53.360] This is how the old story goes.
[00:12:55.560] He broke out to go get her.
[00:12:57.640] Then, a later historian writes that he escaped,
[00:13:01.020] intending to help her break out and was caught in a Beaumont flop house.
[00:13:05.420] Papers at the time reported the escape and tighter guard at the Lake Charles
[00:13:09.360] jail.
[00:13:10.500] There it is, the best and worst of Cowboy, side by side.
[00:13:15.460] He loved her enough to run and it couldn't do one bit of good.
[00:13:19.580] Contemporary reporting of the day also says she spoke with him by telephone before
[00:13:24.140] the end.
[00:13:25.180] Do tell.
[00:13:26.180] Tell me what she said to him.
[00:13:27.880] Well, a later account says she told him to get rid of that prison
[00:13:31.640] suit and go straight.
[00:13:32.840] It says he cried and she stayed bright and cheerful.
[00:13:37.000] We haven't verified those words.
[00:13:38.940] Just think.
[00:13:40.140] If that's true, she spent her last night telling her Cowboy to live
[00:13:44.340] a good life.
[00:13:45.540] She was the one doing the comforting.
[00:13:47.700] Well, what I can say is that the record shows a call.
[00:13:51.660] Those words belong to the legend until we find better.
[00:13:55.280] It was a Saturday, November 28th, 1942.
[00:13:59.420] I'll tell this part plainly and only once.
[00:14:03.080] Gently, sister.
[00:14:04.740] Please.
[00:14:05.860] The record accounts that Toni Jo's long dark hair was shaved that morning
[00:14:10.000] and that she cried.
[00:14:12.200] Another account says Father Richard had given her a scarf to cover her head.
[00:14:16.920] All that long dark hair the papers love to photograph.
[00:14:21.240] That was the last pretty thing they'd been selling of her.
[00:14:24.140] And they took even that from her.
[00:14:26.000] All of the accounts even disagree about her dress.
[00:14:29.520] Most say black and one says white.
[00:14:32.300] So we'll leave the color where the record leaves it.
[00:14:35.440] Then Lake Charles's paper reported that she spent her last minutes alone with Father
[00:14:40.020] Richard.
[00:14:41.200] At five past noon, she came down 22 steps from her cell
[00:14:45.120] to the jail's first floor corridor where the state's portable chair had been set
[00:14:49.440] up.
[00:14:50.160] Some 300 people waited outside.
[00:14:52.680] A few watching from the courthouse steps across the street.
[00:14:56.800] 300 people outside and inside the one man who'd come three times
[00:15:02.060] a week.
[00:15:02.840] That same newspaper says she kept a smile until the end and said nothing.
[00:15:08.040] Within minutes, she was gone.
[00:15:10.660] Every story in my stack gives her different last words, Emmie.
[00:15:14.920] Then let's lay them side by side.
[00:15:17.320] One retelling says that when they asked for a final statement, she answered,
[00:15:21.800] I think not.
[00:15:23.220] Another says she looked at her priest and told him goodbye.
[00:15:27.140] Lake Charles's own paper written that same day says she was silent.
[00:15:32.120] Then I say I won't put words in her mouth.
[00:15:35.140] If she chose silence, she earned it.
[00:15:37.540] Toni Jo was 26 years old.
[00:15:44.410] One account says her last request was a crucifix in her hand when
[00:15:49.770] she was buried.
[00:15:51.430] Then, a newspaper two days later reported that her kin had claimed her body.
[00:15:56.250] Father Richard officiated at her burial in Orange Grove Cemetery,
[00:16:00.650] right here in Lake Charles.
[00:16:02.490] Family came for her at the end.
[00:16:04.690] I'm glad of that.
[00:16:06.150] Her November statement went before the pardon board for Burks.
[00:16:09.330] In March, he got an eight-day reprieve while his lawyers challenged how the board
[00:16:14.550] was made up.
[00:16:15.530] But then, on March 23, 1943,
[00:16:19.670] Burks was executed too.
[00:16:21.850] Her last gift didn't save him.
[00:16:24.470] Arkie, I promised to learn you before I judged you.
[00:16:28.470] I learned you were young and scared,
[00:16:30.830] and you climbed into a car on the worst night of three lives.
[00:16:34.710] Toni Jo's Cowboy did get out eventually.
[00:16:37.150] Later accounts say he was on parole when he was shot and killed
[00:16:41.270] in Dallas in July of 1945.
[00:16:44.710] I asked for this episode to be one final hearing for a lost girl
[00:16:49.130] in love.
[00:16:50.090] Not a pardon, Emmie.
[00:16:51.930] A hearing.
[00:16:53.110] Then, let's say plainly what we heard.
[00:16:55.550] She admitted she fired the shot.
[00:16:58.010] Louisiana's highest court corrected two unfair trials and upheld the third.
[00:17:03.170] I still don't think she got a fair shake those first two times.
[00:17:06.530] Maybe not the third.
[00:17:08.110] A hard childhood, a hungry press, and a crowd that wanted a hanging all
[00:17:12.810] leaned on that scale.
[00:17:14.470] Part of that, the record supports, because the court said so about the crowd
[00:17:18.710] and the first two trials.
[00:17:20.630] The rest is our judgment, and we'll own it as ours.
[00:17:23.950] Here's my verdict for my own heart, sister.
[00:17:27.930] She wasn't a monster.
[00:17:29.750] She was a girl nobody kept in their care when they should have.
[00:17:33.410] A girl who loved one man past all sense and did a terrible thing
[00:17:37.830] on a dark road.
[00:17:39.510] Mine is quieter.
[00:17:41.310] Every part of that machine had a chance to listen,
[00:17:44.250] and some of them did.
[00:17:45.930] She was heard three times.
[00:17:48.130] Then there's one more hearing we owe, ma douce sœur.
[00:17:51.030] We head back to…
[00:17:53.030] Joseph Calloway was a salesman out of Houston.
[00:17:56.170] A newspaper said he came from North Carolina and that he left five brothers
[00:18:00.450] and three sisters.
[00:18:02.450] His wife was Lulu Pearl.
[00:18:04.630] His daughter was Lita, and she was 17 when she sat in that courtroom.
[00:18:09.590] Tell them what else we found, dear heart.
[00:18:12.430] We think he's the Joseph P. Calloway in the 1930 census,
[00:18:16.090] a salesman living in St. Petersburg, Florida with Lula P. and their little girl.
[00:18:21.570] We're still working to prove that link.
[00:18:23.990] His family held his funeral in Houston.
[00:18:26.810] Toni Jo had three juries, a priest, 200 letters a day,
[00:18:31.690] and now us.
[00:18:33.170] He had one dark road and one chance to ask.
[00:18:36.470] Then he asked for his life, and it wasn't given.
[00:18:40.470] Everything we've told this season began with what was taken from him.
[00:18:44.230] We heard her, Emmie, all the way to the end.
[00:18:48.390] Now let's end where we began.
[00:18:50.570] Every step of the way, sister mine, he was there first.
[00:18:54.950] Say his name for them one more time.
[00:18:57.530] Dear listeners,
[00:18:59.010] his name was Joseph Calloway.
[00:19:12.890] If the signal found you, you are meant to be here.
[00:19:16.810] Subscribe and join us at 104.7 The Between
[00:19:19.910] for more Stories Through the Static.
[00:19:22.470] We'd love to see you drop in at the Mansion:
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