Jim Bradshaw: Who, or what, is buried in Winberly's grave?

According to official records, Abraham O. Wimberly, one-time town marshal, died in a jail cell on March 1, 1899, and was buried in Church Point. According to family legend, he was long gone from the cell on March 1 and they buried a casket filled with bricks.

I started rooting out old newspaper accounts after Gene Thibodeaux chronicled much of this as part of a larger story on Wimberly lawmen in the journal of the Pointe de l’Eglise-Acadia Genealogical and Historical Society.

Wimberly was in jail because he shot and killed Sosthene (Coon) Daigle in a Church Point saloon on April 23, 1898. According to the first report in the Crowley Signal, the shooting came as a result of a simmering feud between the men.

“About a month ago … Daigle got on a spree in Church Point and resisted arrest by the marshal for disturbing the peace, and Marshal Wimberly in effecting the arrest had to use his club on Daigle” according to the Signal report on April 30. “Since that time, it is alleged that Daigle has made frequent threats that if Wimberly did not resign … he would kill him.”

According to that report, Daigle came to Church Point looking for trouble and was drinking heavily when Wimberly confronted him.

The marshal “tried to get Daigle to go home,” the Signal said, but shot him when Daigle started to draw a pistol. “Everyone seems to think that Wimberly acted in self-defense and in the discharge of his duty as an officer,” according to the news account.

That was quickly challenged by Sosthene’s brother, Theogene Daigle, who wrote a letter to the newspaper calling the account “garbled, incorrect and untrue.”

First, Theogene said, “While Wimberly had a short time previously dealt my brother a murderous blow … [that] almost crushed his skull, still Sosthene acted with commendable patience in not having sought Wimberly to avenge the wrong.”

He said that on the fatal day Wimberly, hearing that Daigle was in town, “sought an opportunity to finish the job he had left incomplete.”

When Wimberly, “bent on his murderous mission,” went into the saloon, “he immediately accosted my brother in a manner which, taken in connection with the rough treatment he had previously used, caused my brother to tell him to go away, that he did not want anything to do with him,” according to Theogene’s account.

Theogene said that’s when the marshal shot Sosthene. He said it was “a matter of doubt” whether Sosthene had made a motion to draw his own pistol, and that “even if he had … under such circumstances no one could blame him.”

Wimberly was charged with murder, but pleaded self-defense at his trial in June 1898.

Some witnesses said Wimberly had “a deliberate intention of killing Daigle,” according to the newspaper account of the trial. The jury apparently agreed, but said there were mitigating circumstances.  The jurors convicted him of the lesser crime of manslaughter. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

“To put the mildest construction upon the unfortunate affair, Wimberly managed things with poor judgement to arrest a man under the influence of liquor whom he expected to have trouble with … at least that was the light in which the jury viewed it,” the Signal said.

Wimberly waited in the Acadia Parish jail while his attorneys appealed the verdict to the Louisiana Supreme Court and also petitioned the governor for a pardon.

Both were denied, but the convicted marshal would not go to the state penitentiary.

The Signal told the story in a brief notice on March 4, 1899.

A. O. Wimberly, “who was tried and convicted of manslaughter … some months ago, and who appealed to the pardon board [while] remaining in the parish jail … died of dropsy [congestive heart failure] at 7:15 o’clock Saturday morning. By a strange coincidence the papers affirming the decision of the district court and ordering his removal to the penitentiary came by this morning’s mail. But death relieved the prisoner of any further punishment by the law.”

But there is also the possibility that the Signal’s editors got fooled by a hoax pulled by the family, and that Wimberly escaped further punishment by another route. Thibodeaux told that story this way.

“There is a family tale that has worked its way down through the Wimberly family … that Abraham O. Wimberly did not die in a jail cell, but was secretly set free to leave the state forever. The coffin that was lowered into the grave contained bricks instead of the ex-town marshal. Whether true or not, it is an interesting tale.”

A Wimberly acquaintance of mine couldn’t say whether the tale was true, but said “that sounds like something that might have happened.”

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.