Park Predators - The Feathers

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

When a beloved game warden disappears while investigating abrupt gunshots in the Everglades, a tiny coastal village is shocked. A massive fashion industry craze appears to have pushed a poacher to the rarest kind of blood sport.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-feathers Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators  | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the story I'm gonna tell you about today is one that is near and dear to my heart, seeing as how I've spent a good amount of my career living and reporting in South Florida. This case came to me in the wildest of ways. I was camping deep in the Florida Everglades with some family friends when we happened to walk into a visitor center gift shop.

While we were all trying to get on the Wi-Fi, my friend saw a small book titled Death in the Everglades, the murder of Guy Bradley, America's first martyr to environmentalism. She brought it over to me and said it looked like it would make a great episode for Park Predators. And man was she right. Stuart MacGyver's nonfiction novel,

published in 2003, is a fantastic read and I highly recommend it. It was a piece of source material I leaned heavily on to put this episode together. And the reason for that is because the victim in this story, Guy Bradley, was brutally murdered 119 years ago in 1905. Which meant finding original, credible, still existing news coverage wasn't necessarily going to be easy or possible for me in this case. For those of you who don't know, the Everglades is a mammoth protected natural

ecosystem that essentially makes up a river of grass that spans the southern tip of Florida. Some of the rarest and most endangered types of wildlife and plants exist there, including alligators, American crocodiles, flamingos, Florida panthers, and manatees. You can take guided tours on boats and catch a glimpse of the more than 360 species of birds that call the Everglades their home. At the turn of the 20th century, though, the skies over the ecosystem began to change. Fewer and fewer feathered creatures were seen adorning mangrove trees and nesting grounds. And the man charged with getting to the bottom of why they were disappearing found himself

fighting a fearsome foe that would ultimately prove to be fatal. This is Park Predators. On the night of Saturday, July 8th, 1905, a woman named Franny Bradley nervously scanned the horizon outside her home in the small rural village of Flamingo, Florida. She knew that her husband, 35-year-old Guy Bradley, should have been home by nightfall, but he wasn't. It was rare for him to miss dinner with her and their two young sons, Morrell and Ellis. The last time she'd seen her husband was several hours earlier, around nine o'clock in the morning.

He'd taken off in a rowboat to investigate sounds of gunfire coming from two nearby islands called Oyster Keys. The pair of islands were about two miles from the Bradley's front door and housed a rookery for native birds. Because Guy was the only game warden in charge of patrolling that part of Florida and had been for nearly three years at that point, his trip to investigate gunshots near protected bird nests wasn't unusual. All too often shots would ring out on islands that housed nesting grounds. For years bird poachers had been pillaging species of native birds by the tens of thousands

just to earn a quick buck. The hunters were after the birds beautiful feathers, also referred to as plumes. They would kill species with particularly robust plumes, strip them of their feathers, and then sell those feathers to the millinery industry, which made hats mostly worn by women in the late 1800s. Author Stuart MacGyver wrote in his book that by 1886,

around five million birds were being slain each year to support this arm of the fashion industry. On average, the feathers would sell for a few cents all the way up to $130 back in the day, depending on the quantity and quality. In 1901, so four years before Guy vanished, this poaching issue had gotten so bad that a conservation organization called the New York Audubon Society, which boasted environmentalist and eventual U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt as one of its key members, launched a campaign to educate the public about the environmental travesty happening to the birds in Florida.

The group successfully convinced state leaders to create laws aimed at protecting native birds from being wiped out by plume hunters. These critical pieces of legislation spelled out what kinds of consequences would be leveled against folks who violated wildlife regulations with regards to birds. Something it didn't do, though, was explain how those laws would be enforced. There was nothing in the legislation that articulated how much game wardens would be paid or how they were to handle resistance from poachers. However, thanks to some generous private donors, a fund was set up to supplement the wages for game wardens in Florida. A year after those regulations were spelled out in black and white, Guy Bradley was appointed to fill two important jobs.

He was simultaneously the deputy sheriff of Monroe County, Florida, and game warden over that same area. The job title allowed him to settle down in the coastal settlement of Flamingo, which was just a boat ride away from the established city of Key West, and also close to the many bird rookeries he knew hunters liked to poach in, including a particularly tempting nesting area known as Cuthbert Rookery,

which was located in a remote part of South Florida. This area was deemed to be the holy grail of plume hunters and housed a wide variety of sought after birds. It was tucked away deep in the Everglades and only a few poachers had ever laid eyes on it. It got its name from George Cuthbert, who discovered it in the late 1880s while on an expedition in the Everglades with a friend.

In fact, the location of this rookery was such a tightly held secret that Cuthbert's friend who'd helped him find it ended up being murdered because he refused to reveal its location to another poacher. On the morning Guy left to investigate the gunshots that had come from Oyster Keys, his wife Ronnie followed him to the shoreline to tell him goodbye. She watched him paddle off and then returned to their house, not thinking much of it.

I imagine she figured her husband would just find the source of the gunshots, write the hunter a citation, and then get on with his work day. In hindsight, the only thing that had stuck out to her as abnormal was that when Guy left, he'd taken off in a small rowboat instead of his sailboat. When he departed, the air was still, and without wind, the sailboat sails were useless. So in order for him to conduct his investigation, he had to row over to Oyster Keys manually. The boat situation had not been ideal,

but Frani knew that her husband would make it work. After all, he had been navigating around Flamingo and greater South Florida waterways for decades at that point. Though he was originally from Chicago, his family had moved to Florida when he was about six years old. They'd lived in Fort Lauderdale and Lake Worth, before eventually settling down for good in the village of Flamingo

when Guy was about 28. Within a year after that, he'd met and married Franny, and it didn't take long before the couple welcomed the birth of their first son, Morrell, who was followed a few years later by another son, Ellis. Making a living in Flamingo was difficult before Guy took on the role of game warden. He'd worked previously on boats, in farming, and as a barefoot mailman walking along Florida's east coast delivering letters and packages to hard-to-reach addresses. The terrain in southern Monroe County was notoriously difficult to live in, and the mosquitoes were at times unbearable.

So when the opportunity arose for Guy to work full-time as a lawman, which paid a handsome salary of $35 a month and permitted him to hire help during bird hunting seasons, he jumped at the offer. So when the afternoon of July 8, 1905 passed, and then the evening rolled by, Frani knew something wasn't right. She still had not heard from or seen her husband.

That night she tossed and turned in bed restless and worried about where Guy was. It was out of character for him to be gone for so long. The next morning, she told a family friend in Flamingo named Jean Roberts what was going on. Jean was a great person to share that information with because he'd periodically worked with Guy as a deputy and knew the waterways around Flamingo and Oyster Keys well. Well enough to know the direction Guy may have drifted if, say for example,

he'd lost an oar or gotten shipwrecked while out patrolling the previous day. So at Franny's request, Jean set out to search for Guy off the coast of Flamingo. But unfortunately the weather conditions on July 9th were not ideal. Rainstorms had moved into the area overnight and made it challenging for Gene to see much of anything in front of him on the water. But despite this, he kept at it throughout the morning, and eventually after a few hours of searching, he located Guy's boat. It was bobbing alone out on the open water a few hundred yards in front of Gene's vessel, near an island known as Sawfish Hole.

Gene quickly sped over to the boat and looked inside, but the sight he found was grim. There at the bottom of the adrift dinghy Guy Bradley had last been seen in, Gene Roberts found the missing game warden. He was dead from a single gunshot wound that appeared to have pierced through his collarbone and come out of his back Gene quickly realized there was nothing he could do for his friend Lying next to guys body was a 32 caliber revolver Which gene noted belonged to guy and looked like it had literally dropped right out of the game warden's hand Gene was obviously shaken up by what he discovered and knew he was going to need help transporting Guy and the dinghy back to Flamingo. So he made what I

imagine was a difficult decision to leave Guy's body and the dinghy near Sawfish Hole and return to Flamingo alone. After he arrived he enlisted the help of some of his brothers and a local coroner judge to assist with the situation. According to the available source material and Stuart McIver's book, it was around this time that Gene broke the bad news to Franny, Guy's wife, as well as Guy's older brother Lou and some of Guy's friends living in Flamingo. The coroner judge who'd accompanied Gene to retrieve Guy's body conducted an examination after the gay warden was returned to shore.

That coroner judge determined that the bullet that had hit Guy had shattered two of his vertebrae. It's unclear though if this examiner felt Guy had died slowly from that wound or if he'd been killed instantly. Personally, I hope it was the latter. The Daily Miami Metropolis reported that Guy was then buried in Flamingo not long after his body was returned to land. When it came to any physical evidence of value inside Guy's boat, there wasn't a whole lot to assess. It was essentially just Guy and his revolver.

And the fact that his gun was there didn't really surprise anyone because, before he taken off to oyster keys on July 8th, Frani had seen him arm himself with his revolver since it was a weapon he often carried on the job. You know, just in case he came across a plume hunter and had a confrontation. What's interesting is that according to Stuart McIver's book, one possible reason why Guy made sure to wear his gun on that particular trip was because right before heading off to investigate the gunfire at Oyster Keys, he'd seen a blue schooner-style boat more

nearby that he recognized as belonging to a troublesome resident of Flamingo named Walter Smith. And just to give you some quick background about Walter, he and his family had moved to the village of Flamingo around the same time as Guy's family. They'd all been neighbors for about the same time as Guy's family. They'd all been neighbors for about seven years prior to Guy's death. In fact, Guy's father had played a big role in convincing Walter and his family to move from the Lake Worth area of Florida to the tiny village of Flamingo. Walter was in his 60s in 1905, a much older man than Guy. He was a military veteran who'd fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War

during the 1860s. His specialty as a soldier had been with a rifle. He was a great shot and knew his way around firearms. After the war ended though, Walter didn't really have much use for his marksmanship and he also didn't have a reliable support system around him. He lived a nomadic lifestyle for a while and took up sailing, which resulted in him living in the Carolinas and Georgia before he eventually wound up in the town of Lake Worth, Florida.

On his journey, he married a woman named Rebecca, had a couple of kids, gotten to know the Bradleys, and his wife became good friends with Guy's mother. Throughout Guy's childhood, he and his brother Lou had joined Walter and his sons on a number of plume hunting expeditions. It wasn't a practice Guy was particularly proud of once he became a game warden, but it would have been during a time

when bird protection laws were not in place. But these childhood experiences may have helped give Guy a bit of a tactical advantage when he became a game warden. However, over time, the friendly relationship between Guy's family and Walter Smith's family soured. For one thing, their once shared hobby of plume hunting had become a sore spot between Guy and Walter. As Guy got older, he started to see the environmental impact

that killing native birds was having on Florida. Walter, not so much. It also didn't help matters that once Guy became a game warden, he'd arrested Walter and one of his sons named Tom for illegally shooting and killing native birds. In fact, Walter had literally uttered the threat to Guy at one point saying, quote, "'You ever arrest one of my boys again, I'll kill you, end quote.

On top of those issues, Guy was also very friendly with a well-known man in Flamingo named Steve Roberts, who yes, was the father of the Gene Roberts who found Guy's body. Guy even referred to Steve as uncle throughout his life. But to make a long story short, Steve Roberts and Walter Smith did not get along and that carried over to how Walter viewed Guy. Steve and Walter were said to be in a bitter power struggle for influence and authority in

the small village of Flamingo. Walter had outright accused Guy of being corrupt and said he was too soft on some of the Roberts when they were caught illegally plume hunting, yet acted more harshly when it came to him and his sons. In addition to all that bad blood, Guy's sister had married a man who'd taken Walter to court in a land dispute in the 1890s. So yeah, there was beef. Lots of it. However, within a day of Guy's body being found and everyone learning about his tragic murder, Walter Smith did something no one expected.

He confessed to the crime. According to the official record in this case, which I should mention is mostly based on Walter Smith's perspective of events, it was Guy Bradley who kicked off the sequence of events that resulted in his death on July 8th, 1905. Walter's account went something like this. His sons, Danny and Tom, had killed some birds on Oyster Keys the morning of July 8th, and they knew Guy was coming out into the bay to investigate their actions. According to Walter's version of events, Guy had said he'd seen at least one of Walter's sons

shoot into the nesting grounds on Oyster Keys and kill two birds. But Walter disagreed with Guy's claim, and he'd yelled back that Guy needed a warrant to enforce such an allegation and have to come onto his boat and get Danny and Tom himself if he wanted to arrest them. Which legally wasn't accurate, but nonetheless the tension, I imagine, was visceral. Walter said he waited on his boat which was stuck in mud at low tide and tried to warn his sons with a few shots into the air that Guy was on his way to get them. Walter said that as Guy got closer, the Game Warden observed that Walter had armed himself

with a rifle. Guy sternly warned him to put down his firearms so that he could come aboard and address the poaching charges with his sons. But Walter didn't heed that warning and at some point he said that Guy cursed at him and fired his revolver in the direction of the Smith's boat, which caused everyone on board to take cover. In the chaos of the moment, Walter said he hid himself behind one of the masts of his boat and aimed his rifle at Guy and returned fire.

With that one shot, he hit Guy and the game warden appeared to get on his knees and try and fire his revolver again, but failed. After that, he slumped forward in his rowboat. Walter and his sons then waited a while to see if Guy moved or showed any signs of life, but he didn't. He remained motionless, adrift in his dinghy. Walter said that he and his boys then packed up and quickly took off toward Flamingo. By 11 a.m., they'd landed their boat back on shore, and shortly afterward,

Walter made the decision to travel to Key West and turn himself in to the local sheriff there. According to Stuart McIver's book, when he came forward to authorities, Walter made the declaration, quote, I've shot Guy Bradley. I don't know whether he's dead or just badly injured, end quote. In the end, Walter was formally arrested and a judge set his bond at $5,000. Tom and Danny, his sons, were considered material witnesses in the case. What it came down to was that Walter claimed he'd been acting in self-defense because it was Guy who had fired first. Upon closer examination though, Walter's story had a couple of noticeable problems.

For example, his initial confession to the sheriff where he stated that he wasn't really sure if he'd actually killed Guy, well, that might not have been the whole truth. You see, right before Walter uttered those words, he'd been telling several of his family members back in Flamingo that he knew Guy was in fact dead, which meant Walter was fibbing to the authorities, to say the least. But there was also just the physical evidence that some folks felt didn't quite add up with Walter's claims. For example, one man close to the case said that the position

of the firing pin in Guy's revolver when it was found indicated that the gun had never been shot. This man also claimed that there were six bullets in the gun, a full chamber, which was another indication that Guy had not fired at Walter like the hunter claimed. Guy was also left-handed and typically held his revolver in his left hand when he would shoot. However, during a preliminary hearing in the case after

Walter's arrest, it was noted that when Guy's body was found, the gunshot that had killed him had entered through his right upper chest near his collarbone and traveled downward in a diagonal manner out of his back. It struck a lot of people as odd that Guy would have sustained such an injury if he'd been shooting at Walter at all. I think the assumption here is that if Guy was squared up reaching out with his left hand and firing his gun in Walter's direction, that would have meant his right shoulder and

upper chest would have been facing away from whatever threat he was confronting. It should have been really hard for Walter's bullet to hit Guy in his upper right chest from that angle. However, if Guy had not been shooting, but instead just sitting in his boat without his gun in his hand, then it would have been a lot easier for someone like Walter to fire down on him and strike his body on his right side. Doctors who weighed in on the case also said that they found it highly unlikely that Guy would have been able to get on his knees and try and fire another shot before eventually collapsing. If you remember, that's what Walter claimed to have seen, but the physicians seemed to

believe that the severity of Guy's gunshot wound would have rendered him pretty unable to get to his knees, like Walter had said. Steve Roberts, that prominent man from Flamingo I told you about earlier who knew Guy well but didn't get along with Walter, voiced his theory at one point saying, it was a cold-blooded murder, and he deliberately sent his voice into that rookery for the purpose of enticing Bradley out for the purpose of killing him." Fueling these kinds of theories were whispers that perhaps Guy knew Walter was waiting for an opportunity to take him out. For example, in March of 1905, just a few months before the murder, Guy had told some friends of his in the Audubon community that he was concerned for his life. He remarked to one man that he was particularly worried about a certain plume hunter he might

have to arrest. He didn't state the hunter's name specifically, but Guy did describe this poacher as a quote dangerous character, end quote. A few months before that, during the winter time, Walter Smith's house in Flamingo had been shot up by a group of rogue gunners while his wife and kids were inside with him. Walter immediately assumed the men behind the attack were related to the Roberts family. In the wake of that incident, Walter had gone out and purchased the Winchester rifle that he'd eventually shoot and kill Guy with.

The president of the National Association of Audubon Societies at the time told the Miami Evening Record, quote, Bradley's death was not accidental. He was a real martyr to the cause and met death heroically in the discharge of his duties as bird warden. He had been threatened with death if he ever attempted to make an arrest by the plume hunters of Florida. And yet in the face of this grave danger, he coolly took the risk and lost his life in carrying out his charge." During his time as a game warden, guys' crackdown on plume hunters had driven up the price of

feathers. It was like the more the law was enforced, the more the demand of plumes skyrocketed because there were less and less hunters able to get their hands on native birds. But despite how strong the case against Walter was, five months after Guy's death, in early December 1905, a grand jury in Key West decided not to indict him for the murder. Yeah, according to Stuart MacGyver's book, prosecutors on the case didn't make a strong enough effort to present a solid case to the grand jury. They only called one witness to testify, Steve Roberts, who everyone at that

point knew was a staunch enemy of Walters. A lot of the inconsistencies in Walters version of events also went unaddressed by the lawyers, and so essentially the grand jury had no choice but to return with a bill not to indict. Walter walked out of jail a free man, but he wasn't done with the inside of a courtroom quite yet. He and a lawyer from New York ended up suing two major news publications at the time for libel. Some of the articles these magazines had put out about the case had specifically referred to Walter as a quote, murderer, end quote. Which, as a journalist, I can tell you is a big no-no if a person has not actually been convicted of that crime.

Walter successfully won his libel lawsuits, but in the end, he only got a few hundred dollars in damages, which would probably equate to a decent amount of money today. I'm not sure. He passed away in January 1935, with few people at that point really associating his name with Guy's murder. Frani and Guy's two sons received a lot of support from the conservation and Audubon communities after the murder.

Hundreds of dollars in donations poured in, and a fund was set up to provide income and housing for the grieving widow and her children Eventually she used most of the money to purchase a house in Key West and the rest she set aside to provide for her boys For several weeks after the murder guy's job as game warden of Monroe County remained vacant Not many men wanted to take on the liability of facing off with poachers who were willing to kill not just animals, but human beings. The Daily Miami Metropolis reported that eventually in August of 1905, a man named Eugene Bates was given the title and took up where Guy left off.

A harsh reality I discovered while reading the source material for this episode was that Guy Bradley may have been the first game warden to be killed in the line of duty in Florida, but he was far from the last. According to author Stuart MacGyver's book, another warden named Columbus MacLeod disappeared on a patrol boat in October 1908, just three years after Guy's murder. He'd been on duty in a harbor off Florida's west coast looking for poachers, and almost right away investigators and the public thought that something nefarious had happened to him. Those suspicions turned out to be right, because a few months later his vessel turned up.

Inside, searchers found two sacks full of sand that appeared to be used to weigh it down, as well as several deep cuts in the crown of the boat that appeared to come from an axe. Still stuck in the chop marks were tufts of hair and blood. Columbus's body was never located and no one was ever prosecuted. Unfortunately, over the years natural disasters like hurricanes have taken their toll on Guy's final resting place and the famous rookeries he gave his life to protect. In 1960, Hurricane Donna churned over what remained of Cuthbert Rookery, as well as Guy's grave site. After the storm passed, a park worker found

the commemorative plaque that had been placed in his honor and brought it to the Flamingo Visitor Center of Everglades National Park. It remains there to this day, along with an even bigger memorial that was built by the Tropical Audubon Society of Miami. The sign for that monument says, quote, Audubon Warden was shot and killed off this shore

by outlaw feather hunters, July 8th, 1905. His martyrdom created nationwide indignation, strengthened bird protection laws, and helped bring Everglades National Park into being." Now, I don't know about you, but I'd say that's one heck of a legacy to leave behind. And I'm sure it's the lasting memory Guy would have wanted the public to have of him and the native birds he was charged with protecting. Park Predators is an AudioChuck production.

You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com, and you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, at ParkPredators. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?