1 case tagged “dime novel legend”
Convicted: Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr
Two days before her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr was riding home alone along a dirt road near Briartown in Indian Territory when someone shot her in the back. Twice. She fell from her horse, and the shooter approached and fired again, leaving wounds across her neck, shoulder, and face. It was February 3, 1889, and the woman the New York Times would soon call 'a most desperate woman' never saw forty-one. Her murder has never been solved. History remembers her as Belle Starr, the 'Bandit Queen' of the Old West: pistol-carrying, sidesaddle-riding, a known associate of Jesse James who harbored outlaws at her ranch on the Canadian River. But the truth is both stranger and more human than the dime novel legend that was already being written before her body was cold. She had a classical education. She could play the piano. She had two children, a series of husbands who kept dying violently, and exactly one criminal conviction on her record: horse theft. This is the story of how a Missouri innkeeper's daughter became America's most famous female outlaw, and who might have been waiting in ambush on that winter road outside Briartown.
