The Last Bad Man Of The West
True Crime Historian
Richard O Jones
4.4 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Episode 454 takes us back to the end of the Old West era, where a cattleman’s agent is arrested for the murder of a sheep farmer’s son. Yes, that was a real conflict back then. Tom Horn, the hired gun, had a long history of adventure, deeds good and foul, but the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy was a bullet too far for the colorful Tom Horn, who wrote a book about his life and exploits that you can download at the Safe House.Culled from the historic pages of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, the Salt Lake Herald, and other newspapers of the era.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Cheyenne, Wyoming, October 30th, 1902. |
| 0:07.0 | Tom Horn, bad man of the West, will probably pay the death penalty for having killed a 14-year-old boy. |
| 0:15.0 | Horn is bad in every sense of the word. He has killed more than half a dozen and wounded twice that number. |
| 0:23.1 | He once served as a government scout in expeditions against the Indians and played no small part in |
| 0:29.1 | the Spanish War. It was Tom Horn, now a convicted murderer, who committed the famous |
| 0:34.8 | theft of General Shafter's cow. Horn had gone to Cuba as the leader of a band of |
| 0:39.8 | scouts. On the first day of his arrival, he learned that a Cuban had presented General Shafter with a cow. |
| 0:45.5 | That night, the cow disappeared. Two days later, it was found nailed to a tree in front of Shafter's |
| 0:51.1 | tent. The animal furnished a feast for the scouts. Shafter raged and swore, |
| 0:56.4 | but never discovered who had stolen the animal. When Horn returned from the war, |
| 1:00.7 | he obtained a position as a private detective for the cattleman of Montana. It was while performing |
| 1:05.8 | this work that he is alleged to have killed 14-year-old Willie Nicol. Sometime after the boy had been slain, |
| 1:11.6 | Horn boasted to a man of the name of Lafour's, a government detective, that he had committed the murder. |
| 1:18.6 | It was upon this statement that he was arrested and placed on trial. After the jury had announced |
| 1:23.6 | its verdict finding Horn guilty of murder in the first degree, he yawned and requested his guards to take him back to jail. |
| 1:31.3 | He said, quote, they'll never swing me for this. |
| 1:34.3 | In the first place I didn't kill the kid, and in the next place, that jury simply had it in for me. |
| 1:40.3 | When a man who's ever done anything in his life gets into jail, everybody wants to take a fall out of him. |
| 1:46.7 | That's the way it is with me. The bad man has plenty of friends here who believe he is the victim of |
| 1:52.2 | malicious persecution. Most of these friends are young fellows from the plains. They look upon Horn as they |
| 1:58.4 | would a dime novel hero. They believe that the law-abiding element in Colorado framed up a case against him |
| 2:04.5 | just because he has figured in numerous desperate fights. |
... |
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