Indianapolis. Following a divorce and with her four children in tow, May Lee relocated to a Brown County property homesteaded by the Lee family prior to the Civil War.
On the night of his ninth-grade graduation, Ralph Lee, broke into the O. U. Mutz hardware store to steal guns and ammunition. While escaping he shot and severely wounded William Goodin, town marshall.
After being caught, Lee spent two years at the Indiana Reform School for Boys in Plainfield. Upon release he engaged in a streak of thievery in Brown, Johnson, and Bartholomew counties. Arrested and
Lee’ s painting of Will Rogers. courtesy of Johnson County Museum of History deposited in the county jail in Columbus, Lee crushed the skull of the constable with an iron bar while escaping.
Stopping in a field near Markle to unearth $ 11,000 of his buried booty, 20-year-old Lee headed west. In Washington Lee was convicted of forgery, but escaped on his way to the Washington State Reformatory. In Arizona, he served two years behind bars as the“ Bisbee Gray- Cap Bandit.” Upon release, he broke parole and returned to Indiana. With a forged WWI Honorable Discharge Certificate while appearing before a Bartholomew County circuit court judge, Lee begged for leniency for earlier Indiana crimes.
Captivated by the outlaw Lee’ s story as told by her grandfather shortly before his death, Jeanine Wright Smith researched archival records in Indianapolis. There were thousands of clippings about Lee from the Indianapolis Star. He was arrested over and over, escaping thirteen times. When convicted of grand larceny in Indianapolis, Lee was sent to the Indiana Reformatory in Pendleton and served time with John Dillinger. They escaped in April of 1923, with Lee returning and escaping again in May. In July 1924, the fugitive Lee was identified by all eye-witnesses of the murder of Speedway storekeeper, Abner Peek.
A string of escapes, arrests, and incarcerations continued. Given to dark manifestations of his creative genius, Lee ran a counterfeiting plant while serving five years in a state prison in Tennessee. In 1932, Lee was turned over to federal authorities. Complications from wounds during a shootout landed Lee in the Springfield, Missouri Federal Prison Hospital in 1938, where new approaches to rehabilitation were implemented. It was
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