Crime did not pay for Big Thicket Brothers

“Red” Goleman and an accomplice held up the bank at Hull in Liberty County on July 26, 1939.  The Big Thicket bandit was setting a dangerous example for a younger brother, who would someday follow in his footsteps.

The Goleman boys grew up in the Big Thicket region of southeast Texas, where their overworked mother took in washing to put food on the table.  Thomas Jefferson, the older son known as “Red” got off to a bad start as a backwoods moonshiner and eventually graduated to violent crime.

Locking two terrified tellers in the vault, Red Goleman and his sidekick made off with $12,000 from the Hull State Bank.  A few minutes after their clean getaway, a customer strolled into the deserted bank and called out jokingly, “Where is everybody? This would an ideal time for a bank robbery.”

Soon after his partner in crime was caught, Red was turned into the Hardin County sheriff by disapproving relatives from the law-abiding side of the Goleman clan.  Scoffing at the suggestion he hire an attorney, the robber admitted his guilt and added, “I’m going to face the music like a man.”

But it only took a few days behind bars to dramatically change his attitude.  Despite a previous failure to appear in court, trusting authorities allowed Red to go free on bail. He predictably disappeared into the natural maze called the Big Thicket.

When not enjoying the hospitality of sympathetic friends and kinfolk, the fugitive lived off the land surviving on a diet of roots and berries.  An army of searchers staged a series of sweeps without finding a trace of their elusive prey.

Although his pursuers never realized it, Red twice slipped right through their fingers. Trackers once came within several yards of the runaway before he scampered across a swamp.  On another occasion, unsuspecting officers interrogated Red’s grandmother while he hid in her attic.

Shortly after being branded “Texas Public Enemy Number One,” Red emerged from the Big Thicket long enough to rob and shoot a Beaumont cab driver.  Positively identified by the victim as a second gunman was Red’s little brother Darious, who was subsequently apprehended.

A tantalizing tip in April 1940 led the weary posse back to the grandmother’s farm. Regular visits by family members to a shed out back convinced lawmen that they had their man at last.

While his relatives were held at gunpoint in the house, Red was given the chance to surrender.  His answer was a defiant gunshot, the signal for the posse to riddle the shed with return fire.

From as far away as Missouri and Mississippi, the curious flocked to the funeral of the notorious outlaw.  A jostling mob of 4,000 pushed and shoved for a closer look at the badman in the open casket.  Charging ten cents a person, the bereaved family conducted a tour of the shoot-out site.

Standing a few feet from the coffin were Darious Goleman and his grandmother, who wanted the wild youth to straighten up and fly right if he did not want to wind up like his dead brother. But her stern lecture and a short stretch in prison proved to be no deterrence.

Red’s infamous record and the murder convictions of two uncles helped to persuade a grand jury in June 1949 that Darious should stand trial for the slaying of a housewife, who allegedly gave him a ride.  Found guilty on the basis of a signed confession, which too late he recanted, Darious was sentenced to die in the electric chair at Huntsville.

Back in those days, Death Row was strictly a temporary address rather than a place of indefinite detention.  After a short two-month postponement, the condemned convict ordered the traditional last meal.

Chatting between bites with a newspaperman, Darious stubbornly maintained his innocence insisting the police had beaten a false confession out of him.  He muttered bitterly, “I just can’t get religious enough to forgive them.”

Rejecting the customary offer from the warden to make a final statement, Darious walked through the forbidding green door at the stroke of midnight on Feb. 3, 1953.  He was strapped into “Old Sparky”, and the thick leather mask was lowered over his face.  The silent signal was given, the switch was pulled and the generator made the eerie whirring sound.

Darious Goleman was dead before his time, the 23rd Texan to die in the electric chair.

He could have listened to his grandmother and profited from his brother Red’s mistakes but chose instead to make his own.  That was his choice and he lived and died by it.

Bartee welcomes your comments and questions at [email protected] or P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.