Hellbent Sheriff

I am hellbent to keep Beeville cleaned up so a lady can go up the street day or night.

I never take but one shot.

Both statements have lisped from the pale, thin lips of Bee County's Sheriff Robert Vail Ennis. And both statements have been roughly true. Day or night a lady could sashay unmenaced up Beeville's streets, past the cream stuccoed Kohler Hotel, the Blue Bonnet Cafe, and the two-story buff brick jail where Sheriff Ennis lives with his wife and daughter and keeps evildoers under lock & key.

The roughness in the second statement has been more apparent. In the past four years in Beeville (pop. 7,000), a South Texas oil and cattle town, Sheriff Ennis has killed seven people with his .44 Colt revolver and his .45 submachine gun--not all, however, with one shot.

Rip-Tail Roarer. A Nacogdoches County boy who never finished high school, Vail Ennis high-tailed it for the oilfields when he was 16. He neither drank nor smoked, but he was a heller who would try to whup the pants off anybody he met. The Bee County sheriff cottoned to this abstemious rip-tail roarer and made him his chief deputy in 1941. In 1943, Vail killed his first man when he shot "his way out of a tight place while making an arrest. He was tried for murder, and acquitted. A year later he was elected sheriff. Fifteen days on the job, he blasted the life out of a big Negro he had brought into the jail office for disturbing the peace. The prisoner, he said, had tried to take his gun. There were no witnesses.

One day in July 1945, Vail was handed a court order, told to go out to a ranch five miles west of town and get Jesusa Rodriguez' two children. Jesusa had been divorced from Geronimo Rodriguez and was supposed to have the children for the next six months. They were living with Geronimo's old man, Felix.

Old Felix had a shotgun in the house; whether or not he pointed it at Sheriff Ennis is still in dispute. Anyway, the sheriff let go with his submachine gun. Felix tottered backward, died in his daughter Victoria's arms. Geronimo's uncles, Domingo and Antonio, came running from the back of the house. Ennis wheeled on the porch, fired another burst. They fell dead, too. Economical Ennis had fired only five shots--two for Felix, two for Dom and one for Tony.

In nearby Victoria County, a jury trying Vail for Felix's murder freed him in an hour and 35 minutes. Later he was acquitted of killing Domingo. The third case never came to trial. Back in Beeville, 21 leading citizens got up a petition for Vail's ouster. But six months later, Vail was reelected.

Deliberate Reloading. Last week he almost met his equal--but not quite. He went to the town of Pettus on a tip that two bum-check suspects might be going that way. They were. Vail got them in front of Houston Prewet's filling station, handcuffed them and pushed them into the station office while he made a phone call. One of them whipped a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster and put four slugs in Vail. That was his mistake.

Bleeding but upright, Vail turned from the phone, pulling his Colt from its hip holster; he pumped six shots at the manacled prisoners. Deliberately, he reloaded and pumped six more. When the smoke cleared away, both men were dead.

In Beeville's Thomas Memorial Hospital, hothouse blooms banked all about his big room, Vail Ennis lay gravely wounded, his intestines riddled, a hip and arm ripped by bullets. But he was still alive.

Said a Beeville resident: "They might as well have gone out and hanged themselves as to pull a gun on Vail."

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