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••When the judge said ‘You are to be hung by theneck until you are dead, dead, dead,’Carrie Baker JohnstonCity copskidnappedby robbersPans policemen R.N. “Newt” Baker and H.R. “Tutt” Marks were both successful policeofficers.Baker retired,in 1954 alter 30 years, achieving the rank of lieutenant; Marks served as police chief for 11 years and was named one of the top chiefs in the state.When Marks died in 1959 Texas Sen. A.M. Aikin and Rep. George Preston introduced resolutions in the Texas Legislat ure honoring: him.Baker and Marks shared a common bond over the years.They were kidnapped and held hostage in Oklahoma.The two were on patrol in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 26, 1934, when they came upon a car with Arkansas license plates parked outside Clyde Moore’s service station on North Main Street. Aman named Williams was changing the car’s tire. ^That looks like a bootlegger’s or hijacker’s car,” Baker said to Marks.Baker wrote an article for The Paris News the day after the kidnapping. In that article he said mud on the car had caught his attention.Inside, Baker and Marks encountered Ambrose Nix and Arthur Gooch, who had escaped a month earlier from a Holdenville, Okla., jail.Baker asked where the car was purchased and who owned it. Gooch claimed ownership and said the vehicle cost $675. It was later discovered the car was stolen the day before from Durant, Okla.Motioning to Gooch, Baker told Marks “to see what he’s got.”According to Baker’s newspaper story, he drew his gun, “but the smaller man (Nix) beat me and shoved a pistol almost against my head, saying Drop that gun or I’ll kill you.’ ”Baker dropped his gun as Marks and Nix struggled. Baker tried to retrieve his gun, but was pushed into a glass display case, cutting his hip.Nix and Gooch ordered Baker and Marks out at gunpoint. They took shotguns, rifles, pistols, a sack of money, food and clothes from their car and the four climbed into the patrol car. While Nix drove, Gooch kept a sawed-off shotgun trained on Baker and Marks. They headed north to Oklahoma where they drove around until daylight.The officers remained in thecar all day, allowed out “when necessary,” Baker said, “but they would stand 15 to 20 feet away from us with a gun ready.”It was then that Baker persuaded his captors to dress the wound on his hip.Baker, in his article, wrote that one of the men said: “I don’t givea damn if you bleed to death.”The two had no food or water to drink, but Nix and Gooch gavethe men cigarettes and matches.After dark, the four drove to Rattan, Okla., for gas, which they paid for with nickels and dimes from the sack. The two were suspected of robbing a Tyler lunch stand operator of $80 the day before the kidnapping.With gas in the car, the pah-handed Baker and Marks a flash-*•?lt;- • • v-V \ -KidnappersCarrie Baker Johnston’s late husband, R.N. Newt” Baker, was kidnapped with fellow Paris Policeman H.R. Tutt Marks in 1934. Mrs. Johnston recently recalled the ordeal.Newt’s wife restrainedher tears during ordealCarrie Baker Johnston didn’t cry when her husband was kidnapped.“I don’t cry easily. A policeman’s wife has to learn she can’t cry over every little thing. It takes a particular kind of woman to be a real policeman’s wife,”Mrs. Johnston, now 90, said.When her husband, R.M.“Newt” Baker, returned home from his ordeal, “I cried,” shesaid. “I hadn’t cried until then.He looked over at me and said,'Are you sorry I came home?’ ”Mrs. Johnston, who remarried after Newt died in 1973, recently recalled her husband’s kidnapping.Paris policemen Newt and H.R. Tutt” Marks were on patrol in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 26, 1934, when they came upon a carSee Wife, Page 16B“■nutR.N. “Newt” BakerSee Kidnapped, Page 16Bpaid withtheir livesAmbrose Nix died in hail ofgunfire on Dec. 23, 1934 in Oke-mah, Okla.Arthur Gooch died at the end of rope on June 19, 1936, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Muskogee.“He was an Indian boy,” Carrie Baker Johnston, widow of kidnapped policeman R.N. “Newt” Baker, said.“After being in jail so long, his skin was perfectly beautiful and he had coal black hair.”Mrs. Johnston sat behind Gooclduring the trials.“I was so happy that they had turned my husband loose that when the judge pronounced the sentence, You are to be hung by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead,’ I cried. I cried because if I had had my way I would have turned him loose just like he had turned Marks and Newt loose,” she recalled.■ Mrs. Johnston said he did not want to see Gooch killed for hiscrimes.u‘He was young. I felt sorry for him. That's the only way it can be placed; I felt sorry for him. I was so happy that he had let mine go that I would have let him go.”Lee Mann, the public information coordinator for the prison, said Gooch was “hanged as a courtesy to the federal government.” All other executions at the prison were done by electrocution.Nix and Gooch were stopped by federal and Oklahoma state officers investigating the Dec. 22,1934, robbery of the Okemah bank, from which $17,000 was taken.According to newspaper accounts, Nix opened fire on the officers; Gooch, unhurt, was taken into custody.At the jail, as the story goes, afilling station operator approached Gooch, accused him of robbing hisstation and put a gun to his face. The man pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire.Nix and Gooch were also suspected of holding up a Haileyville, Okla., store a few days before thebank robbery. It was said, too,that they stole $80 from a lunch stand owner in Tyler the night before taking Baker and Marks captive. The car they drove to Paris was stolen from Durant, Okla.Jail was not a foreign place for either Nix or Gooch. The two had escaped from a Holdenville, Okla., jail with four other men about amonth before arriving in Paris.Gooch pleaded guilty to kidnapping and causing bodily harm to Baker. However, the court refused to accept Gooch’s guilty pleas, turning the matter over to a jury, which found him guilty. Judge R.L. Williams of the Eastern District of Oklahoma ordered Gooch hanged.Mrs. Johnston said she remembers what the judge looked like.“He was a little short. I never saw him walking, I don’t think, but you could tell he wasn’t very tall. He would have been in his 50s or something like that. He was a*nice-looking judge, but I wasn’t interested in the judge. I was interested in all the different characters they brought forward.”The story was told from theSee Gooch. Page 16B
Newspaper Details
Paris News
Paris, Texas, US
Sun, Mar 07, 1993
Page 84
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 24 Jun 2019
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