Bat Chit Crazy Life of Thomas Cook: 52 Ancestors 2025 Prompt “Institutions”

Tumultuous Homelife Leads to Prison and a Grim Night on an Arizona Cliff

Thomas Joseph Cook: 1929-1957 (Maternal Third Cousin 2x Removed)

 

While researching Elmer Cook for my previous post, I reviewed records for his children, including his son Thomas Joseph Cook. I discovered that Thomas’ life was cut even shorter than his father’s and was equally troubled, including a stint in an institution: a prison.

Thomas was born April 24, 1929 in McLean County, Kentucky, to parents Elmer Cook and Lula Aldrige. Following his father’s murder in 1936 when Thomas was seven, Thomas’ mother was unable to keep the children together. She separated them and sent them to live with various relatives. Thomas’ sister Lottie May was sent to live with Elmer’s cousin Otis and was eventually adopted by him and his wife. The youngest child, Mary Alice, was adopted by a family named Weatherford. Thomas was sent to live with Tennie Aldrige, his grandmother. He appears in her Owensboro household in the 1940 census, although she has reported him as her nephew rather than her grandson.

Thomas apparently moved to California at some point and ended up in prison. The 1950 census finds him as an inmate at San Quentin, a state prison near San Rafael, California. I have been unable to find any news articles that explain his crime, and it is unclear how long he was institutionalized.  

1950 Census for San Quentin Prison showing Thomas Cook of Kentucky as an inmate.

He ended up in Arizona after his release, working for a guano mine on the rim of the Grand Canyon. U.S. Guano Corp. began mining bat guano from a large cave above the canyon. Guano was used for fertilizer, and erroneous estimates claimed there were hundreds of thousands of dollars of guano in the cave. A tram was built across the Grand Canyon to transport the guano, and miners were hired to dig and sweep up the guano from the cave. The mine barely operated three or four years before closing down due to unprofitability.

Historical Marker at U.S. Guano Corp. site. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

In the wee hours of Christmas Eve 1957, Thomas somehow fell off the cliff near the tram loading area. He plunged 125 feet, landing on a ledge where fellow employees and sheriff’s department officers recovered his body.

The incident was reported in the local newspaper rather matter-of-factly, but it must have been a little murkier than the article suggested. The death certificate was not signed until January 3, ten days after Thomas’ death. The cause of death reads:

“Coroners Jury Verdict: Injuries sustained in an accidental fall off of the cliff near the upper tower at the Bat-Chit U.S. Guano Cave.”

Further down on the certificate, it notes time of death was 12:10 a.m. (after midnight) and that the death occurred “not while at work”. Thomas’ job position was listed as “mechanic” so he wasn’t one of the miners actually digging up the guano. Still, there would have been questions about why Thomas was at the cliff edge long after the workday was over, enough questions that the death was brought before a coroner’s jury to rule out foul play or even suicide.

View of cliff edge by tram area, the approximate area Thomas fell from. Photo Wikimedia Commons.

On a lighter note, I loved that the location of the death was “Bat Chit”—probably a humorous nickname for the site of a cave full of bat you-know-what. And Bat Chit Crazy sums up Thomas’ short and tragic life.

Following his death, his body was returned to Owensboro for burial, and Thomas was buried in Brushy Fork Cemetery where his grandfather George Edward “Ned” Cook is buried. Thomas’ obituary lists his mother’s address at the time of his death as Kingman, Arizona, which was the town nearest the guano mine. Perhaps he had been living with his mother after he was released from San Quentin.

 

Sources:

Photo of Guano Point Mine Ruins, Grand Canyon, AZ. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guano_Point,_Grand_Canyon,_AZ,_USA_(9536784300).jpg

“Grand Canyon Fall Fatal to Worker”. Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Arizona. Dec. 25, 1957.

Thomas Cook Death Certificate. Ancestry.com. Arizona, U.S., Death Records, 1887-1968 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.

“Former Owensboroan Killed in Fall in Arizona”. Owensboro Messenger Inquirer. Owensboro, Kentucky. Jan. 8, 1958.

Changing Definition of Incest: 52 Ancestors 2025 Prompt “Language”

Elmer Cook’s Non-Incestuous “Incestuous” Marriage

Elmer Cook: 1892-1936 (Maternal Second Cousin 3x Removed)
 

Ancestry Pro had flagged some of the people on my tree as lacking sources, so I set out to fix some of them, including second cousin Elmer Cook. When I started reviewing hints for Elmer, in addition to finding proper sources for his birth and death dates, I found some eye-opening news articles about his life. I was especially shocked to read that he was arrested for incest in Kentucky in October 1926. But the more I read, the more confused I became. The supposed incest described in the news article is no longer considered incestuous at all! Has the word changed meaning, or is legal language simply different than common usage?

So what did Elmer Cook do that landed him in jail? He married his father’s widow—a woman unrelated to him except by marriage. This hardly meets the current definition of incest, which involves sexual contact between close blood relatives. However, the Kentucky statutes still include stepparent and stepchild relationships under the incest statute, which reads as follows:

530.020 Incest.

(1) A person is guilty of incest when he or she has sexual intercourse or deviate sexual intercourse, as defined in KRS 510.010, with a person whom he or she knows to be his or her parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, great-grandparent, great-grandchild, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, brother, sister, first cousin, ancestor, or descendant. The relationships referred to herein include blood relationships of either the whole or half blood without regard to legitimacy, relationship of parent and child by adoption, relationship of stepparent and stepchild, and relationship of step-grandparent and step-grandchild.

Apparently several other states have similar definitions. I can certainly see how a stepparent relationship with a much younger stepchild partner could be considered an imbalance of power and sexual grooming and thus be a criminal act, but that hardly applied in the case of Elmer and his stepmother, who were both in their thirties when arrested. So obviously, the legal definition of incest can be quite different than what the layman understands is incestuous.

So how did Elmer get into this situation?

Elmer Cook was born January 12, 1892 to parents George “Ned” Cook and Arra “Airry” Moseley. He was the third of their four children. Airry died when Elmer was only two years old, and Elmer’s father went on to marry two other women, Mary Addie Farrell and Bessie Arnold. George married Bessie April 26, 1912. George was 54, and Bessie was only 23. They went on to have seven children over the fourteen years of their marriage; these children were Elmer’s half-siblings.

By the time George died on August 8, 1926, Elmer was 34 and still living at George’s home. Bessie was 39. According to the article, Bessie decided to marry Elmer because the neighbors were insisting that they needed to marry—they were probably offended that an unmarried man was living with the widow, and assumed the worst (whether or not their assumptions were correct). Bessie argued that she was unaware that Kentucky law forbade such a marriage, which is understandable. She had probably never thought of Elmer as her son, after all, for he had been an adult, nearly twenty, when she married Elmer’s father. Admittedly, the wedding was a bit hasty. George died in August, and she married Elmer only a month later.

The supposedly incestuous union was quickly annulled following Elmer and Bessie’s arrest. Apparently, they were released from custody once the marriage was annulled and faced no further fines or jail time. Both went on to marry other people.

Elmer married Lula Aldrich sometime around 1928. They had three children, Thomas, born April 24, 1931; Lottie May, born April 26, 1933; and Mary Alice, born March 27, 1935.

Elmer had some run-ins with the law as a young man. He had various problems selling land he inherited from his mother’s family, and was taken to court over it. He was charged with grand larceny in 1916 over the theft of brass fittings from a local company.

 

But in 1936, he ran into more serious trouble. Elmer was working at a slaughterhouse, and lodging in Owensboro. He got into an altercation with another lodger named Will Warren. Apparently Elmer had a pocketknife and used it to slash Warren on the forehead. Warren had a butcher knife, and stabbed Elmer in the abdomen. News articles stated Elmer’s intestine was perforated, and that surgery was unsuccessful in saving his life. He died on October 16, two days after the stabbing.

 

In another example of strange legal language, the killer, Warren, was first charged with “malicious cutting”, which seems to downplay the seriousness of the incident. Following Elmer’s death, the charge was changed to murder, but only after Elmer’s brother Arthur swore out a warrant. The killer was eventually able to cut a plea deal for voluntary manslaughter and ended up with a ten-year sentence for Elmer’s death.

Elmer’s family was devastated by his loss. His wife was unable to care for the three children and farmed them out to separate relatives who ended up raising them.

 

Sources:

News Articles from the Owensboro Messenger, Owensboro, KY. , all accessed on Newspapers.com:

            “Elmer Cook is Held Over to the Grand Jury”. April 23, 1916.

            “Marriage License.” Sept. 24, 1926.

            “Man Marries Step-mother”. Oct. 8, 1926.

            “Divorce Suit.” Oct 9, 1926.

            “Man is Stabbed in Abdomen Here”. Oct. 15, 1936.

            “Butcher Knife Wound is Fatal to Elmer Cook.” Oct. 17, 1936.

            “Knife Victim to Be Buried Today.” Oct. 18, 1936.