Lawman, hothead, bane of region

One of the most feared men in 19th century Los Angeles wore a badge. Both his temper and his trigger finger were notoriously quick, and, after a business partner he had defrauded shot him to death, hundreds attended his funeral but few mourned him.

Joseph Franklin Dye was a lawman, oilman and rancher who dispensed his own form of justice in 1870 by killing his boss, City Marshal William Warren. But that was hardly Dye’s only brush with the wrong side of the law, according to newspaper accounts and a recently published book.

Born in Kentucky in 1831 as one of 16 children in a family that later settled in Texas, Dye began his life of violence in his 20s. According to William B. Secrest’s 2007 book, “California Badmen,” Dye left the family farm at age 22 and worked throughout the Southwest for several years as a miner and mule-team driver. He shot a man, wounding him in the neck during a fight over a card game.

Secrest’s research put Dye in California during the Civil War, when the state was a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers. “Everything points to him joining a gang of killers and robbers called the Mason-Henry gang,” Secrest said in a recent interview.

After the war, Dye was hired as a special deputy in El Monte, tracking down thieves as far away as Salt Lake City.

In 1867, impressed with Dye’s tracking and shooting skills, Los Angeles City Marshal Warren, a former Union soldier serving in a job equivalent to today’s chief of police, hired Dye to patrol Chinatown, where gambling halls, saloons and bordellos flourished.

Three years later, Dye and Warren had a falling-out over a former Union soldier whom Warren wanted to hire. But tough cops were hard to find, so Warren kept Dye on the city’s eight-man force as their relationship continued to deteriorate. The fatal confrontation came in 1870 over a $100 reward; Dye felt he had earned a share in the reward, but Warren refused him.

Furious, Dye stopped Warren as he walked from the courthouse across Spring Street near where City Hall stands today, according to Secrest’s book.

“Sir, you have robbed me of that money,” Dye yelled as he approached his boss.

“You’re a liar,” Warren shot back. As he turned, just five feet away from Dye, Warren pulled out his derringer and fired at Dye, grazing his forehead. Both men then drew their six-shooters and began firing wildly, according to the book.

An officer on duty who tried to interfere was shot in the arm. Another officer was shot in the hand, and a bystander took a bullet in the jaw.

Dye, with a bullet wound in his thigh and his pistol empty, rushed at Warren, who lay dying in the street. Dye beat Warren with his pistol, then lifted the nearly dead man by his coat lapels and bit his ear, Secrest wrote.

By the time Warren was buried a few days later, Dye was out on bail and, astonishingly, back on duty. But when a new marshal took over, Dye was fired. At Dye’s murder trial in February 1871, all of the witnesses testified that Warren had shot first, and Dye was promptly acquitted.

Fearing reprisals from vigilante friends of Warren, Dye moved to what would become Ventura County and took up a government land claim in Sespe Canyon in partnership with a few wealthy Angelenos to prospect for oil.

Throughout the early 1870s and ‘80s, Dye drifted back and forth to Los Angeles, stirring up trouble by starting fights and pointing his loaded pistol in the faces of enemies. During this period, Dye married a young woman named Lorena Grace and took her back to Ventura County with their baby daughter.

But whatever happiness they might have had was short-lived. According to Secrest’s book, Dye’s wife began an affair with one of her husband’s Los Angeles partners, H. J. Crow. Crow communicated with her by sending letters to an intermediary, Santa Paula merchant Herman Haines.

After a while, Haines wrote his own note to Dye’s wife, threatening to expose her affair with Crow if she did not meet him in her barn late one night. In a note she sent by courier to Haines, she wrote her refusal, calling him “You Dirty Dog!”

Dye, by then 55 years old, intercepted the messenger himself and confiscated the letter.

In the space of a few days in 1886, Dye’s wife fled and he rode with his daughter to Los Angeles, where he put her in an orphanage, then returned to Santa Paula, where he shot and killed Haines.

Set to be tried in Ventura, Dye hired two prominent lawyers, future California Gov. Henry T. Gage and future U.S. Sen. Stephen White. Despite this “dream team” of defense attorneys, a jury convicted Dye of second-degree murder. But Gage and White won their client a new trial in 1888 and Dye was acquitted.

Dye went back to farming and tending to the Sespe Oil Field, taking on a new partner, Mason Bradfield. When Bradfield refused to help Dye in an illegal oil scheme, Dye beat him up, then stalked and threatened to kill him.

But Dye had crossed the wrong man at last. On the afternoon of May 14, 1891, Bradfield found Dye, then 60, as he walked near Alameda and Commercial streets in downtown Los Angeles and killed him with two shotgun blasts. A jury found Bradfield not guilty, believing the killing to be in self-defense.

Dye’s obituary in a Santa Paula newspaper claimed that “his death gave relief in Ventura County” and said he had died “unmourned and unregretted.”

“Hundreds showed up for his funeral,” Secrest wrote in his book, “because they wanted to make sure a very bad man was really dead.”

Dye is buried in an unmarked grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights.

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cecilia.rasmussen@latimes .com