The Murder of Rodgers and Wingfield

Camp Verde, Arizona Territory — July 2, 1899

On Sunday evening, July 2, 1899, R. M. “Mack” Rodgers and Clinton DeWitt Wingfield were preparing to close their store at Camp Verde when gunfire shattered the evening.

Two days later, an Arizona newspaper carried the story beneath a stark headline: “A VERDE MASSACRE.” The first reports were brief, but they provide a contemporary account of a crime that would soon become tangled with rumor, pursuit, and the name of one of the Southwest’s better-known outlaws.

Rodgers and Wingfield operated a country store under the firm name of Rodgers & Wingfield. The July 4 report described Camp Verde as twenty-four miles from Jerome in the Verde Valley and noted that the store did a heavy seasonal business with tourists and travelers going to and from the Grand Canyon.

That Sunday evening, according to the newspaper, Rodgers and Wingfield were closing the store for the night when three men opened fire without warning.

Rodgers and Wingfield were killed.

Captain John Boyd, who was at the store with them and was described by the newspaper as “a noted character in Arizona,” survived the attack but was shot through the leg.

The early report gives no elaborate account of an argument, confrontation, or demand for money. It simply states that the three men opened fire. The killers were described as supposed robbers, but the information available immediately after the murders was limited.

The Alarm Spreads

By the following morning, couriers had ridden from Camp Verde to Jerome. Their immediate purposes reflected both the isolation of the settlement and the seriousness of what had happened: they came for coffins and to send a wire to Yavapai County Sheriff Munds at Prescott.

A posse was already on the trail.

The anger surrounding the killings was evident in the newspaper’s language. The July 4 account stated that it was considered unlikely the desperadoes would be brought back alive. It also reported that the entire country was aroused and that excitement and indignation were widespread.

For all the anger, however, investigators faced a basic problem. The newspaper said that no description of the murderers could yet be obtained.

The First Suspects

The earliest suspicion did not center on Black Jack Ketchum.

Instead, the July 4 report said it was believed that two men who had recently been acquitted at Jerome of stealing horses from Indians might have been the guilty parties. The article did not identify those men by name.

That detail is important because later accounts of the Camp Verde murders often move quickly toward Ketchum. The contemporary report shows that, in the first days after the killings, authorities and residents were still trying to determine who had attacked the store.

The evidence available at that moment was thin: two merchants were dead, Captain Boyd was wounded, three attackers had reportedly fled, and a posse was searching the surrounding country.

Rodgers and Wingfield

The newspaper described Rodgers as a middle-aged family man. Wingfield, it said, was about twenty-six years old and unmarried. Later records give Wingfield’s age more precisely as twenty-seven.

Their deaths were not merely another distant report of frontier violence. Rodgers and Wingfield were local businessmen, killed at their own store in a small Verde Valley community. The attack immediately drew armed men into the countryside and brought the attention of county authorities from Prescott.

What happened next would turn the murders into a much larger story.

A Name Enters the Story

In the weeks that followed, the investigation moved beyond the first suspects. By late August 1899, newspaper reports were connecting the Camp Verde murders with Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, who had been captured after a train robbery in New Mexico.

The hunt had only begun.

Sources and Research Notes

• Contemporary Arizona newspaper report, July 4, 1899, “A Verde Massacre — Two Merchants, Rodgers and Wingfield Murdered.”

• Sharlot Hall Museum historical records for Clinton DeWitt Wingfield and Robert M. Rodgers.

• Camp Verde historical materials concerning the former sutler’s store and the Rodgers-Wingfield murders.