Page 59 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

Butler was brought back to New Mexico at once, and after a Federal Grand Jury in Santa Fe indicted him, was placed in the New Mexico State prison in Santa Fe to await trial. Mr. Warren said he not only confessed to the double murder, but seemed relieved to get it off of his chest. Mr. Warren was serving on the Coroner’s Jury when Butler came out to locate the bodies. Butler pointed out a place in the forest, but just as the men began to dig, he changed his mind and directed them to another site. When this had happened twice, an angry mumbling came from the spectator crowd, who seem to think he deserved to be lynched.
On the third try it was the correct place and the badly decayed bodies of Victor Stotts and his son Ray were exhumed. There joint grave was only a few yards from the spot where I had found the skillet with the broken handle.
Chester said that as far back in the forest as the grave was, and as difficult as it was to locate, it would have been found eventually by a hunter going by, for the younger man’s sweater was already halfway out of the grave through a badger hole, dug since the burial.
Butler’s story was told to me by Mr. Warren as it came out in the confession and in the coroner’s inquest: The two men decided upon some land they thought suitable for homesteading, and drove back to Magdalena to pick up their second car and their trailer, loaded with two fifty-five gallon drums of gasoline and several month’s supply of groceries.
When they arrived at their campsite, Butler was there waiting for them. He told the
young man to come with him because he had a “deer staked out” - an expression used by all the men out there to mean they had seen a deer in the vicinity. The young man went with Butler who led him up to an open grave he had dug during the day, shot him, and pushed him into the hole face down. Young Stotts was very tall and the grave was not quite long enough. Butler bent his legs back over his body after removing his boots.
The plan was for Butler to entice the old man to the spot on some pretense, then shoot him and dump his body into the grave by his son. The plan went astray when Mr. Stotts appeared unexpectedly upon the scene. Butler, in his excited, apprehensive state of mind, fired at him too soon, thereby missing a vital spot. Even more crazed after that, he grabbed up a new axe lying there and split open the old man’s skull. Afterward he had to drag the body to the grave, then cover the grave.
Butler took one of the cars and drove hurriedly to his cabin to get his wife. She helped him pack up all the Stotts’ possessions, then they drove the two cars back to their cabin for their own belongings and their two children.
In leaving the hill where their cabin was located, one of them stripped the gears on one of the cars and they had to leave it.
When Mr. Collins found the lady camper in Texas, she still had the bloody axe - still unused. Her story was that as the two Stotts men prepared for their trip to Magdalena that morning, she had gone over to their camp to ask them to bring her some snuff. That evening when they returned just before sundown, she walked over to their camp