Murder Always Brings a Crowd

They arrived 30 minutes early - in a driving rain - packing the parking lot and lining the median and roadside along Broadway Avenue in Everglades City. They were hurrying, scurrying, and hopping puddles to get inside the Museum of the Everglades to claim a chair for Thomas Lockyear’s Third Thursday talk on June 19. They say a sellout creates excitement and that the crowd brings enthusiasm into a room. Well, that was certainly the case on Thursday afternoon. And the topic, Murder in the Everglades, certainly piqued the crowd's curiosity. 

Museum manager Lockyear, who fronted a band in his younger days, showed he still knows how to work the room. He immediately got the crowd pumped up. 

"I apologize for the lack of space,” Lockyear announces to applause, “we’re proud of the fact that we are the smallest and the most remote, but the mightiest of Collier County's five free museums. It's not that often that we exceed our boundaries like this. During the summer months, I try and pick a really juicy topic. Apparently, I found the winner.” 

And talk about exceeding boundaries: besides the lecture room being SRO, the adjacent display room was also full, with everyone standing - or leaning - anywhere they could. One lady poked her head between two pillars for an hour so she could peer inside the lecture room. While most people in the outer room couldn’t see Lockyear or his screen presentation, they still stayed and listened to the entire hour-long presentation. 

“Can everybody hear me out in the nether regions out there?” Lockyear asks. "There are a couple of standing spots over on this side for somebody that really wants to be able to see the screen. But there's not going to be a seat for you. But we're all friends here, right?" 

Lockyear immediately lets the crowd know how important their questions are in making Third Thursdays, now six years old, a success. 

“Very often I'll have people come through and ask a question that I don't know the answer to,” Lockyear said. "And once it happens a couple times, I'm like, 'I need to learn this topic. I need to really figure this out.' And the way to do that is to assign myself to learning. And my process for doing this is a little bit crazy. I'm not an expert. But I do have a passion for history and for sharing. So, I come across really difficult topics.” 

Lockyear immediately hooked his audience with stories of murders and violent incidents in the Everglades region from the early 1900s to the present. Stories of houses being burned by the Park Service, the murder of Audubon warden Guy Bradley, and murders attributed to the notorious outlaw Edgar Watson, who was eventually murdered himself in dramatic fashion.  

“Guy Bradley was living down at Flamingo,” Lockyear said, "but he was covering a huge area from Key West all the way up to about Fort Myers. This is back in the days when they were hunting plumes to make fancy hats. And it was one of the first times that people here were able to make real cash money. So, people didn't care too much for Mr. Bradley and the fact that he was trying to stop them from doing it. So, on July 6, 1905, he met his maker. He was killed by Captain Walker Smith because Mr. Smith said, 'I told you when you arrested my boy the last time, if you ever did it again, I was going to shoot you and kill you.' And he did shoot him before he even got off the boat. He bled out in his boat and washed up.” 

Lockyear painted a vivid description of Watson, the Everglades’ most notorious figure, being killed in Chokoloskee. 

“They put 33 bullets in the man,” Lockyear said to oohs and aahs from the crowd. 

Lockyear’s next Third Thursday talk will be July 17 at 2:00 PM, when he will talk about the legend of the skunk ape.