A major Deseret News story of 1893 was a recap of events that occurred about 30 years earlier. The newspaper was attempting to reconstruct the 1862 story of Jean Baptiste and one of the most bizarre Utah crime tales ever.
Baptiste's penchant for grave robbery might have gone unnoticed except for the equally dramatic story of John W. Dawson, Utah's third governor. Dawson served only three weeks before being forced out of office by scandal and rushed out of the territory by mail coach.As he fled, Dawson was assailed by a group of young hoodlums, who beat and robbed him. Three of the young men were subsequently killed by law officers, and one, Moroni Clawson, was buried in clothing provided by a local policeman. And that's where Baptiste enters the story.
Although Clawson's family had not claimed his body after he was shot down on a Salt Lake street, his brother George later decided to have "Rone" disinterred and re-buried in the Willow Creek area (now Draper). When the Salt Lake grave was opened, George was incensed to find his brother stark naked.
He accused officer Henry Heath of burying Rone in that condition and wouldn't accept the officer's assurances that Heath had, himself, purchased proper burial clothing for the younger Clawson.
Frustrated, Heath went to Probate Judge Elias Smith, who told him to investigate further. The group went to the home of cemetery sexton J.C. Little, who was shocked and unable to explain the oddity. He joined the group to go to the home of Baptiste, the local gravedigger for several years.
The gravedigger had a feeble-minded wife, the story says, who readily welcomed the law officer and his entourage, even though the house was filled with suspicious boxes. When one of the men poked into a box, he found it crammed with burial robes, as were all the others.
They found Baptiste at work in the cemetery. Accused of the foul activity, the "nondescript little man" fell to his knees and swore as God was his witness that he was innocent. Subsequent reports say Heath, who had himself recently buried a child in the cemetery, took him by the throat and "shook him like a rat" until he confessed.
Only Baptiste's swearing he hadn't desecrated the Heath child's grave saved him from being throttled right there in the cemetery, Heath later wrote.
It became evident that the gravedigger had been a grave robber for years.
In fact, it was learned as the investigation went forward that Baptiste had been seen a short time earlier wearing a broadcloth Prince Albert suit that looked suspiciously like one in which a murdered saloonkeeper named Carpenter had been buried.
Investigators found about 60 pairs of children's shoes in Baptiste's home, along with about a dozen pairs of men's shoes, garments and many items of female apparel. Officers estimated he had robbed about 300 graves, using the caskets for firewood and hoarding the clothing in a ghoulish fetish.
As word got around the city, an incensed populace began to react. Families sifted through the clothing brought to the county courthouse and spread out on a 50-foot-long table. In some cases, they identified items in which they had buried their dead. What was not claimed by families ultimately was buried in a large box in a single grave at the cemetery.
The public unrest became so severe that LDS President Brigham Young dealt with it in one of his discourses. "I am unable to think so low as to get at such a mean, contemptible, damnable trick. I have three sisters in the graveyard in this city and two wives and several children, besides other connections and near relatives," he said.
President Young said he personally would not open the graves of his dead to see if they were among Baptiste's victims. But he assured his followers that when the dead had been respectfully buried, "I will defy any thief there is on the earth or in hell to rob a Saint of one blessing . . . When the Resurrection takes place, the Saints will come forth with all the glory, beauty and excellence of resurrected Saints, clothed as they were when they were laid away."
Young advised leaving the dead to sleep in peace, but he told concerned families that they could dig up their dead if they chose and "put them in your gardens, where you can watch them by day and night until you are pretty sure that the clothing is rotted, and then lay them away in the burying ground."
Policemen kept Baptiste in the farthest recesses of the jail to ensure his safety while judicial minds tried to decide what could be done to him that fit his crimes. Judge Smith wrote in his journal that "the populace would have torn him to pieces, such was the excitement produced by the unheard-of occurrence."
The judge's journal became the only evidence that Baptiste had been granted any judicial consideration. Court records of the era make no mention of the affair.
To hang or shoot Baptiste would "do no good to anybody but himself," President Young concluded. In the end, it was decided to banish the grave robber. He was first taken to Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, but because of the shallowness of the water in that area, it was feared he would wade right back to the mainland. So arrangements were made to have Davis County stockmen Henry and Dan Miller take Baptiste to Fremont Island and maroon him there.
Three weeks later, the Miller brothers returned to the island and found that the roof and sides of a cabin they had built on Fremont had been torn off. The carcass of a young heifer was found nearby and the supposition was that Baptiste had made thongs of cowhide, used the cabin wood for a raft and escaped.
Over the years, stories about Baptiste were added to and subtracted from until the truth was considerably muddied. Some said Baptiste's ears were cut off before he was marooned, that his forehead was branded with the words "grave robber" and that he went to the island shackled with a ball and chain.
About 1890, a party of duck hunters near the mouth of the Jordan River found a human skull protruding from the mud. The rest of the skeleton was later located. A local newspaper reported that the skeleton's leg still bore a ball and chain.
But was it the body of Baptiste? In lurid stories, one Salt Lake newspaper declared that it was.
In an attempt to arrive at the truth, the Deseret News conducted interviews with Henry Heath and Albert Dewey, a fellow officer at the time Baptiste was arrested.
Both said emphatically that Baptiste had not been shackled when he was taken to the island and that the "brand" on his forehead was only a declaration - "branded for robbing the dead" - written in indelible ink.
Neither Heath nor Dewey made any reference one way or the other to the rumors that Baptiste's ears had been cut off.
If the officers were correct, the skeleton found by hunters could not have been Baptiste's remains. The lawmen's conclusions were that he had successfully escaped from the island. Rumors that the grave robber had been spotted in a Montana mining camp or in California at various times and that he eventually died in the latter state probably held some truth, they said, leaving the ultimate fate of Jean Baptiste as a mystery of history.