Birdie McCarty: Another Female Horse Thief

           The past two weeks, I've written about two different female horse thieves who made their appearance in southwest Missouri around 1890. After a decade's hiatus, another woman horse thief, Birdie McCarty, came on the scene, but most of her exploits took place just across the Kansas line. When Birdie made her criminal debut in the Kansas-Missouri border region in early 1902, one area newspaper waxed nostalgic, observing that law officers were “now dealing with the first female horse thief since the palmy days of the reign of May Colvin, the notorious woman desperado, who invaded this section of the country about ten years ago.” Sensationalized in the press over the next few weeks, Birdie made fewer headlines than her predecessor only because her career in crime proved briefer than May’s. 

            Birdie’s saga began when she accompanied a young man from Butler, Missouri, to Fort Scott, Kansas, about the 20^th of February, 1902. After a few days in Fort Scott, her male companion proposed that she go to a livery and get a horse and buggy, which she did. The couple started south but got into an argument at Pittsburg over who owned the rig. The quarrel ended, according to the Joplin Globe, with the man telling Birdie to “go to hell.” Instead, “she concluded to go to a better place” and came to Baxter Springs, where she arrived on the evening of February 25 and turned herself in to the city marshal, confessing that she had a horse and buggy that belonged to a liveryman in Fort Scott.
               After she was placed in jail at Baxter Springs, “some little dispute” arose, according to the Globe, among the town’s officials over the auburn-haired prisoner’s attractiveness. The marshal claimed the woman was “beautiful to look upon,” while the mayor declared that “her face would stop a Frisco freight.”

            The next day an officer from Fort Scott arrived to escort the prisoner back to Fort Scott to face criminal charges. Confined with three other women in a basement room of the Bourbon County courthouse, Birdie was described as “a daring little woman about 22 years old.” The close quarters of the basement room didn’t hold Birdie for long. On Sunday, March 23, she “opened up a sensational Sabbath” by making what the Fort Scott Monitor called “a dash for liberty that even the professional crooks of the stronger sex might well envy…. Birdie McCarty had flown, and the other birds had soared away in her wake.”

            The four women parted ways after they escaped, with Birdie going in the company of a male accomplice named Red Taylor, while the other three fugitives headed north. Taylor took Birdie to meet Pete Sheflet, reputed to be her lover, and she and Sheflet “rode like the wind” on the same horse, according to Birdie’s later testimony, to the camp of two brothers named Ryder. Sheflet induced the Ryder boys to take Birdie on as a cook, and she started south with the brothers, riding in the back of their wagon.

            Birdie’s three fellow escapees were recaptured about two miles north of Fort Scott shortly after the jail break. The three women swore they had nothing to do with plotting the escape but that it was all the work of Birdie McCarty, who had been boasting for several days that her captivity would be brief. The women claimed to know nothing about the escapade until Birdie awakened them about five o’clock Sunday morning and told them the door was open.

            Meanwhile, the Bourbon County sheriff overtook the Ryder brothers about twelve miles south of Fort Scott, crawled into the back of their wagon, and found Birdie hidden beneath a pile of gunny sacks. He placed the fugitive under arrest and brought her back to Fort Scott. Taylor and Sheflet were also arrested. They were suspected not only of aiding Birdie in her flight but also of having helped her escape to begin with, although Birdie claimed she opened the door herself with a piece of wire.

            A few days after being recaptured, Birdie made headlines because of her scandalous predilection for tobacco. “Birdie McCarty, besides being an acknowledged horse thief,” read a brief story in the Monitor, “is quite a tobacco fiend.”

            Birdie’s trial for horse stealing came up during the May term of court. She was convicted of grand larceny and sentenced to five years in the Kansas Penitentiary. The judge, who’d heard the defendant mention that she was raised to go to church and knew the Lord’s prayer, offered to take a year off the sentence if she could recite the prayer by heart. Birdie reportedly hung her head and could not repeat even the first line, and the five-year sentence stood.

            Birdie was sent to the state prison at Lansing, where she was received on May 14, 1902.