Accepted Claims
Accepted facts about his life include these:
- He stole horses, and at least once was caught with a freed slave living on his property. Murrell was also known to kidnap slaves and sell them back to other slave owners. He was sentenced to ten years in a Tennessee prison for slave-stealing. Murrell would be considered a conductor on the Reverse Underground Railroad.
- Murrell was one of three brothers who were known to be petty thieves. Their father was a Methodist circuit preacher.
- After Murrell died nine months after leaving prison, parts of him were dug up and stolen. His skull is still missing, but one of his thumbs is in the possession of the Tennessee State Museum.
Read more about this topic: John Murrell (bandit)
Famous quotes containing the words accepted and/or claims:
“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)