Joe Nickell, PhD, is, like Tom Horn, a former Pinkerton detective. This is his fiftieth year as a paranormal investigator. He became CSI’s senior research fellow in 1995.
At the turn of the twentieth century in Wyoming, the “range wars” claimed many victims, among them fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell (yes, one of my distant cousins).1 This is the story of his murder and the hanging of his killer—a legendary lawman and now “ghost.” It begins over a quarter of a century ear-lier in my home county of Morgan in eastern Kentucky.
Tom Horn braiding a rope in the Laramie County jail office in Cheyenne, 1902.