Bob Moody - The Terror of Indiana: Bent Jones & The Moody-Tolliver Feud Second Edition

Preface

M y great-great-great grandparents are buried in a Southern Indiana cornfield. Not in a legally recognized cemetery situated on any map, but on private property in the middle of a working farm. Generations of landowners have carefully plowed around the Moody family headstones and respected the graves. The story of how I became aware of them is almost miraculous. It would prompt a forty-year search for the history of my Indiana ancestors and eventually reveal new and dramatic details about the almost forgotten Moody-Tolliver Feud.

In the late Seventies my father received a family Bible from a half cousin in Arkansas. My grandfather Moody had been born in Indiana, but became an orphan at the age of eighteen, so we didnt know much about the family history. The torn and battered Bible had been printed in 1829 and contained handwritten dates of birth, marriage, and death for unfamiliar ancestors. One note mentioned Orange County and Little Orleans. Guessing that this was Orleans, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from my home in Kentucky, Dad asked me to investigate.

Since 1976 I had been working at WAKY radio in Louisville. In early 1981 I traveled to the courthouses in Paoli (Orange County) and Bedford (Lawrence County), where I found several references to the Moody family, including documents related to wills and civil trials. Later I was introduced to a distant relative in Orleans who told me about the murder of my great-great-great uncle Thomas Moody and showed me the house where it had happened.

One day I mentioned my visits to Indiana on the radio and thanked people I had met for their help. The next day I boarded a flight to England to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. When I returned two weeks later there was a message at WAKY from a young farmer in Orleans named Jim Salkeld. He had been driving south to deliver part of his corn crop to New Albany when he heard me mention my search for the Moody family on his trucks AM-only radio. When I returned the call Jims wife, Sheila, said, I dont know if they are part of your family, but we have Moodys buried on our farm. Reading off her notepad, she gave me names and dates that turned out to be those of both of my great-great-great grandparents and one of their daughters-in-law.

That inspired my first serious efforts at genealogical research. At that time, long before home computers, it meant hours of scrolling through microfilm in libraries and consulting local history books. Along the way I found brief references to the Moody-Tolliver Feud with specific dates that allowed me to search page by page in old newspapers on file at libraries in Louisville and New Albany. Tantalizing details appeared in those accounts, but the full story and eventual outcome were beyond my grasp, especially after I left Louisville in 1985.

Over the years I was able to learn more about my family tree using Internet resources, but I did not realize that the Moody-Tolliver Feud had been covered in newspapers across the United States and abroad, including the front page of the New York Times . Only when it became possible to access indexed newspaper files online did the significance of that feud and the subsequent trials become apparent.

The story of the violent unpleasantness between the Moody and Tolliver families had been reported from coast to coast and beyond. It appears to be the first family blood feud to receive immediate national newspaper coverage. Earlier family conflicts had taken place in relatively remote areas prior to coast-to-coast telegraph service in 1861 and completion of the U.S.