Prison mugshot card of Bessie Leigh from an original in the Dark Corners of History archives.
Her name was Bessie Leigh. She was young (twenty-six), vivacious, curvaceous, and lonely. What she might have neglected to mention was that she also had a husband, Tilden Leigh, in the Deer Lodge State Penitentiary and four children in a Helena orphanage.
His name was Fred Hoffman. He was thirty-two and ruggedly-handsome, and the fact that he had an estranged wife and six children may have slipped his mind.
They met on a ranch, where Hoffman worked as a handyman and laborer. Bessie Leigh cooked for the crew. Sometime, somewhere under the big sky, it happened. He said he loved her and would marry her; moved by his words, she relented.
Then came the he-said, she-said. Clearly the sex was consensual, or Bessie would have filed a rape charge. Instead, she turned to an old, graying law that was in its death-throes.
She said Hoffman seduced her and filed a “seduction” charge: by definition, a crime (as well as a tort) in which a man coerces, with the promise of marriage, an unmarried woman to have sex with him. Enjoying the wedding cake before paying for it but with the promise to pay only to later back out of the deal. In an age when the absence of chastity represented a premarital stain that couldn’t be washed away, “seduction” was a particularly troublesome personal injury.
Except, Bessie Leigh was already married, which raised the question of motive. Did she want to put Hoffman behind bars as a sort of amorous buyer’s remorse, or was there a more sinister reason? Did she want to press him to pay for services rendered—her brand of honey trap? Perhaps they made a financial arrangement beforehand, and Hoffman reneged after the deal was consummated.
Regardless of her reasons, her charges prompted County Sheriff Richard Whitaker to take both to Missoula to sort out the sordid affair.
Whitaker didn’t know that Bessie Leigh had concealed a handgun in her dress. As they motored toward Missoula in the sheriff’s automobile, she shot Hoffman in the face at point-blank range. Her lover (the press referred to Hoffman as her “sweatheart”) died two days later, on October 6, 1916, in Hellgate Township.
In the wake of Hoffman’s death, Bessie made several telling confessions. Born Bessie May Kohler in Cadmus, Michigan (Lenawee County), she admitted to having a husband, Tilden Leigh, who was doing his second term in the State pen for theft. This confession made her seduction charge a moot point. Worse, it made her look like a conniver linked to a career criminal.
At the time, Tilden was in the midst of his second stint in the State prison when Bessie shot Fred Hoffman. The ink on his discharge paperwork was barely dry when Leigh, a railroad man for Northern Pacific, got caught and convicted of a second burglary charge.
Bessie also said that at the time she shot Hoffman, she was on drugs, which she had taken in a half-baked suicide gambit. The local newspapers used her excuse as an argument for prohibition. If the state outlawed intoxicating agents, so the argument went, such acts of violence would ebb. It also raised the interesting possibility that Bessie may have been regular user, which adds an interesting wrinkle to that night under the Big Sky, her motives, and the ever-increasing possibility she turned a trick and the John didn’t pay.
Bessie took up residence in the Missoula County jail while a murder charge lingered until mid-December, when she went in front A.L. Duncan. Found guilty of manslaughter, Bessie was sentenced to eight years, which she served in Deer Lodge. Ironically, she and her husband had been reunited…in crime.
One of the collateral victims of the shooting was Sheriff Richard Whitaker, who failed to win a second term as sheriff in part, it was reported at the time, because the shooting occurred while the suspects were in his custody.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2017 Tobin T. Buhk 
Leave a Reply