On Tuesday evening, February 19, 1889, Ada Hulmes, the piano player at Silver City’s Monarch saloon, shot and killed John V. ‘Jack’ Brown — a Silver City carpenter and also the fire chief of that town in southwestern New Mexico Territory. As reports of the killing spread, people flocked to the murder scene at the Centennial saloon to join in the excitement, discuss the lurid details and condemn the murderess. They also gossiped about Jack and Ada’s intimate relationship. By the weekend, most of Silver City knew that Brown had recently jilted her, thanks to the Silver City Enterprise. Ada Hulmes was a woman scorned.

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In a note Brown had received from his distraught ex-paramour, she pleaded with him to spend the evening with her. He in turn dashed off a curt response that he ‘wished to break off all further familiarity.’ He then penned a second note to his new favorite lady, ‘Claude’ Lewis, who was Ada’s housemate. Jack invited Claude to meet him at the Centennial. Young Henry Rosecrans delivered the messages to the women. After Ada read her note, she jumped up, grabbed a pistol, wrapped it in a silk handkerchief and plunged it into the bosom of her dress. Oddly, she yelled to her rival to accompany her and stormed out of the room swearing that she was ‘going to kill the son of a bitch.’

‘If you are going to have any trouble, I will not go with you,’ Claude Lewis replied. But Ada insisted, ‘I will not have any difficulty with him.’

The two rode together to the Centennial. The saloon, according to the Enterprise, was full of men and’several frail creatures’ drinking in the barroom. Claude stopped at the bar and asked Ada to join her for a drink. Ada spurned the invitation and marched directly to the gambling room, where she found Brown ‘lazily looking on a game of cards.’ Ada’s shout that she was going to kill him shocked Brown and grabbed the attention of everyone in the room. Brown should have seized and subdued Ada. Instead, his instincts took over, and he turned and dashed around the stove to put it between him and the enraged woman. A shot rang out. Brown threw up his hands as the bullet ripped into his left side, carved an upward trajectory, raced through his heart and burst out the right side of his chest. Brown stumbled across the room, staggered through the door and fell to the sidewalk on the south side of the building.

Ada, the newspaper reported, fled to the rear of the Centennial, ‘occupied by people of her own class,’ and ran into Savannah Randall, a middle-aged mulatto whose day job was as a laundress. In a futile effort at concealment, the ‘golden-toothed sirene [sic]‘ secreted Hulmes in one of the cribs located behind the saloon. Deputies Al Card and C.L. Cantle arrived, pushed their way through the Centennial and out the back. When they kicked in the crib’s door, Ada ‘came forth swinging her arms and yelling like a hyena.’ As her captors hauled her to jail, she asserted her innocence, yet she also tried to feign insanity. Spectators sided with Brown; they agreed that the fire chief, a Michigan native, ‘had many faults, and yet was not a bad man.’ The Enterprise rationalized that his thrilling experiences on the frontier had not made for a ‘life of refinement. He had a weakness for loud dress and flashy jewelry,’ but, the report continued, he possessed ‘a warm heart and a generous hand.’ The faithless fire chief, who had been a resident of the area for the past decade, left behind his 23-year-old wife, Adelaide, a 19-month-old daughter and an infant son.

Less than a week later, the heavily veiled Hulmes, described as a ‘bold adventuress,’ appeared before Justice Harry W. Lucas (her first cousin, Ada later claimed). With Silver City’s citizens in an uproar, her attorneys, Idus L. Fielder and Gideon D. Bantz, moved for a change of venue. Lucas ordered the trial moved to Doña Ana County.

The five-day-long murder trial of Ada Hulmes began in Las Cruces during the first week of October 1889. William L. Rynerson and his partner Edward C. Wade, district attorney for the third judicial district, prosecuted. Rynerson had first gained notoriety on December 15, 1867, when he shot and killed John P. Slough, New Mexico Territory’s chief justice, and was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Political powerhouse Albert J. Fountain (1838-1896), later a victim in one of the Southwest’s most renowned murder mysteries (see story in February 1998 Wild West), joined Bantz and Fielder at the defense table for what the Enterprise described as ‘one of the most remarkable as well as one of the most interesting trials that has ever occurred in southern New Mexico.’ What stirred so much interest? The defendant was a ‘good looking, well-developed young woman of 30 years, with a bright and intelligent countenance and possessed a very nervous temperament.’ Those who did not know her or the circumstances of the killing, ‘with heroic and true Western magnanimity,’ perceived a sympathetic defendant. In contrast, Silver City residents who did know her and the facts of the killing beheld a ‘cold-blooded murderer.’

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