He stood just under five feet nine inches, with blue eyes and sandy hair, and by the time his name settled into the mouths of the people of Harlan County, Kentucky, it was spoken like a curse. They called him Devil Jim Turner, and in the mountains of Appalachia, that name meant something far worse than trouble. He was born in 1836 near Clover Fork of the Cumberland River, in a corner of Harlan County where the old families ruled with land, money, and fear. His grandfather had been among the first white settlers to reach the region, amassing more than five thousand acres and running the only general store in the county.
That store passed down to Jim’s father, who kept it and the family’s grip on the local economy intact. In those days, a general store was the center of every community, the gathering place where wealthy landowners and politicians controlled the trade that flowed through the county. Anyone who dared open a competing store risked more than his business. He risked his life and the lives of his family.
Several rivals tried to encroach on the Turner family’s territory. They were quickly driven out, either on a fast horse or in a wooden box. That kind of ruthless protection of family interests ran deep in the Turner blood, but it was matched by another clan, the Middletons. The two families were related by marriage, with Jim’s father’s sister having wed into the Middleton line.
The Turners insisted that was the only reason the Middletons had any wealth at all. The Middletons, naturally, told the story differently. What both sides agreed on was this: a simmering feud had been building for years, and everyone in the county knew that the Turners and the Middletons fielded the most dangerous men in Harlan. Jim’s father was a stern, religious man, the kind who sat in the front pew of the Methodist church every Sunday, praying for guidance in all spiritual matters.
He kept his Bible close to his heart. He also kept a bottle and a gun close at hand for settling the affairs of the world. That combination of scripture and whiskey created an explosive household, and Jim and his brother grew up tough as barbed wire, learning the arts of gunpowder and lead early. As a boy, Jim followed his father closely, even speaking from the pulpit on occasion, pounding the Bible and warning the congregation about vengeance against all their enemies.
His father smiled with pride. Outside that sanctuary, Jim was a different person entirely. He was an outlaw in the making. He drank whiskey and stole hogs for the thrill of it.
Local people swore they saw him steal fourteen pigs from a man’s pen in broad daylight. On another occasion, he robbed an old man of ninety-four dollars, money he did not need, and rumor had it he shot and killed the man as well. A clever lawyer hired by his father got him out of that charge in court. What was clear was that young Jim had an insatiable appetite for destruction.
He liked the feeling of it. He relished the power of staring down a gun barrel at another man and watching the fear rise in his eyes. The feud with the Middletons came to a head when Jim was fifteen. A strong storm knocked down part of the fence dividing the two families’ properties, and some Middleton cattle wandered onto Turner land.
Jim took it upon himself to shoot every one of them. The Middleton boys rushed out with their rifles and opened fire, wounding Jim in the arm and calling him a devil. Jim shot back at each of them in turn. From that day on, everyone called him Devil Jim Turner.
He came of age in a time of enormous national turmoil. In the years before the Civil War, Kentucky was torn in two, with strong loyalties to both the Confederacy and the Union, sometimes within the same family. Both armies wanted the state, and both placed a star for Kentucky on their flags. Raiders from each side swept through the mountains constantly, trying to intimidate men into joining their cause through murder, robbery, and destruction of property.
Because Virginia was the Confederate capital and Harlan County sat on the border between the two states, it became a focal point for the most lawless atrocities of the war. It was literally kill or be killed, and only the strongest survived. By the time the fighting began, Jim was a grown man with a wife and children, but like nearly every other man of his day, he wanted in. The Turners sided with the Union cause.
On April 15, 1863, Jim enlisted as a Union soldier in Company D of the Forty-Ninth Kentucky Infantry. Many of the Middletons, by contrast, had joined the Confederate army. Jim soon discovered he had no taste for army life. The training and the taking of orders were a waste of time.
He wanted to be in the middle of the action, on the front lines, and truth be told, he had no real personal loyalty to the Union cause at all. He was a maverick who made his own laws. He appreciated the free clothing, weapons, and ammunition the army provided, but within months, he deserted. What followed was Devil Jim’s usual pattern of killing, robbery, and horse stealing for the rest of the war, with Confederate men bearing the brunt of it.
He raided camps, stole horses, and burned the barns and houses of Confederate sympathizers. On one occasion, he ordered a Black man to open his master’s meat storehouse. When the man looked him in the eye and said he would rather die than hand over the key, Jim replied, well, then you will die, placed the muzzle of his rifle behind the man’s head, and fired. Jim and his men lived off plunder during the war, stealing whatever they needed and killing anyone who refused them.
Once, hiding from arrest at his uncle’s house, he was nearly wild with hunger. He saw a cow in his uncle’s pasture, walked up to the animal, and knocked it unconscious with the butt of his pistol. Then he took out his knife, cut a slab of meat from the animal while it was still alive, and ate it raw as the creature ran bellowing back to the herd. In 1863, a man named Hugh Ethridge, married into the Middleton family, was found dead.
The finger of blame pointed at Devil Jim. When Carr Middleton tried to bring Jim to justice, Jim shot him and left him crippled for life. The feud escalated. In late 1863, Jim and his gang declared that they wanted the old Middleton patriarch, James Middleton, dead.
Middleton fled for his life into the mountains of Lee County, Virginia, but it did no good. The outlaws tracked him down, seized him, and dragged him back across the Kentucky line. They tied him to a tree in their camp, cut off his ears and nose, tore out his toenails, and then sat and watched him die slowly while they enjoyed a meal of beans cooked over the campfire. In total, Devil Jim Turner was accused of thirteen murders.
The official plaque at the Harlan County courthouse still claims that Confederate forces burned the building in October 1863, but the old-timers know the truth. They say Devil Jim and his gang burned it to the ground in broad daylight. By the end of the war, Jim had made so many enemies and faced so much legal trouble that he transferred all his land and property rights to his wife so he would not lose everything. The Civil War ended, but the killing did not stop for Jim.
In 1869, he murdered his own cousin. In 1872, when the Middleton family tried to prosecute him for the crime, Jim hid behind a tree stump beside the road leading to the courthouse and ambushed the two main witnesses. He shot William Middleton off his horse. When his brother-in-law tried to flee, Jim shot him in the back and left his body in a ditch.
They never made it to testify. Finally, the justice system had enough. In 1872, the sheriff of Clay County arrested Devil Jim and his brother and brought them to court for their crimes. Jim posted bail, and while awaiting trial, he appeared in the courthouse square one morning, pulled out his knife, stabbed the main witness and the court clerk, then drew his pistol and pulled the trigger three times, aiming at the judge’s face.
Remarkably, the pistol misfired all three times, and the judge survived. Devil Jim Turner was sentenced to life in prison. In that era, prison was designed to break the hardest men. For the rest of his life, Jim was required to break large rocks into small stones with a pick, from dawn until dusk.
Over the next sixteen years, the strong mountain man withered into someone who could barely lift his own fork. Once he no longer provided free labor, the state no longer needed him. In 1890, after sixteen years, he was released on parole, on the condition that he leave Kentucky and never show his face there again. Jim moved west to Washington with several of his outlaw friends, settling outside Toledo.
They resumed their violent ways so thoroughly that the locals began calling the place Little Kentucky. In 1910, Jim was a frail old man. On a cold morning, standing over the wood stove cooking his breakfast in his kitchen, he suffered a stroke and fell face-first onto the stove. His clothes caught fire as he screamed for help.
His young grandson came in and saw the old man’s face melting against the hot iron, but the boy was too afraid to touch him. Instead, he decided the fastest course was to run half a mile to the nearest neighbor for help, leaving Devil Jim to burn on the stove the whole time. By the time help arrived, the scene was horrific. The newspapers put it plainly: Devil Jim had been slowly roasted, suffering in agony for some twenty-four hours before he died.
The next day, as family members prepared his body for burial, they found eight hundred dollars hidden in his shoe. The family decided it was not right to keep the money, since Devil Jim had likely come by it through criminal means. So they simply put it back in his shoe and buried him. Two weeks after the funeral, they discovered that Jim’s grave had been dug up and the coffin lid removed.
The shoe and the money were gone. So was the leg that had been attached to it. It had been sawed off. That was the end of the story of Devil Jim Turner, one of the hardest men the Appalachian hills ever produced.
He spent a lifetime dealing out violence, and in the end, the manner of his death and the fate of his grave made it clear that even in the hills, justice has a way of finding its own reckoning.