![skull and bones glass coffin skull and bones glass coffin](https://cdn0.rubylane.com/_pod/item/386639/RL-1078/18th-C-Memorial-Watercolor-Skull-Bones-full-7-2048-94.jpg)
After his death the skull “disappeared,” only to resurface in 1972, when it was donated to the Dover Historical Society.
![skull and bones glass coffin skull and bones glass coffin](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/57/88/32/5788326a8862a40d54a116954f5c7b51.jpg)
Scott secretly retained the skull and at least five bones. Not all of the skeleton went into the ground, however. Scott, a boyhood friend of Quantrill, traveled to Kentucky, opened his grave, and took the remains back to Dover for reburial.
![skull and bones glass coffin skull and bones glass coffin](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b4/fc/ea/b4fceaf31a28725e74061c653a3ec638.jpg)
I came up with a fantastically grotesque image.Īs the guide led me back down through the mansion and out into the gardens and into the carriage house, she told me this story: “Would you like to see it?” For an instant I tried to imagine what a cadaver’s face would look like 120 years after death. “Well, we have his head,” the guide answered. At the end of the tour I allowed as how I was interested in Quantrill and asked if the society had anything else of his. On display in a glass case were Quantrill’s powder horn and a couple of nineteenth-century dime novels about him. The historical society is housed in a lovely old Victorian mansion, and a young woman gave me a guided tour. The next day, my mind still on Huberty, I drove to Dover. Quantrill’s name came up along with the dubious, stale old epithets attached to it by Northern historians: “the bloodiest man in American history,” “the most hated man in the Civil War.” Near midnight a few years later on the anniversary of the massacre I sat at a bar down the block from his house, drinking from a frosted mug, thinking about him, and half listening to some locals play a can-you-top-this game of naming monsters and murderers native to Ohio. Just before he died, he shouted, “I’ve killed a thousand, and I’ll kill a thousand more!” In fact, he shot forty and killed twenty-one, thus becoming for a time the leading one-day mass murderer in American history. Over the next hour and seventeen minutes, until a SWAT team sniper put a single bullet in his chest, he walked back and forth in the restaurant, coolly shooting people point-blank.
![skull and bones glass coffin skull and bones glass coffin](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d1/13/3d/d1133dde09173a14d9dbaea20bdd6186--a-skeleton-mourning-jewelry.jpg)
He cried, “Everybody get down on the floor or I’ll kill somebody!” and then opened fire. The following afternoon, at approximately four o’clock, he walked into a McDonald’s, wearing a black T-shirt and camouflage pants with a 9-mm Browning automatic pistol stuck in the waist, an Uzi submachine gun slung over his shoulder, and a 12-gauge pump shotgun in one hand. On July 17, 1984, having been hearing voices for several days, Hubert called a mental health clinic and asked for an appointment. One day he abruptly asked me to buy his house he had decided to make a new life for himself and his family in Mexico. Mostly we spoke of the weather, the troubles at the steel mill, or the losses of the area sports teams. More recently he had worked as a welder however, he had been laid off. He had a sociology degree from a Quaker college and had been an apprentice embalmer-a job he loved-but he had been fired because he couldn’t get along with living human beings. I used to stop to talk to him as he sat on his side stoop, petting his dogs. There were other, wilder stories, but by the time I heard them I had become acquainted with Huberty, and I tended to discount them. He had two huge German shepherds that he let run loose if one of his dogs got after you and you complained, he would threaten to kill you. He was crazy, they said, a gun nut with a short fuse. The other neighbors warned me about Huberty when I moved onto Fifth Street. Then a neighbor of mine committed a monstrous crime, which led me to become curious about the person who has been called “the bloodiest man in the Annals of America.” The first thing I learned about him was the bizarre history of his bones, and I was so intrigued that I set out on what proved to be a five-year course of visiting archives and battlefields in seven states and the District of Columbia to research and write his biography. I knew little about Quantrill before I moved to Massillon, twenty miles north of Dover, his hometown, in 1982.