June 4, 1910: Friends and neighbors in Watts told Mrs. Taple that she should leave her husband, Chris, a pleasant, industrious man except when he was drinking. She always ignored their advice, saying that she needed to stay so he wouldn’t drink even more.

One day, she reached the breaking point and when Chris came home drunk, he found that she was moving to a neighbor’s house. As she ran away across an open field, he took a shotgun from a corner of the parlor and fired at her. She tripped and fell, saving her life as the shot went over her head, but Chris apparently assumed that he had killed her and went inside his home to prepare for a gunfight with the law.

Warning: As with many stories from this era, the details are extremely graphic.