ON THIS DAY IN WEIRD

On This Day in Weird, April 3...

1882: Southern partisan and homicidal outlaw Jesse Woodson James is allegedly killed by gang member Robert Ford, in St. Joseph, Missouri. At the time, James lived with his wife and children under the pseudonym "Thomas Howard," still recuperating from the gang's disastrous raid on Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876. Rumors persist to this day that Ford actually shot a stand-in, or perhaps no one at all. The last claimant, John Frank Dalton—itself a possible alias—announced his "true" identity as Jesse James in 1948 and died three years later in Granbury, Texas, allegedly 101 years old. Dalton's corpse scheduled for exhumation and DNA testing in May 2000, but authorities mistakenly unearthed one William Henry Holland and now declare Dalton's remains cannot be found.