A clue

The attacker disappeared, but police believed he’d left one bit of evidence behind: a print of a bare foot in the sand outside the Kookers’ house.

Police put a box over it and waited to find the man who would fit it.

On the night of Nov. 5, they thought they had him. And he been close by all along.

Patrolman Jesse F. Greek, who lived nearby, had worked the case doggedly for days. At 9 that night, that work paid off when Greek and two other officers went into a row of houses owned by the Kookers, known as Kookers’ quarters.

The suspect was in bed, and tried to escape, but at each turn a blue-uniformed officer blocked his way.

He was “Peter Forrest, a West India negro,” the Metropolis said (though in later stories his surname was given as Forest).

For days, the press had called the attacker a “fiend” and a “brute.”

Now, led from his room, Forest simply looked terrified.

Proclaiming his innocence, he “trembled like a leaf in the wind, and kept saying in a low, husky tone: ‘Oh my God.’ ”

Greek wanted Mrs. Kooker to identify him. But first — the footprint in the sand, preserved all those days.

Forest was so stricken, so afraid, that police had to seize his foot to place it in the print.

The print was small. Forest’s foot was small. The fit — perfect.

Patrolman Greek took him to Mrs. Kooker, who quickly cried out: “That’s exactly the man I saw on the night I was attacked.”

Police then made him say the word the attacker had uttered to Mrs. Kooker when he showed her his revolver.

Hush.

“There is a peculiar tone in his voice,” the paper said, “and he speaks with the soft accent of a West Indian, that would serve to identify him anywhere.”

Hush, Forest said.

That’s the man, Mrs. Kooker said.

‘A most appropriate inscription’

Another week went by, and money for the hero kept coming in.

By Nov. 11, the Metropolis declared: “Williams Memorial Fund Now Considered Adequate.”

In all, $135.50 came to the Metropolis office. The slab’s cost was no more than $60. The rest would be reserved for Williams’ family.

Hartridge, the attorney who started the fund, formed a committee with D.H. McMillan and Judge W.B. Young to pick out the slab. They also wrote the inscription, getting the date of death wrong by two days but still managing to tell a compelling yarn:

This tablet marks the grave of Thompson Williams, a Negro who died on October 28, 1908 from wounds received while endeavoring to protect the honor and life of a white woman.

It is, the newspaper agreed, “a most appropriate inscription,” one that “will impress all who pass the old negro’s grave.”

‘Will Escape Gallows’

By mid-November, the story was starting to run out of gas. Still, readers pestered the Metropolis for days after: What happened to Forest?

On Nov. 20, the paper finally had more: “Will Escape Gallows/Grand Jury Acts on Case of Mrs. Kooker’s Assailant.”

In contrast to the often dramatic coverage given the case in earlier days, this report on Forest’s fate was terse, even dispirited.

“The grand jury only found evidence of an attempt, and not of a felonious assault, and consequently the case was sent to the Criminal Court for trial … the offense not being a capital one.”

There was no explanation given in the Metropolis or the next day’s Times-Union of what became of any charges in Williams’ death.

It was, it’s easy to imagine, something of a letdown, for the papers and their readers.

No matter: That could be set aside, for there were plenty of other stories in the bustling city to move on to.

A notorious Peeping Tom was back in business after several weeks away, and W.H. Davis of 1039 W. Monroe St. reported he’d seen him outside his window.

Another “aged negro,” identified as “old Man Tison,” had been robbed of $300, “the savings of a lifetime.”

An Italian claimed another Italian attacked him at a riverfront dock and plunged a stiletto into his cheek. In broken English, he told police he was a victim of “blacka da hand” — or the Black Hand, “the society that all Italians fear, and which has caused terror in many Italian colonies in America.”

There was the heartbreaking story of the young boy who told guests at the fancy Windsor Hotel the desperate tale of how he and his family, on the verge of starvation, had walked for help all the way from Waycross, Ga.

Concerned citizens, their sympathies aroused, pitched in with donations to help the wretched urchin. But shortly it was reported the trusting residents of Jacksonville had been “smoothly flimflammed” — and not a word of the incredible yarn was true.

But what a yarn it was! The boy’s plight seemed so alarming, the Metropolis noted, that it had “aroused a greater clamor” among readers than the increase in millage contemplated in 1909 city budget. Greater, even, than the Metropolis’ $5,000 circulation contest.

Justice would find the young flimflammer, though: His stepfather was on record vowing to thrash the “little beggar.”

Two families

The patriarch of the Kooker family, Samuel, was listed in the city directory as president of the G.B. Griffin Land Co. and an accountant at the National Bank of Jacksonville. The city in 1922 bought land from Samuel and his wife, Ida, which became a park named after them, just south of 21st Street.

The park went where Kooker Street once ran, erasing it from maps.

But the park itself is still there, as Henry L. Brown-Kooker Park, a well-kept space off the Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway, with a baseball diamond and football field fringed by big live oaks and pines.

The next generation of the family included May Kooker and her husband, T. Hurd, who in 1908 was manager of a consulting engineering office. He later started a company, Ellis Curtis & Kooker, an engineering firm. It’s still around, as ECK Land Surveyors, though no one in the family is connected to it now.

Shortly after the attack, T. Hurd Kooker bought the Alligator, a paddle-wheel steamboat of some fame that had operated for 20 years on North Florida lakes and rivers. It sank not six months later on Crescent Lake after catching fire at midnight. In 2008, maritime archaeologists from the Lighthouse Museum of St. Augustine went diving for it; they found wreckage but nothing they could conclusively identify as the Alligator.

T. Hurd Kooker died on New Year’s Day 1939. The obituary of the “widely known civil engineer” was on the front page of the second section of the Times-Union.

May Kooker lived into her 80s; she died in Jacksonville in 1952.

Thompson Williams — the “aged Negro” hero of the news stories — was about 51 when he died.

Records don’t show much more about him: City directories listed him as a laborer; according to the census, he was born in Alabama around 1857. That almost certainly meant he had been born into slavery, as was his wife, whom he married in 1879.

She was born in 1862 in South Carolina. The census listed her name as Cantie.

After her husband’s murder, she showed up in Jacksonville city directories for a few years as Candice, Candis or Candus, She was identified as a widow and a laundress, and she changed houses often. By 1918, her listing was gone.