Tashi Coleman

Thin Air podcast

Episode 5: THE SHERIFF

NARRATOR: The one thing you’ll constantly hear about the late Sheriff Hamp Beckett is that he was a good man.

WOMAN’S VOICE [BACKGROUND NOISE OF BUSY DINER]: I never met a man who stood taller than Sheriff Beckett. He was like John Wayne and Buford Pusser in one. People were afraid to break the law when he was in office. Folks would see his patrol car rolling down the road and wave. We all knew we had someone to look out for us. The way he wore that old cowboy hat and rancher coat, he looked just like he’d stepped out of the Wild West.

NARRATOR: And the one thing you won’t hear anyone say is Sheriff Beckett had often been accused of bribery, physical force against prisoners, and being the enforcer for the county kingpin, a man named Johnny Stagg, who would later go to federal prison for his crimes.

MAN’S VOICE [BACKGROUND NOISE OF CICADAS BUZZING OUTSIDE]: That was all a bunch of gosh-dang malarkey. Sheriff Beckett knew this place would return to a hell on this earth, the lawlessness after the Indian days or right after the Civil War. He knew Tibbehah County had a wild streak a mile wide and he had to be tougher than most. Maybe we did get a little rough with the prisoners sometimes. But let me tell you something, we never did nothing to anyone who didn’t deserve it. This place would’ve been up there with Phenix City, Alabama, if Hamp Beckett hadn’t taken care of us. All the nonsense about him throwing in with Johnny Stagg is a dang lie. Beckett hated Stagg and did everything in his power to get rid of him.

NARRATOR: But Beckett never could. Thirteen years after he ruled Brandon Taylor’s death a suicide, Sheriff Hamp Beckett took his own life while still in office. He shot himself in the kitchen of his family farmhouse, a plate of pork chops and Cajun rice on the stove, the report says. Foul play suspected. None ever proven.

MARY WATKINS: He just couldn’t live with what this place had become. Stagg had gotten too powerful. And after those folks had moved up to Hell Creek, the ones who followed that devil, Gowrie, he lost all control. A lot of folks started dying because of those drugs and Johnny Stagg did his dead-level best to make sure Hamp couldn’t make any trouble. He was old then, just hit sixty-seven, thinking on retirement, which never would have suited him. I saw his hands start to shake many times when I waited on him. Or when we were together in the off hours. He was a sick man. And he was humiliated. That’s why he killed himself.

NARRATOR: Hamp Beckett had been in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Twice awarded the Purple Heart and once the Bronze Star. He credited the military for shaping his life, leading him to a disciplined, moral path. Later, he’d try to instill those same beliefs in his nephew, Quinn Colson. Beckett and his wife, Halley, never had children, often looking out for Quinn and his sister, Caddy, as if they were their own.

QUINN COLSON: My uncle put a .22 in my hand on my sixth birthday. We shot cans and bottles. He taught me how to fish and to hunt. Some of my best memories were walking into the woods with that man. He seemed to stand taller than the rest. He just kind of showed you how to act by the way he treated his own family and even those he had to arrest. I never wanted to be like my father, but I wanted to be like my Uncle Hamp. Whatever is whispered about him now doesn’t tell the whole story. Something awful happened to him, but Hamp Beckett was once a damn good man.