Bailey men
On Friday morning, January 18, 1963, Lesley Cortez Bailey pointed a French-made automatic pistol at his wife’s left temple and fired. He then rested the muzzle below his right eye and ended his own life. He did so fully aware his actions would orphan the couple’s 8-month-old daughter.
Lesley, 32, a truck maintenance worker, and Angelina, 31, had been separated about three weeks when they agreed to meet to discuss their break-up. According to the Dallas Morning News, Angelina was overheard saying she would not return to her husband, and then “pistol shots rang out.”
Police found Angelina’s body on the floor next to the bed where Lesley lay. A justice of the peace ruled their deaths a murder-suicide. They were buried next to each other in Dallas’s Oakland Cemetery.
Inevitably, we look for fault when people’s lives go so wrong, when a murder-suicide, for example, ends the lives of two young people and changes their daughter’s life forever. It’s hard enough to explain such actions when we have access to the perpetrator, but Lesley made sure no one would ask him, “Why?”
Lesley Bailey descended from a long line of men who married and fathered children under difficult circumstances: They were uneducated men who struggled to live off the land — or worked with their hands — with neither inherited wealth nor many lucky breaks.
Was there something in his bloodline, something in the Bailey men’s past that could provide, if not an explanation, some clarity — or maybe even a precedent — for Lesley’s actions on that winter day?
GREAT GRANDFATHER JOHN On the day after Christmas 1857, in Fannin County, Texas, John Harrison Bailey, 26, an Arkansas-born farm laborer, married Martha Waldrum, age 14. Six months after giving birth to their sixth child, Martha died, leaving John with a houseful of motherless children.
Keeping to his custom of marrying during the winter holidays, the widower of six months wooed then wed Sarah Acock on New Year’s Day 1875. With that, the oldest of the Bailey children, 14-year-old Jim, lost his mother and gained a baby sister and a stepmother in the same year.
GRANDFATHER JIM James “Jim” Monroe Bailey outdid his father: He married three times and produced a dozen children. At 19, Jim was boarding with his dead mother’s relatives and working their farm in Collin County, Texas. A decade later, he was a widower with two daughters marrying for the second time. He and wife Sarah produced a daughter and two sons before she died in 1898.
On his third try a year later, Jim, 39, married a hardy 19-year-old named Edna Hendrix. The 1900 census shows the couple living in Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory (Oklahoma) with Jim’s five children, the youngest of whom was 3-year-old Thomas. While Jim worked the land, Edna tended her step-children. And, between 1901 and 1917, she produced six more Baileys.
FATHER TOM The 1930 census shows Thomas Bailey, 33, farming in McClain County, Oklahoma to keep his extended family sheltered and fed in the early years of the Dust Bowl, when it couldn’t have been more difficult. Depending on him was his step-mother, sister, wife Stella, and their sons, Chesley, 5, and Wesley, 3. It’s not clear if they already had chosen another rhyming name for their third child, but Stella was then pregnant with Lesley.
By 1940, having added a daughter to their family, the Baileys were living in Dallas, where Tom earned $360 for 26 weeks of work as a carpenter. When he registered for the World War II draft in February 1942, he was unemployed. The description provided —132 pounds on a 5-feet-11 1/2- inch frame with teeth missing in the upper right part of his mouth — suggests a life of hard work and poor health care. His signature on the document is painfully executed, as if writing was not easy for him.
Tom and Stella divorced, and the 1950 census shows her living on Kings Road in Dallas with two of her children and a niece. In 1954, Stella married William D. Sample. Seven years later, Tom Bailey, 60, died of pancreatic cancer at Parkland Hospital; he was buried in Restland Cemetery.
Tom was spared from knowing how his son Lesley’s life ended, but Stella was present when her boy — one of the three brothers whose rhyming names suggest his parents delighted in them — not only murdered his wife but ended the life Tom and Stella had given him. Stella had opened her home in Mesquite to the estranged couple for what she surely hoped would be a reconciliation.
There were many victims of the shooting that took place that frigid January morning in 1963. Chief among them was Angelina Corrales Bailey, the lovely young wife and mother who died at the hands of the man who gave her his name and with whom she created a new life.
She was born May 30, 1931, in Texas to Juan Corrales and Iodelia Hernandez. Days before her 29th birthday, Angelina married Lesley; their daughter, whom they named Doris, was born May 31, 1962, the day after her mother turned 31. Was little Doris the birthday present for which Angelina had long waited?
Angelina was statistically a late first-time mother. In the early 1960's, 43 percent of women had their first baby by age 24. Given that, it’s possible Lesley was not Angelina’s first husband. What is certain is that Angelina wasn’t Lesley’s first wife.
On April 1, 1950, Lesley and Evelyn Forwalter married in Rockwall County. Born in Tennessee, Evelyn was living with her grandmother in Dallas by the time she was eight. She later attended Forest Avenue High School.
The couple soon divorced, as evidenced by a Colorado document that shows 19-year-old Evelyn married her second husband less than a year after marrying Lesley.
Did Evelyn see something in Lesley that frightened her away?
Constructing family trees often unearths ancestors prone to bad behavior, and speculating about probable causes is irresistible. Lesley Bailey, for example, did a terrible thing, and it’s natural to want to better understand not only what happened but why.
A look at Lesley’s immediate male ancestors reveals neither serial killers nor inmates of insane asylums. On the contrary, his great-grandfather, grandfather and father seemingly spent a great deal of energy making a living and providing their children with new mothers. Of course, how they interacted with their spouses and children — affectionately or cruelly, joyfully or begrudgingly — is not something found in a family tree.
There was, however, one Bailey kinsman whose death offers, if not an explanation, at least a parallel to Lesley’s. More than three decades separated the men’s actions, but both reached for a gun as they lay in bed with their unsuspecting wives, both men chose violence to resolve whatever darkness rose in them one night.
The kinsman’s name was Daniel Owen Bailey; he was Lesley’s great-uncle. In 1910, Dan was farming in Howard County, Texas. His household included his wife of 20 years, Beulah, and the four children in the photograph.
By 1920, Dan and his family were in Midland. Living with them were three of their children, as well as four grandchildren left behind when their oldest daughter died in early 1920. Six years later, Beulah died, and like his male forebears, Dan soon remarried.
Mary Ann Mayer, a widow, was the mother of 10 children. When she and Dan married in 1927, they not only merged their large broods, but they added one of their own, Melvin. Dan was then 60; Mary Ann, 50.
On Friday, November 21, 1930, the Bailey family were in their beds — Dan, Mary Ann and Melvin were sleeping together; the other four children in the household were sleeping in an adjoining room — when the quiet was shattered by a single shotgun blast.
When authorities arrived, Dan lay dead, the shotgun lying on the floor next to him. No one else was injured. The coroner who signed his death certificate hand-wrote the cause: “suicide/shot with his own hands with a shotgun.”
It’s likely the coroner had it right, but Dan’s son, Lee Wesley, then 32, seems to have taken his father’s death hard; he encouraged officials to disregard the suicide verdict and pursue a murder. A few weeks after the shooting, Lee Wesley filed a murder complaint against John Mayer (or, Meyers in some reports), a laborer on the Bailey farm. The man was subsequently no-billed by a grand jury.
In November 1931, another suspect was indicted and arrested: Mary Ann Bailey, the dead man’s widow. On November 27, a newspaper reported that “she sought to be released on bond.” She apparently was successful. A search revealed no further news stories about the widow’s legal standing.
By 1935, Mary Ann had moved to California, where she remained until she died July 24, 1967, at age 87. She was survived by nine children, 24 grandchildren, 48 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. She never remarried; she retained the Bailey surname to the end.
Like Angelina Corrales, Mary Ann Bailey suffered serious consequences — the loss of her mate, an arrest, a damaged reputation — as a result of her husband’s decision to end his life. The difference, of course, between Dan’s desperate last act and his great-nephew’s was that Lesley took even more from his wife. He took her life before he took his own.
Both men, of course, abandoned their children. Dan left five young children in his household, as well as adult children whose little ones would never know their grandfather.
Lesley Cortez Bailey left only one child, but that child’s loss was double: When Lesley fired those deadly shots, he deprived his daughter of a father’s love and protection…and her mother.
NOTES: Lesley and Angelina Bailey are buried in Oakland Cemetery’s section 3, tier 7, graves 10 and 11. Lesley’s mother, Stella Sample, is buried in an unmarked grave at Oakland, in section 5, tier 1, grave 18. Her son Wesley (one of Lesley’s rhyming brothers) is buried in the same section and tier, grave 21.
