Assassination of A.J. Daggs
Arizona, The Youngest State
1913, page 486

The Daggs brothers had been hard hit financially by the wool 
slump during the first Cleveland administration.  Two of 
them, P.O. and W.A. moved to Tempe, where they secured control 
of the Bank of Tempe and where they purchased thousands of 
acres of land for the consideration of remotely dated notes.  
The bank soon thereafter failed, with practically no cash left 
in the treasury and no satisfactory accounting of just where 
the cash had gone.  The land had been transferred twice and 
thrice so the original sellers generally got nothing.  Two 
more Daggs brothers, R.E. L. and A.J. came from Missouri to 
handle the long-continued legal trouble that had arisen over 
these transactions.  A record of family immunity from violence 
finally was broken when A.J. Daggs was assassinated.  Though 
mainly engaged in corporation work in Phoenix, he had secured 
valuable mining interests in the Superior District and on 
January 1, 1908, paid a visit to his claims, accompanied by a 
body guard, George Ditmore.  From a distant hill top a 
prospector saw the men shot from ambush.  Daggs dropped and 
two men broke from bushes beside the trail tot pursue and 
slay the fleeing Ditmore,  Then the pair returned and 
completed their bloody work.  It developed, however, that 
Daggs had utilized his few remaining moments of life.  
Already mortally wounded, he had mustered up enough strength 
to scribble in his note book, "Stewart and Fondren have 
killed me," then threw the book and pencil behind a nearby 
bush where later they were found.  Robert J. Stewart and 
Edward Fondren were promptly arrested.  They had quarreled 
with Daggs over mining claims and had made threats on his 
life, but the prospector who had seen the murders from afar 
could not identify them and they might have escaped punishment 
had not one of them in his cups boasted of his deed.  Both 
went to the Penitentiary.


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