Leroy
Darkwood
Leroy Darkwood was a killer. Born in 1842 in
Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, as Leroy Joseph Wood, little is known about
his early life. Relatives claimed he was a harsh child that took
pleasure in the pain of others. It was rumored that he killed his
first man at the age of 15. This incident forced his parents to send
him west, to Missouri, in order to keep him from hanging for his crime.
The next reported events in Leroy Wood's life
came in 1861. It was around this time that he met William Quantrill,
a captain in the Confederate army. Quantrill was instantly impressed
with the young Wood’s dead-on aim with a rifle, and with his hardened nature
at such an early age. Quantrill made Leroy a member of his notorious
Quantrill Raiders. This gave Leroy a golden opportunity to do what
he did best; kill.
On August 21st, 1863, Quantrill’s Raiders, along
with Wood, raided the city of Lawrence, Kansas, a stronghold of pro-Union
support. The raiders killed 183 men and boys, dragging some from
their homes to murder them in front of their families, and set the torch
to much of the city. Wood’s brutality during the Lawrence massacre
even horrified some of his fellow raiders. There were reports of
Wood herding fathers and sons into the cornfields, and then setting the
fields ablaze. Leroy shot anyone that tried to run from the burning
corn. Fellow raiders said that, as he dispatched his victims Leroy
had a gleam in his eye that chilled them to the bone. Of the 183
deaths that night, Wood had his hand in the majority of them.
After that, fellow raiders refused to ride with
Wood. In order to keep from losing all his soldiers William Quantrill
forced Leroy to leave his band. Wood told Quantrill he would see
him in hell, and then he left Missouri heading west.
For the next 13 years Leroy Wood worked as
a gunman for hire. This time period in his life is referred to by
historians as ‘The Bloody 13”. He traveled from Kansas to New Mexico
to Texas. All across the southwest his trail was littered with the
bodies of his victims. When he was hired to perform an assassination
he usually carried it out above and beyond what was asked for. Not
only would he kill his intended target, but he would also kill their family,
and anyone else in the general vicinity of his target. His brutality,
and the psychological torture of his victims before he dispatched them,
led frontiersmen to referred to him as simply ‘Deadwood”. His legend
grew so terrible that it is believed by some historians that most of his
horrible exploits were fictions. Wood became the embodiment of a
western boogieman. Someone cowboys would use to scare their peers
around campfires, or mothers would use to scare their children into behaving.
“Better watch out, or Deadwood will be coming
for you!”
In 1877 Leroy Wood’s life changed. After killing
a man in a saloon in Santa Fe, for the crime of spilling his drink, he
met a woman by the name of Raven Wolf.
Raven was a half Apache half Irish show girl.
Legend has it that she enchanted her patrons with tribal magic and dance.
A fast bond formed between Raven and Leroy. Some say she put a spell
on him from which he could not escape, but others say the two were just
made for each other because they were cut from the same evil cloth.
In a secret ceremony performed in the desert outside
Santa Fe, the two married. Shortly after their marriage Leroy changed
his last name to Darkwood. His 13 years as a killer had left him
a target for vengeance by many in the southwest.
It was in 1880 that the couple returned east.
With their accumulated ill-gotten wealth they built a house in Leroy’s
birthplace, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Two years later they
gave birth to their first, and only child, Abigail
Darkwood. So began the legend of Darkwood Manor.
