Fort Worth Characters

Chapter 10: Crazy Mary Rea: A Real “Corker”

190 Every family has a black sheep, and the Rea family of Fort Worth was no exception. The Reas were known as a family of lawmen, marshals, and sheriffs. Then there was Mary Rea, who was only related by marriage , but still, she wore the family name and that was all that mattered . She was an embarrassment to the family and a dilemma to the city. No one knew what to do with her. She could have been the poster child for all that was wrong with the justice system when it came to dealing with the mentally ill. When mentally troubled individuals came through the criminal justice system, a myriad of factors determined how they were treated. First and foremost was their place in the community. Status and family connections were all-important in determining sanity and placing those who were judged “insane” or “incompetent.” For many defendants , a trip through the justice system began when family members dropped them off at the county jail, in effect turning them over to the Sheriff. This occurred when the family members could no longer control the person or were just tired of shouldering the burden.1 In Mary’s case, she was tolerated as an eccentric and allowed to go about her business because of the prominence of the Rea family. They were part of the second generation of Fort Worth pioneers who arrived after the railroad in 1876 and helped turn Cowtown into a ChapTeR 10 Crazy Mary Rea: A Real “Corker” Crazy Mary Rea: “A Real Corker” / 191 thriving city. The Reas produced a bumper crop of lawmen that included William, Edward, Henry, James, and John T. The most famous of the brood, William M. Rea, served twelve terms as Fort Worth marshal , aka chief of police, five terms as deputy sheriff, and two terms as sheriff in a thirty-five year career in law enforcement. Around 1879, Mary, a Fort Worth resident, married Confederate veteran John Rea who was sixteen years older, widowed, and raising a son at the time. He had followed his older brother to Fort Worth and also into law enforcement. He eventually served fifteen years on the police force, twelve of those years under William Rea before retiring in 1905 as the second-oldest member of the force.2 Subscribing to the theory that children were cheaper by the halfdozen , John and Mary had five children of their own, three sons and two daughters. The family lived comfortably enough in a house on Arizona Avenue. Mary had a fragile psyche and raising six children while fulfilling all the obligations that came with being a member of Fort Worth’s version of the famous Earp family was more than she Fort Worth Police Officer John T. Rea, Mary Rea’s husband , whose years as a policeman could not have prepared him for dealing with “Crazy Mary.” (Reproduced from 1901 FWPD Annual, courtesy Fort Worth Police Historical Association.) Fort Worth Characters / 192 could handle. At the very least those were contributing causes to her very public mental breakdown. Over several years her behavior became more and more eccentric, eventually crossing the line into the bizarre. The beginning of her “long day’s journey into night” came in 1909 when she got into a bitter dispute with the Magnolia Rebekah Lodge, the women’s auxiliary of the Odd Fellows, of which John was a longtime member. The lodge expelled her, and she filed suit. When that went nowhere, she filed another suit against the Grand Lodge of Texas. Both suits came before Judge James Swayne in the Seventeenth District Court, and he summarily dismissed them. That was not the end of it, however. John had refused to be a party to her suit; in fact, he had spoken out publicly against the action. Convinced that her husband was in cahoots with her enemies, she gave him no peace. After nearly a year of this, the sixty-seven-year-old husband filed for divorce, citing as grounds, that he had “experienced no peace of mind” since the lawsuit and that “married happiness had ceased to exist” for him. The case landed in the Seventeenth District Court, so Mary once again found herself standing before Judge Swayne, this time as a defendant. It did not make any difference; she lost again as John’s divorce petition was granted. It was an ugly breakup. Everyone knew John was...