He was sent to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Steilacoom, Washington. The 12 white men on the jury delivered a guilty verdict and the judge sentenced Edwards to life in prison. The rocks were key pieces of evidence when Edwards stood trial in federal court in October of that year. Curiously, at least two of the rocks used to crush her skull were inscribed with her husband’s initials: S.J.E.
Murder was one of them.Ī medical examiner reported that Margaret had been killed by blows to her head and strangulation. The reservation was patrolled largely by Indian officers, but ever since the Major Crimes Act of 1885, certain crimes on Indian reservations had fallen under federal jurisdiction. He was still kneeling there, holding his wife’s body, when a sheriff and an Apache police officer arrived. “I went to her bedside and before I fully realized what I was doing or that she was really dead, I had picked her up in my arms, her head was very bloody and a part of the blood got on my hands and clothing.” “I went in the tepee and found my wife in my own bed,” Edwards later wrote.
They alerted adults, who carried her body home. Children had discovered her body, along with bloody rocks, at the side of a trail two and a half miles outside of the Fort Apache town of Whiteriver. Shocking news came the next day: Margaret was dead. The argument escalated, and Margaret threatened to end their marriage. People who were there reported that Margaret confronted him inside a tepee, demanding to know why he’d been spending time with a younger woman, one of Margaret’s relatives. Three hours later, the Edwardses joined a group heading to another friend’s home. When he and Margaret arrived at their friend’s dwelling, a tepee, they found people drinking tulapai, a homemade Apache liquor. Hundreds of followers regarded him as a divinely inspired religious leader, a renowned shaman and medicine man. Edwards, a trim middle-aged man with a penetrating gaze, was an influential figure on reservations throughout the Southwest. On a Saturday afternoon in February 1933, at the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona, a White Mountain Apache Indian named Silas John Edwards and his wife, Margaret, stopped by a friend’s place to visit and relax.
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