Mrs. Stokes, the Lost Pony, and Two Seniors

     Football was big in small town west Texas, and in the fall of 1945 Littlefield saw one of its best ever Wildcat teams go undefeated until it lost the regional playoff to Ballinger on December 7, 1945. A letterman on that Wildcat team was senior Landon “Slow” Grissom who saw the Hunt girls coming toward his house with his mother in 1943 when the Hunts were killed. Also, the student manager of that football team was senior +Malcolm Parker Stokes whose mom was looking for his lost pony on Sunday October 24, 1943 near the Hunt home just before the murders on Tuesday October 26, 1943.
     As 1946 began this “lost pony” story was one of the loose ends of the Hunt case that the district attorney in Plainview was trying to tie up. He tried multiple times to get sheriff Hutson to get the lady to tell her story to the court and to go to line ups where she could identify Jim Thomas. The trial for Jim Thomas was set for October 15, 1946.
     It is the story of the local druggists wife, +Pearl Elizabeth (Loyd) Stokes, told on page 93 of +Clovis Road II and also on page 148 how District Attorney Harold LaFont so badly wanted her testimony in a case where he had very little evidence placing Jim C. Thomas in Littlefield in 1943. On August 15, 1946 eldest son, James Jr, of Pearl and her husband, James Mitchell Stokes, married a good Baptist girl, Ruth. James Stokes, Jr was studying to be a dentist and football manager son Malcolm was done with Littlefield High School and off to Texas Tech.
     The Stokes family had moved to Littlefield and opened the only drug store and soda fountain at 331 Phelps Avenue before 1924. On August 13, 1924 new city commissioner J. M. Stokes attended the first meeting of the Littlefield City Council and worked hard to get the city incorporated by the state the following year on March 24, 1925. Stokes was reelected commissioner in 1925. +James Mitchell Stokes was born in Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister, on March 26, 1891 and listed himself as a drug clerk by 1910.
    Then all of a sudden, when testimony was badly needed in October of 1946, Mrs. Stokes reconsidered visiting a line up in Huntsville for Jim Thomas. Some in Littlefield say she left Littlefield, and moved to Snyder, Texas for a time. She never testified. Snyder was where +Dr. Billy Newton had great influence and owned the local hospital. Also, Jim Thomas had real estate interests in Snyder. In 1950 the town of Snyder grew from 4,000 population to more than 12,000 after the discovery of Canyon Reef Oil Field.There are no coincidences ... and Mrs. Stokes had been dissuaded by the Newton gang from testifying, been given an offer she could not refuse and in effect damaged the prosecution’s case against +Jim C. Thomas. What makes a 57 year old druggist with political influence, with an established business, with a home on East 8th Street, and with ties in a community ties where he raised his family and helped found the city, sell his store to the Wrights and pick up and move 120 miles further down Highway 84, the Clovis Road? Only Pearl Stokes and her husband Jim knew for sure and she died in 1961 before her husband died on November 14, 1967.