Blood on the Desert Queen Ranch

William Franklin Keys, known to everyone as Bill, was one of the last great desert homesteaders. Born in eighteen seventy-nine, he arrived in this country around nineteen ten and built a whole world out of nothing at what he called the Desert Queen Ranch. Over the decades he and his wife Frances raised seven children here, built a ranch house, a schoolhouse for the local homesteader kids, dams to catch the rare rain, an orchard, and a stamp mill for crushing ore.

But Bill Keys had a long feud with a neighbor named Worth Bagley, a former Los Angeles lawman, over cattle and over a road Bagley had blocked. On May eleventh, nineteen forty-three, the two men met on that road and gunfire broke out. Keys said Bagley shot at him first from ambush.

Keys grabbed a rifle from his car and fired back, killing Bagley. A jury convicted him of manslaughter and sent him to San Quentin. He might have died in prison, but Frances wrote to the crime novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, whose Court of Last Resort investigation helped reopen the case.

Keys was paroled and, in nineteen fifty-six, fully pardoned. He returned to the ranch and lived there until his death in nineteen sixty-nine. He even carved the story into a rock at the spot, a stone marker that still reads that here is where Worth Bagley bit the dust at the hand of W.

F. Keys.