20. Did He Get Away?

An uncanny thing happened one afternoon when I was idly surfing the Internet looking for information on my great great great great grandfather Philip Alston’s murders – both the one he committed as well as his own murder.  I came across my opposite number –  my opposite number, that is,  if I believed in curses and spiritualism and other non-observable phenomena.  Suz Pratt,  from Ferguson, Missouri, is a descendant of George Glascock, the man Philip Alston murdered.  She too is obsessed with the story behind this long-ago crime, though as a “spiritual researcher” she has access to channels not accessible to me.

It is her belief that the murder caused a curse to fall upon her “entire lineage,”  causing many Glascock descendants to be mysteriously wiped off the census records.  She shares her views on her You Tube channel, Sophia’s Emporium.  In one video she reads aloud an  account of Glascock’s murder from the Glascock Family Quarterly, a newsletter started by her kin.

In her commentary, she acknowledges that it’s commonly believed that “Dave the slave,” killed both Glascock and Philip Alston – which is what the Glascock Family Quarterly reports as well.  But she has come across a book published in 1930 that has caused her to question this version of events.  In The Outlaw Years,  author Robert M. Coates tells the story of a mysterious Ohio River  pirate with the name of Philip Alston “dressed in ruffles, broadcloth and lace,” who from his base on Diamond Island scuttled boats and murdered their crews. 

When things got too hot for him, the brigand escaped to Mexico, where he “rose again to high dignity – moving still among the Spanish gentlemen, courteously formal, dressed in his ruffles, broadcloth and lace.”  Suz Pratt considers this alternative outcome for Philip Alston not at all unlikely.

For myself, I don’t like to think that my great great great great grandfather managed to elude justice of any kind, poetic or otherwise, and live out his days as a Mexican grandee.  But I happen to know that at the time he lived there were more than a few Philip Alstons in the South.  I have come across websites that peg my ancestor as a counterfeiter.  Aha, I thought.  Something else to add to his list of crimes.  But it turns out that was an entirely different Philip Alston.  Maybe the one who became a pirate and ended up in Mexico.