There are roads in the Florida Panhandle that remember things.
They remember wagon wheels and mule hooves, Model T tires humming over white sand, and the sound of men talking easy when they shouldn’t have trusted so freely. U.S. 90—long before anyone called it that—was one of those roads.
On July 3, 1921 (105 years ago), while the rest of the country was busy with fireworks and speeches, John M. Tuggle was doing what he had always done—driving.
Tuggle was a young automobile salesman out of Holmes County, a Chipley man by association if not by birth, and the sort of fellow folks described as obliging. The kind who would slow down for a stranger and never thought twice about it. On that summer day, he was headed west toward Pensacola, following the familiar ribbon of road from Chipley through Caryville, Crestview, and beyond.
At the Choctawhatchee River ferry in Caryville (before the Highway 90 bridge), the day changed. Two men approached him while he waited to cross. They were drifters by the look of them—dusty, travel-worn, and asking for nothing more than a ride west. Their names, as the papers would later try to untangle, were Jake Martin—sometimes called Joseph—and a companion known variously as Putnam E. Ponsell, Jim Lingo, or Hugh Bond, depending on which sheriff you asked and which lie was being told that day.
Tuggle innocently agreed to take them. They rode together into Milton, where Tuggle let them out. Before parting, he told them something that would seal his fate: If you need a ride back east tomorrow, I’ll pick you up.
And he did. The next morning, July 4th, Tuggle collected the two men and headed back toward Chipley. The road east was quiet. Pines stood thick. Heat rose off the sand. Somewhere past Crestview, as the car neared Deerland in the Mossy Head area, the ride came to an end.
What happened in that automobile was never softened by time. The two men turned on Tuggle. He was beaten and killed along that lonely stretch of Okaloosa County road, his body left where the road bent and the woods closed in. The motive was as plain as sin.
Money.
The Pensacola News Journal carried the story on July 7 and again on July 12, 1921. The details were grim, but what followed was stranger still.
After the killing, the two men walked into Mossy Head and caught an eastbound train. They stepped off at the junction in Cottondale, stayed there until Wednesday night, then rode north to Dothan. From there, they walked—on foot—to Bainbridge, where they found work on riverboats, believing the distance had buried their crime. It hadn’t.
Jake Martin’s capture came not through brilliance, but irony. He was arrested in Bainbridge by a bailiff—not for murder, but for stealing a shirt. When the bailiff brought him into the sheriff’s office, the sheriff happened to be reading a description sent over by Okaloosa County authorities.
The sheriff looked up from the paper, studied the man standing before him, and asked plainly: “Why did you murder that young fellow over in Florida?”
Martin didn’t hesitate. “For his money,” he said. There was no lawyer present. No sermon. Just the truth, spoken flat. Both men confessed. Given the rising anger back home, Florida Governor Sidney J. Catts Hardee ordered them transferred to Duval County for safekeeping, away from the reach of mob justice. Eventually, they were returned to Escambia County.
On September 11, 1921, they sat in the Escambia County Courthouse awaiting arraignment. The courtroom belonged to Judge A. G. Campbell, with State Attorney Harry Thompson prosecuting the case. The evidence was overwhelming. The confessions stood. There would be no mercy.
Convicted of first-degree murder, the two men made one final request. They asked to be hanged together…the court granted it.
On September 23, 1921, Sheriff Steele carried out the sentence. No spectacle. No speeches. Just the quiet work of justice as it was understood in those days.
John M. Tuggle had offered a ride to strangers on a dusty Panhandle road, trusting in decency where none existed. The road remembers that. And if you drive through Mossy Head when the sun is low and the pines stand still, you might feel it too—the weight of a long ride west that never reached its destination.
Some roads never forget.
Retired Pensacola Police sergeant Michael Earl Simmons is a crime historian and storyteller. He owns Sweet Tea Murders, a true crime storytelling company. For more information, contact sweetteamurders.com.
