Her bloody Valentine: Toni Jo Henry shoots man between the eyes in bid to free jailed husband

BY Mara Bovsun
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

Sunday, February 14th 2010, 4:00 AM

It was Valentine's Day, 1940, and Toni Jo Henry had planned a perfect surprise, sure to show her sweetie just how much she loved him.

She was going to bust him out of jail.

No easy task, given that Toni Jo had no cash, car or weapons, and was not the type to bake quaint little cakes in which to conceal files.

Instead she used her most powerful weapon - beauty - to play on the sympathies of two men, an ex-con and a Good Samaritan. Neither realized they were dealing with a woman the press would later dub "The Tigress." Both would pay with their lives.

Born Annie Beatrice McQuiston on January 3, 1916, near Shreveport, La., she was the baby of a family of six children. From the start, the girl was spirited, but after her mother died of tuberculosis the 6-year-old became a handful.

As her sisters studied hard to become nurses, and her brothers took jobs as laborers, Annie Beatrice grew more beautiful, and more out of control. By 13, she had changed her name to Toni Jo, and was working in a Shreveport whorehouse, earning money to feed a cocaine addiction.

That's where, in the fall of 1939, she met the "Cowboy," Claude Henry, 26, a down-on-his luck boxer with a history of petty crimes and violence. They fell for each other, hard.

Cowboy helped the 23-year-old stunner "get the drug monkey off my back," she'd say later. A justice of the peace married the love-struck couple in November, just in time for Cowboy to go on trial for killing a former San Antonio police officer in a bar fight.

When his new bride heard the sentence, 50 years in prison, she shrieked, "I'll get you out, Cowboy! Don't worry!"

She took her vow seriously, moving to Beaumont, Texas, to be near her husband's new digs, the Huntsville prison. There, she plotted to get her man back.

Her first glimmer of hope came from Finnon Burks, 23. Newly released from Huntsville, Burks was already looking for trouble and would find plenty of it in his lovely accomplice. They teamed up, pretended to be newlyweds, and took off on a crime spree.

On Valentine's Day, 1940, Joseph A. Calloway, 41, a salesman, set out from his Houston home in a sparkling new Ford coupe, headed for a business meeting in Louisiana. He disappeared.

No one had a clue of what had become of Calloway until Toni Jo showed up unannounced at an aunt's house near Shreveport and announced that she had killed a man.

To police, she later poured out her eye-popping tale: how she had planned the jailbreak, teamed up with Burks and stole a cache of weapons from a gun shop. They were going to rob a bank. Toni Jo intended to use the loot as bribe money to shorten Cowboy's sentence.

Calloway just happened to be on the road when, on a rainy night, a beautiful woman stuck out her thumb. He pulled over and offered a ride to the comely hitchhiker and her companion.

Somewhere near Lake Charles, La., Toni Jo pulled a gun on the good Samaritan, stole his wallet and forced him into the trunk.

After a few more miles, they stopped and, at gunpoint, Toni Jo led Calloway into a deserted rice field and ordered him to take off his clothes. She thought the outfit would look nice on her beloved.

As the naked man shivered before her, Toni Jo said she forced him down on his knees. He begged her to spare him; she shot him between the eyes.

After offering her confession to the police, she led officers to the corpse and offered up the name of her accomplice.

By the time of her trial, on March 27, 1940, Toni Jo had changed her story, insisting that Burks was the one who pulled the trigger.

But after seven hours of deliberation, the jury found her guilty. Tried a short time later, Burks got the same verdict. The sentence was death in the electric chair.

Her lawyers appealed, and managed to find technicalities to earn not one, but two new trials. It took about an hour for the second jury to agree with the first. A third trial yielded the same result.

Now, it was Cowboy's turn to ride to the rescue.

Just before Thanksgiving, 1942, five days before Toni Jo was scheduled to become the first and only woman to die in Louisiana's electric chair, Cowboy busted himself out of jail. His plan was to kidnap the judge who had given the death sentence and hold him hostage until Toni Jo went free. Police rounded the fugitive up in a Beaumont hotel.

The young lovers were allowed one last phone call.

"Hurry up and get that zoot suit off and walk out the front door like a man so your mother will be proud of you," she told him. "Go straight and try to make something of your life."

Cowboy just sobbed.

Toni Jo was oddly cheerful the next day, quipping with reporters and photographers as they snapped her jailhouse portrait. "I've smiled twice, mister," she told one. "Have you any idea how much talent is being wasted here today?"

For last wishes, she asked only that her death-row companion, a small black and white puppy, be given to her niece, and that she be buried with a crucifix in her left hand.

When asked if she had any last words, she said, "I believe not."

While awaiting execution, Toni Jo admitted that she had lied about Burks, and that she had been the killer. Burks got the chair anyway, on March 22, 1943.

About two years after Toni Jo's death, Cowboy, his heart failing, was paroled.

Freedom didn't do much for his health; he was gunned down on a Dallas street three months later.

From: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/02/14/2010-02-14_her_bloody_valentine_a_bullet_between_the_eyes.html