By Leo Banks
(This is the second part of a two-part ) article.)
A curse seemed to follow the men in Gabriell "Gabe" Dollie Wiley's life.
The first one, Ernest Presti, was an Italian-born gambler and prizefighter who boxed under the name "Kid Kirby." He and Gabe were married in the gold mining town of Congress, Arizona on October 6, 1909. However, in May of 1911, Presti was shot in the back in broad daylight on a Prescott sidewalk by Bill Campbell, a shoeshine man. The two had argued over a $20 blackjack debt. After Presti came Topp. Then Gabe married Bernard Melvin in Orange County, California in 1919. They split after six months and were legally divorced in 1923.
Just before Christmas 1922, Gabe traveled to Los Angeles to have Melvin arrested for embezzling $2,000 from her. Her return to the city of her acquittal was big news, only this time it was Melvin giving sensational interviews from behind bars. "I didn't steal that money from her. She gave it to me," Melvin told the L.A. Times. "We loved each other once, but we're through now, and she hates me. She hated Topp and she killed him. I'm in jail. The man pays, I guess."
Melvin's last years were bizarre. He lived in a shack at the Prescott dump, where he worked as caretaker, refusing to communicate with anyone. He had no family and hadn't received mail in 20 years. In 1927, according to Yavapai County probate papers, he was attacked at the dump and beaten to within a whisker of his life by several shadowy men. They made off with the $800 in life savings that he stashed there. The crime was not pinned on Gabe, but it was never solved either. Melvin died a pathetic loner in 1929 at age seventy. The official cause: pneumonia.
Gabe's next husband was a barber and manicurist named Everett L. Fretz. Something went haywire in his head, too, and in 1935 he was committed to the Arizona State Asylum. He raved through terrible nights about his gold mine near Prescott, demanding to be deputized to protect it. But the mine existed only in his imagination. A month later, he died of what state records cryptically describe as "general paralysis of the insane." He was forty.
Four men shot, poisoned or dead under mysterious circumstances. Four that we know about.
Gabe's own nephew, Gil Layral, a retired food service worker in California, believes there might've been twice that many. "It's hard to say how many there were. Maybe eight?" Layral said in a phone interview. "Rat poison, eh. That was her preferred method."
Gabe's last husband was George Wiley. They were married in Prescott in what must have been a sight: an old hooker, plump, glistening with diamonds, standing beside a grinning ex-bootlegger with a tomato for a face, and the ceremony performed by Yavapai County Judge Gordon Clark, who stood three-and-a-half feet tall in his cowboy boots.
The midget judge, as he was called, joined the happy couple in matrimony on July 31, 1937. Adopting her longtime nickname, Dollie, Gabe Fretz moved to Salome, Arizona and became Dollie Wiley.
She and George operated a combination liquor store, cafe, auto court and gas station on the highway to California. But little else had changed. The madam still ran girls out of the cabins behind the cafe - and people around her kept winding up dead.
On November 23, 1940, George got into an argument at the cafe with Mae Grisson, one of Dollie's girls. When he lunged at Mae, she fell off her stool and hit her head on a water cooler. Two weeks later she died in the Wickenburg hospital and George was charged with murder. The trial was set for early the next year, but it never took place.
On January 10, 1941, the 59-year-old Wiley was found dead on his kitchen floor. He'd worked at the cafe from midnight to 9 a.m. After Dollie relieved him, he went home and drank from a water glass on the kitchen counter that police say was filled with cynogas, commonly used to poison rats.
The coroner's jury, aware of Dollie's past, suspected she left the glass out for him. Others found it more than strange that Grisson's death came just hours after Dollie had paid her a visit her in the hospital. But officials ruled that Grisson had died of natural causes, and Wiley by suicide.
Now well-off and with a business of her own, Dollie might've spent the remainder of her days in relative peace. But her radar for trouble was always working.
On August 15, 1962, a 36-year-old service station operator named Bill Gabbard shot and killed a man while hunting rabbits outside Salome. The Gabbards rented a home Dollie owned, right next to her own, and she threw herself into his defense.
She helped his wife, Birdie, hire a top Yuma lawyer, and even put up bail money. Gabbard's trial opened in Yuma on December 12 and lasted four days. The jury believed Gabbard's claim of self-defense and delivered a verdict of not guilty. Ironically, Gabbard's case looked much like Dollie's back in 1915. Both involved a shooting, a claim of self-defense, the defendant receiving unexpected help, and ultimate acquittal.
Either way, it was the perfect coda to her crime-novel life.
Five days after the verdict, on December 21, Dollie fell at her home. She was admitted to the hospital in Wickenburg with a broken hip and pneumonia. Knowing the end had come, she telephoned Prescott and asked old friend, Lester Ruffner, a funeral home operator, to contact the Episcopal minister and hurry to her bedside to administer last rites.
The two men rushed to Wickenburg, making it in time to square her with God. Dollie was about 72 when she died, Christmas Day, 1962. The body was cremated and the ashes were buried in Prescott beside E.L. Fretz, the husband who raved about his gold mine from his bed at the asylum.
"I remember that 4-by-8 foot cell down there in Yuma [while awaiting trial in 1962]," says Bill Gabbard from his home in Tennessee. "The jailer come and opened the door and I said, 'What's going on?' And he said, 'You're going home.'
"I went out to the front, and there was my wife and Dollie standing there. Dollie didn't say nothin', and she was bent over and shakin', but she was smiling that little smile she always had. I tell you, if it wasn't for her I'd still be in that jail. She sure was a fine lady."
Dollie Wiley's business in Salome is still open today. It's called the Free Lunch Cafe.
(Leo W. Banks, a Tucson-based writer, is a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways magazine. He also has written several books of history for Arizona Highways' book division. These include Never Stand Between a Cowboy and his Spittoon [2001] and Rattlesnake Blues [2000].)
Sharlot Hall Museum Photograph Call Number: (pb136f8i1). Reuse only by permission.
A curse seemed to follow the men of Gabriell Dollie Wiley life, shown here visiting the Granite Dells in the 1930s (the face rock tumbled over years later). She had been a madam at the time. Late in life she moved to Salome and ran a restaurant with her last husband .who died mysteriously.