Taking Aim at Jesse James & History

"And one night I was watching TV with my girlfriend. I see this face, this actor, and I said to her, 'Who is that?' And she said, 'That's Casey Affleck.' He looked like Bob Ford to me. So I had Casey come in and read for the part. He was fantastic."

And so he had his assassin.

They give themselves -- in that one lightning moment -- over to infamy.

It is a point of no return, a drop into darkness and headlines and eternal family shame.

The assassin has long fascinated many, drilling depthless holes into the psyche of the populace, sending legions to cry on street corners, on stoops, inside farmhouses. And in police stations and schoolrooms and on stairwells.

In 2004 Stephen Sondheim's musical "Assassins" opened on Broadway. It was all about those men and women who had either assassinated or attempted to assassinate American presidents.

Assassins crack the window of invincibility. They seem so methodical about it. They send the psychologists poring over documents and letters and yearbook pronouncements.

In the end they seem to wish only to matter.

Norman Mailer has written about Lee Harvey Oswald, as has Don DeLillo. One of the more recent titles about Lincoln's assassin was "American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies," written by Michael W. Kauffman.

The reviews for "Assassins" were ecstatic.

Ford was actually one of the few assassins who enjoyed their celebrity. He went on tour in a stage show with brother Charley, who had been with him in the house when he shot James. They reenacted the murder onstage, something the film also depicts. "When they started out doing it," Hansen says of the dramatic presentation, "they were essentially movie stars. Then the attitudes began to change about them. They were vilified. They were haunted by, essentially, bad press. Those first stories that had appeared about them were about these brave men who took on Jesse James. But then, more and more people began to find them reprehensible."

Robert Ford's glory had seeped from the blood that flowed from the skull of Jesse James. "Maybe he thought it was a good trade-off," Hansen says of the fame acquired by Ford.

By 1892 Ford was living in Creede, Colo. He was operating a makeshift dance hall. Dressing in spiffy clothes, staring at himself in mirrors for unnaturally long periods of time. In early June of that year, a man by the name of Ed O'Kelley, an out-of-town deputy sheriff, arrived in Creede. He walked over to Ford's dance hall and evenly called out his name. Ford had his back to the man. When he turned around he was staring at a shotgun and the man wielding it who would kill him.

Apparently O'Kelly had been angered that a man who had shot another man in the back -- even a murderer like Jesse James -- had gallivanted about the country for so long, untouched.

O'Kelley (sometimes referred to as Ed Kelly) would always be a mysterious figure. He did have what Hansen calls "a vague longing for glory."

In prison, O'Kelley -- the man who took the last breath from James's killer -- received heaps of fan mail. It came from around the country and across oceans. The warden and other inmates were astonished at his celebrity.

O'Kelley was pardoned early because of illness, but years after his release he was shot dead by a policeman following a burglary.

Jesse James's blood -- as had Robert Ford's blood -- flowed on.