Bea Elizabeth Phillips' Fraudulent Death Certificate.


* Before examining this document, consider the valid evidence first. All the census records for her family say she was born in Texas as were all her children (the social security applications of her sons John and Jack give both of their birth places as Texas). Without the false evidence, a researcher could easily deduce that Bea Phillips also died in Texas and that Tom Phillips took his family to Indian Territory after her death.

The "Delayed Filing" Death Certificate

There are some serious problems with this document, shown below, which prove it is based on fraudulent information.

With this document (and the amended death certificate of Jack Phillips), this person appears to have committed a crime in the State of Oklahoma by giving false information for an official document.

To make matters worse, the person responsible for the hoax erased the "Delayed Filing" stamps on the certificate (see it here) and gave it to researchers as if it were her actual death certificate.

Place of Birth

The evidence is conclusive – Bea Elizabeth Phillips was born in Texas, not Missouri, and none of the Dalton family was born in Texas. (See Finding Bea.)

The Attending Physician

The official title of the death certificate is "ATTENDING PHYSICIAN CERTIFICATE OF DEATH". The certifying / attending physician is alleged to be Dr. John Bolton MORGAN, M.D.. Dr. Morgan was born in 1861. He is a physician on the 1900 census and living in the Chickasaw Nation in Township 1 N R 3 W, which is just north of Tussy.

He received his license #586 from the AMA in January 1908. He was a doctor living in Elmore City for the 1910 and 1920 censuses. It is possible that Dr. Morgan attended Bea Elizabeth Phillips in her last days, but this death certificate says she lived in Tussy and died at home (but the fraud surrounding this makes all of it suspect). Dr. Morgan died in 1931 in Oklahoma City

The date for his signature is Jan. 2, 1895, but this "delayed filing" request was received and signed April 2, 1987, 56 years after Dr. Morgan died and 92 years after Bea Phillips died.

There is no evidence that Dr. Morgan was present at Bea's death.

There were no death certificates in Indian Territory in 1894, no official death records were kept by anyone. There was no undertaker in Tussy or Elmore and burials were the responsibility of the family. Where did the information come from for this delayed filing death certificate, considering no records were kept and everyone involved had been dead for decades?

The Informant

Why isn't the informant the Funeral Director or someone with direct knowledge of or access to the official details of her burial? The informant is Billy Murl Phillips who wasn't born until 34 years after Bea Elizabeth Phillips died and he is the person responsible for the other falsification of data surrounding this hoax. (There were no records, there was no funeral home and no funeral director, so there is no one who could officially attest to any of the facts on this certificate.)

The Funeral Director

More evidence that this is fraud is the Funeral Home and the Funeral Director listed on it. The funeral home is listed as the Elmore City Funeral Home, located in "Elmore City, Ok" and the Director is E.H. Yeary. Keep in mind that this funeral happened the last of December in 1894 and "Ok" did not exist until 1907 when Indian Territory became part of the new State of Oklahoma.

Also, the town was called Elmore in 1894, not Elmore City. The funeral home was the "Yeary Funeral Home" and it did not come into existence until after E.H. Yeary married in 1904 (see the Yeary Funeral Home History).

The Funeral Director is listed as E.H. Yeary. He is Edwin Hannibal YEARY (1) (2), who was born 1875 and died 1958.

E.H. Yeary could not have been the funeral director when Bea died for several reasons, the most important being that he was a farmer living in a different town, 19 years old, and did not enter that business until more than 10 years after she died.

Susan Vaughn, granddaughter of E.H. Yeary, wrote (Mar. 9, 2014):

... Ed Yeary did not have a funeral home until after he married my grandmother Ruth Alice McCandlis on June 25, 1904. At the beginning, the name was Yeary Funeral Home - never Elmore Funeral Home.....

The Funeral Home

See the History of the Yeary-Vaughn Funeral Home, sometimes referred to as the Elmore Funeral Home or the Elmore City Funeral Home.

How about the Elmore City Funeral Home? Could it have officiated at Bea Phillips' funeral? Absolutely not! Ed Yeary was a farmer living with his family in Lexington when Bea died. There was no funeral home in Elmore at that time – Black's General Store, which had been open for less than 5 years in that little town of approximately 200 residents, sold caskets but did not perform burials.


The Cemetery where she was buried

  • Bea Elizabeth Phillips' grave was originally listed in the Tussy Cemetery, not in the Elmore Cemetery, though it is possible she died in Texas and the marker at Tussy was for memorial purposes only.
  • The cemetery at Elmore was not named "Elmore City Cemetery" until after 1911.
  • Listing her burial in Elmore City Cemetery is a convenient way of justifying placing a tombstone there for Tom and Bea Phillips – a place where his "proof" would more likely be seen than were it placed in the small, remote Tussy Cemetery.

About Elmore City, Oklahoma

Elmore City was originally known only as Elmore up until 1910 when it was renamed to Banner and then back to Elmore City in 1911. The first record of a residence in Elmore is in 1885 and the first post office was established there in 1890. That same year Jasper N. Black opened his General Store. Bea died just four years after the General Store and post office appeared in Elmore. Black became the town's first mayor when it was incorporated in 1898.

In an attempt to determine the size of Elmore around the time Bea died, a search was made of the 1900 census at familysearch.org for all people living in Elmore town, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory. It returned 220 people. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 90 years later (1990) there were 492 people living there and in 2000 the population was 756 and for 2010 census there were 328 households and 697 people living in Elmore City.

From "The Dalton Gang Story", p. 39

What affidavits were filed with the State of Oklahoma to obtain this delayed filing certificate?

  • The funeral home did not exist when Bea Elizabeth Phillips died – it was founded after 1904, more than 10 years after she died.
  • No funeral home records exist prior to 1948.
  • E.H. Yeary was a farmer in Lexington when she died, he did not enter the undertaking business until after he married in 1904 and he would not have had records of her death.
  • If records were presented from the Elmore City Cemetery, where did they originate? (She was not buried there.)

Map of the cities involved:

See the map below. E.H. Yeary was in Lexington when Bea died. She allegedly died in Tussy and there is a record of a grave for her in the Tussy Cemetery. The man who has created all this deception lives in Wynnewood and was born and raised in Elmore City. He requested the delayed filing death certificate for Bea Phillips and placed a tombstone for her and her husband Tom in a second cemetery, the Elmore City Cemetery.

Tussy Cemetery

The family was poor and it is possible no stones were placed on Tom and Bea Phillips' graves.

Thomas Louis Phillips | Bea Elizabeth Phillips

Elmore City Cemetery

Thomas Louis Phillips & Bea Elizabeth Phillips

See: Lies Carved in Stone

Problems for the Bea Elizabeth "Dalton" Hoax:

The delayed filing death certificate for Bea Elizabeth Phillips presents numerous problems from both legal and historical viewpoints. It shows that she was buried in the Elmore City Cemetery by the Elmore Funeral Home and that the Funeral Director was E.H. Yeary, but none of these are possible – they are more examples of fraud.

  • The first record of Bea Elizabeth Phillips' grave is in the Tussy Cemetery, not in the Elmore Cemetery, and other evidence indicates she may have died in Texas. The Tussy Cemetery was founded in 1893, the year before she died, and was 15 miles from Elmore. No documents exist for the Tussy Cemetery from that time period and could not have been used to obtain this death certificate.
  • Elmore City did not exist in 1894 – it had been known as either Rock Creek or Banner until 1890 when the post office was established there. The post office was named Elmore.
  • It is not known whether there was a cemetery at Elmore in 1894. The town of Elmore would not be officially established until 3 years after Bea died (1898) and it was called Elmore, not Elmore City.
  • When she died, Black's General Store in Elmore had only been in business 4 years. It sold caskets but performed no services, no burials, and made no records of burials. The family would have purchased the casket and buried her body themselves.
  • When she died, the bend-in-the-road that would become Elmore had about 200 people living in the area and was too small to support a funeral home.

See the History of Yeary Funeral Home

  • There was no funeral home in Elmore when she died.
  • There was no funeral director in Elmore when she died.
  • There was never a business in Elmore named Elmore Funeral Home.
  • When she died, Ed Yeary was a farmer living with his family in Lexington. He was not in Elmore, he was not overseeing burials, he was not a funeral director, he had nothing to do with her burial and he certainly did not record anything about her death or burial.
  • Ed Yeary would not enter the funeral home business until after 1904 – 10 years after her death.
  • There were no official records kept for Bea Phillips' burial as there was no funeral home and no undertaker in Elmore (or in Tussy) at that time.