The Death of Berkely Muse
Told by John Mattingly
Originally appearing in Slackwater, Volume 4
They say the night before Berkely Muse was murdered, King and Muse were in a bar. When Harvey King decided he was going to go dredging, Berkely went with him. Normally Muse didn’t dredge with King, and I never saw him tonging out there with him much. The Navy had a restricted area where they would fire at practice targets, and the watermen couldn’t tong in that area during the day when the ranges were hot. So they come out at night and dredge what they called mussels or lumps. They could go out there and catch a load of oysters in nothing flat because there were a lot of offshore lumps out there with a lot of oysters on them. King and Muse dredged this area on the night Muse was shot.
I was out on the water that night. As a matter of fact, I was on the patrol boat Honga River. We were laying at Blackistone Island, and it was pre-planned what we were going to do that night. Captain Braun of the Louise Dee came down at four o’clock in the morning and got on the Honga River with my brother-in-law, Roger. Because Bruan wasn’t too familiar with the area, I captained the Louise Dee. The boat would probably do about ten miles an hour, because it must’ve been at least forty-five years old. She had a 110 Chrysler in her, and if you ran her over 2,000 RPM, she’d quit on you. I was just supposed to hang around the lower part of the Potomac River while they went up it.
Howard Shenton was in charge that night, and when the Honga River had blown up one of her engines back, we all met at Cobb Island. The Honga River had blown up one of her engines when she was chasing Harvey King and Berkely Muse that night. Shenton had heard that Muse had been shot, and it was later determined that King had been shot, too. The story was that when he passed the pier in Monroe Bay, he [King] dumped Muse up on the pier and kept going on up the creek. Eventually, he got to his vehicle and drove himself to the hospital.
I spent a lot of time looking for the dredges that had allegedly been thrown overboard but never did find them. There were a lot of unhappy people on the shores over there. But whatever happened and why it happened, I guess nobody will ever know.
