Hiring cowboys for the ranch was a rather odd affair. With over 300 square miles of grazing land and several thousand head of cattle, one would think we had a large group of cowboys running the show. Not this ranch. Most of the time, the ranch was run by Earl and one or two old cowboys, along with drifting cowboys who usually lasted a month or two.
During the summers, Earl would enlist the help of his younger son, Mitch, who mostly delegated his duties to his own sons. We needed to build character.
Instead of building character, however, we mainly learned how to work with some strange characters. The strangest character we ever dealt with was Nay Hays Partlaw.
Nay and his girlfriend, Winnie (actually, we never knew her real name) drifted into town one summer in a bus that looked like it came out of the Muppet Movie. Both were hippies and odd as a 4 dollar bill. Nay stood over six feet tall, with long hair and a big shaggy salt and pepper beard. His face and eyes were worn by age and probably too many hits on the bong. Earl hired him to work the ranch with us. He was a little odd, but was a likable fellow. He rode an old beach cruiser style bicycle, with a handlebar basket, to and from Earl’s house each day.
The funniest thing was to watch this tall hippy following the cows on a roundup. He would slowly walk his horse behind the cattle and emit a small “wheet” whistle, over and over.
Nay didn’t go out much and we never saw his girlfriend, but he always showed up for work and did a fair job on his assignments. He helped my younger brother, Jared, and his friend, Loren, build a shed around a generator and pressure tank. He was almost always working with one of us kids all over the large ranch. Little known to us, that should have been the scary part.
One day, Nay and his girlfriend disappeared. Nay didn’t even pick up his paycheck, but some cowboys naturally drift on to other jobs.
Sometime during 1987, Earl was watching a TV show—Unsolved Mysteries which talked of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list or perhaps it was America”s Most Wanted. Both shows did segments about similar subjects. The story was about a man (Nay Hayes) who was having an affair with a married woman. The married woman, Patricia Ester, had gotten involved with Nay (Danny Michael Weeks). It was learned later that Patricia had hired Weeks to kill her husband, 40-year-old Army Sgt. Hubert Ester. Weeks was found guilty of 2nd degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Patricia was also sentenced, but to first degree murder, and also got life in prison.
On August 24, 1986, Weeks and another inmate escaped the Louisiana State Penitentiary. They swam across the Mississippi river to get away! Then they kidnapped a young lady and forced her to drive to Houston, where she was released unharmed. Then they forced another woman to drive them to El Paso, where she was released.
What an experience! We, a bunch of kids, worked side by side with a murderer and serial kidnappper!
Now we had been told at some point that he had killed some kids in the commission of the crime, but I did some research recently and that was not the case. He did kill the husband during an altercation, but what got him on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted was the other crimes he committed while fleeing. Evidently, he was caught, but then escaped from the jail he was being held in. Then he kidnapped two women during his journey westward, holding them at gunpoint as he crossed state lines, but eventually letting both of them go, unharmed (at least physically).
It was after he released the second in New Mexico that somehow he acquired the Muppets’ bus and drove to St. Johns. I’d surmise that the bus belonged to his hippy girlfriend. After he left St. Johns, he was later arrested in Phoenix, AZ, on March 10, 1988, along with a woman, Jorene Florea, after a former work associate had recognized him and sent a tip to the FBI. I still don’t know if this woman was the one he was living with in St. Johns.
After capture, he went back to the Louisiana State Prison with two consecutive life sentences, and later, was transferred to the Federal Prison system. He currently resides in a federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, and is approximately 76 years old or he may have died in 2016. Reports are spotty.
For many months after seeing the story on America’s Most Wanted, Earl often commented, “I knew there was something funny about that guy.” ---Or something chillingly scary.
Several of my other siblings had the opportunity to work with Danny Weeks aka Nay Hays Partlaw, but I don’t know their stories or their own views on how they saw him as kids versus now, knowing the situation as it is today looking back. So I call on them to make a comment and give their own reports on working with Danny Weeks!
Thought you might enjoy this interesting history of the characters that somehow ended up on our ranch!
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