Over the past weekend, Linda and I got away for a few days to do some caching.

We found this this intriguing family mystery spanning more than 135 years is told by three tombstones lying behind a rusting iron fence in a small East Texas cemetery called Laurel Hill in Coldspring, Tx. 
Each of the tombstones provides cryptic inscriptions that, when linked together in time, offer glimpses of three tragedies that stalked the family of Robert and Sarah Smith in 1869 and 1872.
On January 21, 1869, the Smiths’ twenty-three-year-old son, Robert Emmett, was buried in the cemetery.
His time-weathered tombstone tells a tale of a probable murder: “In memory of my beloved son, Robert E. Smith, born December 24, 1846. Assassinated in cold blood…”

Smith’s body, pierced by gunshots, was found lying by the front gate of his family’s plantation home near the Trinity River.

His head rested on the removed saddle of his prize horse, Black Prince.
On June 3, less than five months after young Robert’s death, his father died, leading the remaining family members to erect a monument with a poignant inscription beginning with four words: “He never smiled again,” adding that Smith died “of grief and broken spirits.”
Not far from her father’s grave, seventeen-year-old Edith Smith was buried on May 18, 1872 — some three years after the untimely deaths of her brother and father.
Her inscription, penned by a grieving mother, is perhaps the most intriguing of the three tombstones: “Erected in memory of my darling child, Edith…died a victim to an experiment of surgery by Dr. Warren Stone Sr., of New Orleans…”
Robert Smith’s murder, if it was such, was never solved.

Because the body was carefully placed at the family’s gate, with the head resting on the saddle, the death may have been an accident by an unknown friend.
At the same time, there are few clues to the tragic death of Edith Smith.
Edith’s mother carried any explanation to her grave, which also lies in Laurel Hill Cemetery. Sarah Carson Smith died at Shepherd, near Coldspring, on February 8, 1891.

It would seem the wise Solomon was right when he said, “People can never predict when hard times might come. Like fish in a net or birds in a snare, people are often caught by sudden tragedy.” Eccl 9:12 NLT