Topic: Belle Starr

Myra Maybelle Shirley Reed Starr, better known as Belle Starr, was a notorious American outlaw. She was murdered on February 3, 1889.

She was born Myra Maybelle Shirley (known as May to her family) on her father's farm near Carthage, Missouri. Her mother was a Hatfield from the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feuding clans. In the 1860s her father sold the farm and moved the family to Carthage where he bought an inn and livery stable on the town square.

May Shirley received a classical education and learned piano, while graduating from Missouri's Carthage Female Academy, a genteel institution her father had helped to found.