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It was unusually warm in St. Joseph, Missouri, that early spring morning.

“Mr. Howard,” the man who rented the little wooden-frame house at 1318 Lafayette St., had just finished breakfast when he noticed that a print on the wall was hanging crooked. He stretched out his hands to straighten it, unaware that one simple act was about to set in motion a string of unintended consequences.

“Mr. Howard” was, in fact, the outlaw Jesse James (an alias he had used before), and it wasn’t just the temperature that had him and his family lying low in that spring of 1882. The James Gang had fallen on hard times, and Jesse was trying to (in modern terms) “put the band back together” for a criminal comeback. With many old members dead or in prison, it was time for new blood.

Brothers Bob and Charley Ford were handsome men in their early 20s who might have fit the bill. As the job description indicates, they were also crooks. In a classic example of “no honor among thieves,” while they were worming their way into Jesse James’ confidence, they were also secretly negotiating with Missouri’s governor for the $5,000 reward on James’ head (about $160,000 today).

A deal was cut: kill James and get the cash, plus a full pardon.

Monday, April 3, 1882, arrived. With his guns resting on a nearby table, Jesse was straightening the picture when Bob Ford shot him from behind. Jesse James was no hero, but shooting an unarmed man from behind was the ultimate act of cowardice. Conspiring to collect $5,000 for it added a Judas Iscariot dimension.

That was the end of Jesse James’ story. However, for Bob and Charley Ford, karma was kicking in.

The two backstabbing brothers wired the governor to collect their ill-gotten gains, then turned themselves in to the authorities. Imagine their surprise when they were indicted for murder, tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang — all in just one day.

Two hours later, the governor spared them from the gallows with a full pardon. He shorted them on the reward, paying only $500 — a far cry from the $5,000 they were promised. (Politicians were no more trustworthy in the 19th century than today.)

It was all downhill from there for the Brothers Ford. Killing a celebrity made them celebrities, too — but in a bad way. Bob was viewed much like John Wilkes Booth, who also shot Abraham Lincoln from behind. Even people who loathed Jesse James felt he didn’t deserve an ending like that.

Bob and Charley tried to cash in on their newfound fame. Bob posed for pictures in cheap arcades, a forerunner of pay-per-view. The brothers reenacted the shooting on stage, but the audience’s dislike of them — and their inability to act — doomed the show. Two years later, Charley, riddled with tuberculosis and addicted to morphine because of the intense pain, died by suicide.

Bob Ford stumbled from job to job. He opened a saloon in New Mexico Territory, tried his hand as a policeman in Las Vegas, and finally wound up in Colorado, where he opened another saloon. When it burned down, he reopened in a tent. Then it was on to yet another saloon in another town.

He was working there on June 8, 1892, when a man walked in and said, “Hello, Bob.” As he turned around, Edward O’Kelly fired both barrels of a double-barrel shotgun, killing Ford instantly. O’Kelly became known as “The Man Who Killed the Man Who Killed Jesse James,” until he himself was killed in 1904 while trying to shoot a policeman in Oklahoma City.

And so, the bloody trail of murders finally came to an end.

It just goes to show you never know what chain of events your actions can set in motion — nor can you predict how or when they will stop.

And the long, deadly path that produced such a high body count started 144 years ago this spring in that little frame house in St. Joseph, Mo., with a betrayal by a supposed friend.

J. Mark Powell is a former television journalist. His nonfiction book “Witness to War: The Story of the Civil War Told by Those Living Through It” is available at . He wrote this for .