Murder of a Nightwatchman

About noon on Christmas Day of 1899, twenty-five-year-old Edgar Spencer was armed with a knife and causing a disturbance in John Adkins's saloon in Vandalia, Missouri, when thirty-five-year-old nightwatchman Benjamin Eddelman, who happened also to be in the saloon, drew his pistol and ordered Spencer out of the building. Although later evidence suggested that Eddelman's weapon was not even been loaded, Spencer acceded to the threat and let a couple of his acquaintances, who had interceded, escort him out of the saloon.
Spencer went to the local livery, where he expressed anger at having been put out of the saloon and made threats toward Eddelman. Vandalia mayor J. Smelser confronted the irate man, telling him he needed to settle down and that Eddelman had already gone home.
Not long afterwards, however, Smelser found Spencer and Eddelman in front of the saloon exchanging words. He again warned Spencer to settle down or else he would have to put him in jail. Eddelman told the mayor to go ahead and put Spencer in jail because he was tired of fooling with him and didn't want any more trouble from him. However, Smelser allowed two of Spencer's buddies to again escort the troublemaker away.
About two o'clock, though, Spencer showed up at the saloon yet again, and this time he was armed with a pistol. Adkins tried to put him back out, but Spencer walked into an interior room where Eddelman was standing at a counter near an ice chest. Spencer strode up to the nightwatchman, grabbed him by the throat, and shot him in the head, killing him almost instantly. The assailant backed out of the saloon and fled, but he was soon apprehended by the mayor and placed in the calaboose.
At his trial in Audrain County Circuit Court early the next year, Adkins was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to ten years in the state pen. His lawyers appealed the verdict, claiming that Spencer feared for his life because Eddelman had made threats against him. In October of 1900, however, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the verdict, saying that, even if Eddelman had made threats against Spencer, it made no difference unless the defendant was being threatened at the time of the shooting, and there was no evidence at all that such was the case. The high court admonished Spencer that he should be happy he got off with such a light sentence.
Spencer was then transported to the Missouri State Penitentiary in February 1901. Five years later, he found an official who was more sympathetic than the supreme court justices. Missouri governor A. M. Dockery commuted Spencer's sentence in 1906, after he had served only half of his ten-year sentence.

Murder of Sheriff John K. Polk

           Late Thursday afternoon, May 25, 1905, a young man named William Spaugh entered Robert Rasche's restaurant in Ironton, Missouri, and started bedeviling some of the customers by throwing peanut shells at them. He then caught one of the customers, William Edgar, by the leg, pulled him from his seat, and started dancing around the floor taunting Edgar and trying to get him to dance, too. After Edgar reclaimed his seat, Spaugh told him (Edgar) that the more he looked at his face, the more he hated it and struck him in the eye, inflicting a cut. He again jerked Edgar by the foot, pulling him to the floor. Here Rasche interceded and put Spaugh out of the restaurant. 
            Spaugh went to his home in Ironton, and the Iron County sheriff, John W. Polk, informed of the outrages on Edgar, went to the Spaugh home to arrest the assailant. William Spaugh was sitting on the front porch with his younger brother, Arthur, and another young man, William Brown, when Polk arrived. William Spaugh, according to Brown's later testimony, announced to the other two young men that the sheriff was there to arrest him, and Arthur got up and went inside the house. At the gate leading into the front yard, Polk hollered to William Spaugh that he needed to see him and for Spaugh to come to the fence. Spaugh demanded to know whether the sheriff had a warrant, and when Polk admitted he didn't, Spaugh got up and followed his brother inside.
            Sheriff Polk then went inside the gate, stepped onto the front porch, opened the door to the house, and started to walk across the threshold when four or five shots rang out. One of them was a shotgun blast that reportedly blew a hole in Polk's side big enough to stick a fist in. Polk was also shot with a ball to the heart and one to the head, and he was given yet another wound with some sort of sharp instrument, apparently after he had already fallen dead to the floor.          
           The Spaugh brothers left the premises immediately after the shooting, and search parties sent out in pursuit of them finally brought them to bay, with the help of bloodhounds, at an isolated cabin in Madison County about five days later. After a gun battle that lasted several minutes, the two fugitives finally surrendered and were arrested and charged with murder. Their mother had previously been arrested, and she also was charged with murder for allegedly urging her sons to resist Sheriff Polk.    
         In early July, a mob broke into the Iron County jail where the brothers were being held, tied up the newly appointed sheriff, and shot the brothers several times in their legs. By order of the Missouri governor, the Spaughs were then transferred to St. Louis for safekeeping while awaiting trial.
            The three Spaughs were scheduled for trial in late 1905 in Reynolds County on a change of venue from Iron County. William Spaugh was tried, convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to hang. Arthur's trial and his mother's trial were postponed until the following summer. In mid-1906 Arthur was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 55 years in prison, and the mother was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.
            All three convictions were appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but the verdicts were upheld in each case. However, the mother was later granted a new trial and was acquitted upon retrial. Also, William Spaugh's death sentence was later commuted to life in prison.
            In 1913, when William Spaugh was dying of tuberculosis, Arthur tried to take the blame for the killings in order to secure a parole for William so that he might die at home, but the request was denied and William Spaugh died in prison at Jefferson City in mid-1913. Later, Arthur also died in prison of tuberculosis after serving just a few years.

Great Blizzard of 1899

The Great Blizzard of 1899, sometimes called the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899, was a winter-weather event that affected the entire United States, especially east of the Rockies. It occurred during the first half of February, with the peak cold weather happening between February 10 and February 14, and it set all kinds of records for lowest all-time temperatures. Until the mid-1930s, it was the coldest February on record for the United States, and for several individual states, including Kansas and Missouri, February 1899 still stands as the coldest February on record.
All of Missouri and the Ozarks, like much of the rest of the country, suffered during the cold wave of February 1899. A report from Joplin on February 8 said that southwest Missouri was experiencing its coldest weather since 1863. The cold weather brought the lead and zinc mines around Joplin to a virtual standstill. The Joplin report said that the output of ore the previous week had been only about half as much as normal, and the output was expected to drop even more dramatically during the coming week.
The next day, February 9, Webb City recorded a low temperature of 12 below, and a report from Golden City said it was 13 below there, with even the ripples in streams frozen solid. Various towns in north Missouri recorded temperatures as low as 28 below. On the same day, February 9, Galena, Kansas, reported, just as Joplin had on the 8th, that the mines were virtually at a standstill. Spring River was frozen twelve inches thick, whereas as ice even as thick as six inches was unusual.
The Kansas City Journal reported on February 12 that the previous day's low was -19 degrees. The 12th promised to be considerably colder, because February 11th's low mark of -19 had already been matched at 3 a.m. on the 12th when the newspaper went to press.
On February 12, 1899, Springfield, Missouri, recorded a temperature of -29 degrees Fahrenheit, paralyzing the town. I believe that mark still stands as the lowest temperature ever recorded in Springfield.
Temperatures in the Potosi, Missouri, area dipped to as low as thirty degrees below zero around February 12. By the 15th, the cold temperatures were starting to moderate, and the Potosi Journal summed up the weather phenomenon that the area had just endured: "The weather the past week has been the severest felt in this section for many winters. In fact, even the oldest inhabitant cannot recall anything like it.... Such intense cold is unusual in these latitudes and caused much discomfort and some suffering in the community. Business was practically suspended and people devoted themselves chiefly to attending fires and staying warm."

Birdie McCarty: Another Female Horse Thief

           The past two weeks, I've written about two different female horse thieves who made their appearance in southwest Missouri around 1890. After a decade's hiatus, another woman horse thief, Birdie McCarty, came on the scene, but most of her exploits took place just across the Kansas line. When Birdie made her criminal debut in the Kansas-Missouri border region in early 1902, one area newspaper waxed nostalgic, observing that law officers were “now dealing with the first female horse thief since the palmy days of the reign of May Colvin, the notorious woman desperado, who invaded this section of the country about ten years ago.” Sensationalized in the press over the next few weeks, Birdie made fewer headlines than her predecessor only because her career in crime proved briefer than May’s. 

            Birdie’s saga began when she accompanied a young man from Butler, Missouri, to Fort Scott, Kansas, about the 20^th of February, 1902. After a few days in Fort Scott, her male companion proposed that she go to a livery and get a horse and buggy, which she did. The couple started south but got into an argument at Pittsburg over who owned the rig. The quarrel ended, according to the Joplin Globe, with the man telling Birdie to “go to hell.” Instead, “she concluded to go to a better place” and came to Baxter Springs, where she arrived on the evening of February 25 and turned herself in to the city marshal, confessing that she had a horse and buggy that belonged to a liveryman in Fort Scott.
               After she was placed in jail at Baxter Springs, “some little dispute” arose, according to the Globe, among the town’s officials over the auburn-haired prisoner’s attractiveness. The marshal claimed the woman was “beautiful to look upon,” while the mayor declared that “her face would stop a Frisco freight.”

            The next day an officer from Fort Scott arrived to escort the prisoner back to Fort Scott to face criminal charges. Confined with three other women in a basement room of the Bourbon County courthouse, Birdie was described as “a daring little woman about 22 years old.” The close quarters of the basement room didn’t hold Birdie for long. On Sunday, March 23, she “opened up a sensational Sabbath” by making what the Fort Scott Monitor called “a dash for liberty that even the professional crooks of the stronger sex might well envy…. Birdie McCarty had flown, and the other birds had soared away in her wake.”

            The four women parted ways after they escaped, with Birdie going in the company of a male accomplice named Red Taylor, while the other three fugitives headed north. Taylor took Birdie to meet Pete Sheflet, reputed to be her lover, and she and Sheflet “rode like the wind” on the same horse, according to Birdie’s later testimony, to the camp of two brothers named Ryder. Sheflet induced the Ryder boys to take Birdie on as a cook, and she started south with the brothers, riding in the back of their wagon.

            Birdie’s three fellow escapees were recaptured about two miles north of Fort Scott shortly after the jail break. The three women swore they had nothing to do with plotting the escape but that it was all the work of Birdie McCarty, who had been boasting for several days that her captivity would be brief. The women claimed to know nothing about the escapade until Birdie awakened them about five o’clock Sunday morning and told them the door was open.

            Meanwhile, the Bourbon County sheriff overtook the Ryder brothers about twelve miles south of Fort Scott, crawled into the back of their wagon, and found Birdie hidden beneath a pile of gunny sacks. He placed the fugitive under arrest and brought her back to Fort Scott. Taylor and Sheflet were also arrested. They were suspected not only of aiding Birdie in her flight but also of having helped her escape to begin with, although Birdie claimed she opened the door herself with a piece of wire.

            A few days after being recaptured, Birdie made headlines because of her scandalous predilection for tobacco. “Birdie McCarty, besides being an acknowledged horse thief,” read a brief story in the Monitor, “is quite a tobacco fiend.”

            Birdie’s trial for horse stealing came up during the May term of court. She was convicted of grand larceny and sentenced to five years in the Kansas Penitentiary. The judge, who’d heard the defendant mention that she was raised to go to church and knew the Lord’s prayer, offered to take a year off the sentence if she could recite the prayer by heart. Birdie reportedly hung her head and could not repeat even the first line, and the five-year sentence stood.

            Birdie was sent to the state prison at Lansing, where she was received on May 14, 1902.