Civil War Murder of Alexander Officer

    As a slaveholding border state that remained in the Union during the Civil War, Missouri experienced an intense political strife that often erupted into violence far beyond the battlefield. Loyalties were so divided that civilians were shot down with some regularity merely for sympathizing with the wrong side. Alexander Officer of Andrew County was one such victim.
    On July 7, 1863, Confederate guerrilla leader Joe Hart raided through his old home territory of Andrew County, killing one Union man, seriously wounding two others, and robbing one or two more. What happened to Alexander Officer the next day was in direct retaliation for Hart's raid, because, although Officer had no direct connection to Hart, he was a known Southern sympathizer. Recently, he'd even been ordered to leave the state, but it's not known whether the order came from legitimate Union authority.

    About nine o'clock on the morning of the 8th, five armed men called at Officer's home, and when his wife, Lucinda, answered the door, they demanded to see him. She told them her husband was in the field working, and they went out and got him and marched him back to the house. The men waited on him in the yard while Officer went inside and cleaned up. When he came back, he mounted up and said, "I'm ready." One of the men told him he'd better be preparing, and he said he was about as prepared as he'd ever be. As they started off, one of the other men suggested that they were talking about preparing for the hereafter. They hadn't gone far before Officer, accompanied by one of the men, came back to retrieve the notice he'd received ordering him to leave the state within ten days. The two men then rode off to rejoin the other four men as they headed toward Ogle's Mill (present-day Rosendale). 

    Lucinda didn't see her husband again until about noon the same day when some other men, coming from the direction of Ogle's Mill, brought his body home. Lucinda asked one of the unofficial pallbearers who had killed her husband, and he answered "Some soldiers from Savannah" (the Andrew County seat), but he didn't know their names.

    The next day, July 9, Lucinda swore out an affidavit stating that three of the men who came to her house and took her husband away were Jesse Clemmons, Thomas Ashley, and David Bane, but she didn't know the other two. Several other witnesses were also deposed, and one or more of them testified that they'd either heard the shots that presumably killed Officer, had heard certain members of the Union militia make threats against Officer, or had seen Officer with certain men shortly before the shots were fired. None of them, however, were able to state definitely who had killed Officer.

    Five men, including Clemmons, Ashley, and Bane, were arrested by military authorities as suspects in Officer's murder. The other two were David Wilson and Brad Dowell. The matter was eventually turned over to civilian authority, and only one of the five was ever indicted and had to face prosecution. He, however, was released on bond after some sort of trial or hearing, and according to the History of Platte and Andrew Counties, the matter was quietly dismissed after that. 

    Sources: Union Provost Marshals' Papers, Two or More file; county history; chapter on Joe Hart in my book Other Noted Guerrillas. 

Sam Hildebrand Rides Again

    A lot has been written about the Civil War exploits of notorious southeast Missouri guerrilla Sam Hildebrand. Much of what has been written is based on Hildebrand's autobiography penned after the war. While many, if not all, of the events chronicled in the autobiography did occur, the description and even the facts surrounding those events are exaggerated or embellished and calculated to portray Hildebrand in a favorable light. Contemporaneous sources about Hildebrand are scarce, but those from the Union side that do survive paint a much less favorable picture of Hildebrand.

    Take, for example, the affidavit of Miss Adeline Hale, found in Union Provost Marshals' Papers, which she swore out at Fredericktown on March 12, 1865, charging Mr. and Mrs. Aylett Buckner of Madison County with feeding and harboring Hildebrand. The impetus for her statement was a recent guerrilla raid through Madison County during which at least a couple of citizens had been robbed at gunpoint. However, it's not clear whether Miss Hale came forward on her own or was recruited by Union authorities to give her statement.

    Miss Hale said she had gone to live with the Buckner family in April of 1864 (presumably as a housekeeper and cook) and had stayed until about the first of February 1865. During that time Hildebrand had visited the Buckner home near Fredericktown on five separate occasions. The first time the guerrilla chieftain came, Mr. Buckner introduced him to Adeline as Sam Hildebrand. She said she had known the guerrilla leader previously by sight because she'd been at a house he'd robbed in Wayne County but had not known his name. Hildebrand and all of his men were  "armed with two revolvers and two holster-pistols apiece." It was early morning, and the Buckners fed the guerrillas breakfast and also fed their horses. Hildebrand remarked that he'd kill anybody who reported him, and Buckner's wife, Martha, agreed that "that would be nothing but right." Hildebrand bragged that they had killed "one flop-eared Dutchman" the night before, and one of his lieutenants added, "Yes, and they would kill another one tonight if they were not damned smart." Hildebrand and the Buckners remained in a room separate from Adeline most of the time the bushwhackers were there; so she didn't hear most of their conversation.

    After this first visit, Hildebrand came to the Buckner home four more times while Adeline was there. On one occasion, he had ten men with him, another time he had six men, another time four, and another time three. On each occasion, the Buckners fed Hildebrand and his men and their horses, and they also furnished the guerrillas food to take with them. Also, Martha Buckner would often take food to the spring house in the evening, and the food would be gone the next morning. 

   In addition to Hildebrand's visits, three other guerrillas came to the Buckner home in September of 1864, a couple of days before the Rebel army took over Fredericktown (during Price's raid into Missouri). When the three men first appeared outside the home, the Buckners seemed to know them, seemed glad to see them, and immediately invited them inside, just as they always did with Hildebrand. The men were dressed in civilian clothes but were armed with revolvers. Martha immediately instructed Adeline to start cooking for the men, and the Buckners gave them supplies and fed their horses. The men said that Price and his army were on their way, and Martha remarked, "Let them come." Mr. Buckner said he needed to get his horses to a safe place or they would all be stolen, but Martha disagreed, saying that the Rebels had nobody to help them fight and that she and Aylett could at least furnish them horses. 

    The assistant provost marshal at Fredericktown sent Miss Hale's statement to subdistrict headquarters at Pilot Knob with an endorsement that Miss Hale was "a person of undoubted veracity," and the commanding general there forwarded it to department headquarters at St. Louis with a recommendation that the Buckners be banished from Missouri. Union authorities in St. Louis questioned whether "the unsupported evidence of one person" was sufficient to ban a family, but Aylet Buckner was, indeed, banished on March 28. Apparently his wife, Martha, was not banished, even though she seemed to be more adamant in her disloyalty than he was. It's entirely possible and perhaps likely, though, that Martha accompanied her husband, even if she herself was not banished.  

    

    

Murder at the Cold Spot

    "Gunman Pumps Nine Slugs into Store Manager,” read the Friday afternoon headline of the March 3, 1967, Joplin News Herald. Earlier that day, about 1:45 in the morning, five men had walked into the Cold Spot, an all-night grocery store at 527 West Tenth in Joplin, and discovered the body of the night manager riddled with bullets. A police officer who had stopped at the store at 1:15 said that about twenty-five minutes later, while he was parked three blocks away, he’d heard what sounded like a car backfiring coming from the direction of the store. So, it was theorized the murder took place about 1:40, although the five men said they’d seen no one leaving the area as they arrived. About $30 had been taken from a cash register, and the manager’s billfold was missing.
    Suspicion soon began to settle on a fourteen-year-old lad from Saginaw. The youth had run away from home on Thursday, taking his stepfather’s .22 caliber revolver, and he had turned up at the home of a paternal uncle in St. Louis about noon on Friday, ten hours after the crime. The pistol taken from the stepfather was found on Saturday in a restroom of the Greyhound Bus Station in Joplin and identified as the likely murder weapon. After talking to the boy’s mother, the uncle brought him back to Joplin on Monday, March 6. The young suspect was questioned at the police station for about six hours that evening in the presence of his mother and uncle. The boy staunchly denied any knowledge of the crime at first but finally gave a partial confession. He was retained in the custody of Jasper County juvenile authorities. Later, a polygraph test further implicated the lad. 

    In April, a juvenile judge ruled that the youngster’s case should be transferred to adult court, and the boy, now named as Robert Eugene “Bobby” Sinderson, was charged with first-degree murder and ordered held without bond.
    At Sinderson’s preliminary hearing in May, the signed statement he’d made during questioning at the Joplin Police station was entered into evidence. He blamed the actual murder on an older boy named Jack Marcus, but he admitted that he supplied the murder weapon. He said he rode to the store with Marcus in the latter’s car but remained in the vehicle when Marcus went inside and committed the murder. Efforts to locate the mysterious “Jack Marcus” proved unsuccessful, and a prosecution witness said he’d seen Sinderson inside the store about 1:15 or 1:20 a.m. on the morning of the crime. At the hearing’s conclusion, the judge declared Sinderson should be held without bond.
    At Sinderson’s trial at Carthage in February 1968, the defendant took the stand in his own defense. He repudiated the statement he’d signed shortly after the murder, saying he’d confessed to his role in the crime only because he grew tired of being interrogated for hours and he was afraid the gun found at the Greyhound Station might implicate some other member of his family. The jurors split seven to five, and the judge declared a mistrial.
    In April, the county prosecutor dismissed the first-degree murder charge against Sinderson after a defense motion to suppress his confession was sustained. The young man was released, but a new charge of first-degree murder against him in early June in magistrate court, and at a hearing a couple of months later the magistrate judge bound him back over to the Jasper County Circuit Court. He was indicted both for robbery with a firearm and murder.
    Sinderson went on trial in Joplin in March 1969 on the robbery charge before a new judge, who admitted the boy’s confession over the objections of the defense. In mid-March, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and sentenced Sinderson to five years in the penitentiary. Commenting on the lenient sentence, the prosecutor said he thought the jury probably believed the boy’s original confession that he was only an accomplice in the crime and not the actual murderer. Based on this conclusion, the murder charge against Sanderson was dropped a few days later.
    Sinderson was taken to Jefferson City to serve his prison time, but in October 1971, Governor Warren Hearnes commuted the sentence and he was released in mid-November after serving about two years, eight months.

    Note: This is a condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Midnight Assassinations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo. 

George P. B. Gatewood, Part 2

    In mid-April 1862, George Gatewood was captured by Union soldiers in Vernon County for his part in a guerrilla skirmish a day or two earlier at Montevallo. He was taken to Osceola, and the commanding officer there was getting ready to forward the prisoner to St. Louis when he escaped from the guardhouse.

    He was not seen or heard from again by Union officials until the summer or fall of 1863 when Moss learned that he had showed up in Pike County living with or near relatives at Bowling Green, where he'd grown up. Moss sent word to Union headquarters at St. Louis of Gatewood's whereabouts, but Gatewood was not to be found in Pike County because he had gotten wind that Union officials were looking for him. Instead of hanging around Bowling Green, he fled to Kentucky, where he had other relatives, and he later spent time in Illinois and in the St. Louis area, where he worked on a government boat on the Mississippi River. In June of 1864, special orders were issued at Troy, Missouri, for the arrest of Gatewood, who, in addition to being an escaped prisoner, was also suspected of horse stealing. In early October 1864, Gatewood made the mistake of returning to Pike County, where he was intercepted and taken into Federal custody on October 7 between Louisiana and Bowling Green. 

    The next day at Louisiana, Gatewood gave a statement saying he had been discharged from the Southern army about the first of April 1862. This, of course, was a fudging of the facts, since he’d been taken prisoner in Vernon County about the middle of April while still a member of Taylor’s ragtag outfit. Gatewood said that, immediately after his discharge, he returned to Pike County from Vernon County. Shortly after reaching his old stomping grounds, he went to Mexico, Missouri, and took an oath of allegiance to the Union. He stressed that he traveled from Bowling Green to Mexico specifically for that purpose.  

    Brought to St. Louis and charged with being a bushwhacker, Gatewood gave another statement on October 11, 1864. He again admitted he had been in the Missouri State Guard and the Confederate Army briefly during the early part of the war, but he had never been a bushwhacker. He had taken the oath of allegiance in 1862, and he had never been outside Federal lines since that time. He said he was not now a Confederate sympathizer and that he sincerely wished to see the authority of the Federal government restored. 

    Two days later, on October 13, Colonel Moss gave a deposition telling what he knew about Gatewood. Moss said Gatewood had told him after he was arrested in southwest Missouri that he'd never been in Confederate service, that the hotel fight was the first time he'd ever fought against any Federals, and that he'd only done so because he'd been persuaded by some of his friends. Colonel Moss added that Gatewood, when interrogated at Osceola, had denied killing anybody at the Montevallo fight but that he (Moss) subsequently learned that Gatewood had said in the presence of Union prisoners that he had personally killed one or two of Moss's men. Moss named Granger and Bowman as the men who had heard Gatewood make such a statement. 

    On October 16, Gatewood was re-interviewed and grilled on the issue of whether he had been a bushwhacker. He said he didn't know the men Taylor's company attacked at the hotel in Montevallo were Iowa troops. He thought instead they were Kansas jayhawkers. He also claimed he did not fire a shot during the hotel skirmish. Seeking to prove that Gatewood was not a regular soldier, his interrogator asked him whether he was outfitted with a uniform, arms, and other equipment when he enlisted in Taylor's company. Gatewood said he received some clothes and a minimal amount of other supplies when he joined, but he admitted he had no uniform and that he and his fellow soldiers sometimes had to "press" provisions from civilians. He denied ever stealing any horses from citizens, however. He also said he knew of no instances in which Taylor's men had killed private citizens. After admitting that Taylor's company had only been with the rest of its regiment one time, he was asked whether he wouldn't characterize such a unit as he had described as a bushwhacking outfit. Gatewood said he did not think of it in that manner. 

    Gatewood was also grilled on the discrepancies between his statement and that of Colonel Moss. Why, for instance, did he deny ever being in the Confederate Army in 1862 when he now readily admitted having served in the Confederate Army? He said he had lied about his military service when he was captured in 1862 because he figured it would help get him released from prison. Was it not true, he was asked, that Taylor's company had disbanded or been broken up when Taylor was captured and that the remnants of his command that fought the Federals at the Montevallo hotel were simply acting on their own? Gatewood said he did not believe that was true. On the subject of whether Gatewood had ever personally killed any Federals, his interrogator did not ask about the specifics mentioned by Moss. He asked only whether or not Gatewood had ever killed any citizens or Federals, and Gatewood denied those accusations. 

    Gatewood’s case was turned over to Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Darr, Jr. acting provost marshal general, who sought additional evidence against the accused. Private Granger had already given a statement back in 1862, and Thomas Bowman was tracked down at or near Little Rock, Arkansas, where he gave a statement in early December 1864. Bowman recalled that he'd been taken prisoner at Montevallo about the first of April 1862 by a band of men calling themselves "Home Guards." At the time of his capture, one of the men of his company was shot dead while standing guard in a horse lot, and another was killed while climbing out of a hay loft. Bowman did not witness the killings because it was the middle of the night, but he heard the shots fired and later heard two or three of the so-called home guards talking about shooting at the two soldiers. The only one whose name he remembered was George Gatewood. He added that Gatewood did not specifically say that he had personally killed either man, only that he had fired at them. However, Bannon thought Gatewood was one of the men who'd done the actual killing. 

    Gatewood was lodged at Gratiot Street Prison when he was first brought to St. Louis, and he was imprisoned there throughout the proceedings against him in the fall of 1864. The final disposition of his case, however, is unclear. Presumably he was banished to Illinois. On May 1, 1865, he wrote to Colonel C. W. Davis, provost marshal general at St. Louis, from Washington, Illinois, informing Davis that he had been released from Federal custody.

    After his release, Gatewood returned to Missouri, where he married Mary Alice Noble in Audrain County in August 1866. By 1870, the couple was living in Henry County with two children. Gatewood later lived in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, where he died in 1924.

The Civil War Story of George P. B. Gatewood

    George Phillip Braxton Gatewood was born in Pike County, Missouri, in June 1842 to James M. and Malinda (Hardin) Gatewood. The family moved to Montevallo in Vernon County about 1858, where James M. Gatewood soon became a prominent citizen and was elected to the state legislature in 1860. When civil war looked inevitable in early 1861, the elder Gatewood organized one of the first Southern-allied companies in the region. After the Civil War officially started, Gatewood's company joined the newly organized Missouri State Guard with Gatewood commissioned as a captain in Colonel Dewitt C. Hunter's regiment. Among the members of his company was his nineteen-year-old son, George P. B. Gatewood.
    Young Gatewood came down with camp fever, an ailment similar to typhoid fever, about the first of August 1861, and he returned home on sick leave. At the expiration of his six-month term of enlistment in the fall of 1861, Gatewood traveled to Osceola, where the Missouri State Guard was then headquartered under General Sterling Price, and received his discharge. He then went back to Montevallo and enlisted in a company being raised by former Vernon County sheriff Henry Taylor. The company was sworn into service in February 1862 by Colonel John T. Coffee for the ostensible purpose of going south to join the Confederate Army, even though Coffee was still officially a member of the Missouri State Guard.
    About the same time George was sworn into Confederate service or shortly afterward, his father, James M. Gatewood, accidentally shot and mortally wounded himself at his home near Montevallo as he was returning his pistol to a saddle holster on his horse. (Destroyed during the war, old Montevallo was located about a mile and a half northwest of present-day Montevallo). On April 11, 1862, Captain Taylor was wounded and captured during a skirmish with Federal troops near Montevallo. Two days later, on the 13th, Lieutenant Charles Moss came down to Montevallo from Osceola with a detachment of the 1st Iowa Cavalry and spent the night at the Scobey Hotel. A couple of hours before daylight on the morning of the 14th, Taylor's company (or a part of it) under one of his lieutenants attacked the Federals at the hotel with two or three killed on each side. One of the rebels killed was the notorious Dan "Wild Irishman" Henley. After sunup, a squad of Moss's men chased after and skirmished with some of the rebels, killing another one or two guerrillas and capturing George Gatewood.
    Moss took Gatewood back to Osceola as a prisoner and prepared charges against him for being a bushwhacker, with the intention of sending him to the Union's department headquarters in St. Louis for trial. In his statement against Gatewood, Moss said he lost two men killed and four wounded in the skirmish at the hotel. He mentioned specifically one James Whitford of the First Iowa who was shot dead while coming down a ladder from a barn loft.
    To back up Moss's charges against Gatewood, the provost marshal at Osceola then took a statement from Private Charles Granger, a soldier in Moss's command who had been on the scout to Montevallo. Granger said he and a fellow solider named Bowman did not sleep in the Montevallo hotel with most of their comrades on the night of April 13 because it was too crowded but instead took quarters in a different building about a hundred yards away from the hotel. He and Bowman were awakened around three o'clock in the morning by a squad of about sixteen well-armed men who barged into the building and leveled their guns at the two Iowans. Granger and Bowman were disarmed, ordered to get dressed, and then left in the hands of four guards, while the rest of the guerrillas went on to the hotel to join the attack on the Iowa troops quartered there. Granger did not see the fight, but, judging from the sounds of the firing, he estimated the skirmish lasted about twenty minutes. After the firing died down, several of the guerrillas came back to where Granger and Bowman were being guarded. They retrieved the prisoners' horses from a nearby stable and ordered the two captives to come with them. The guerrillas escaped with their prisoners into some woods and rode about eight or nine miles to a private home, where they stopped for breakfast.
    A number of other guerrillas who had been in the hotel fight, including George Gatewood, were already at the house when Granger and Bowman arrived. From the conversation of his captors, Granger judged that they were "a marauding party" with "no regular organization." Granger heard the men bragging about killing "five or six" Federals, and he heard Gatewood, in particular, say that he had shot and killed one Federal as he was coming out of a barn and that he had watched him fall. Gatewood "seemed to exult in it and was glad he had killed him.” He said he'd like to "finish a few more." The guerrillas claimed the only reason they hadn't killed more Federals at the hotel fight was because they ran low on ammunition. After conferring a while, some of the guerrillas came up to Granger and Bowman and said they had decided to let the two men go. They then led the captives about four miles through a field and some woods, took their horses, and left them on foot. After about an hour, Granger and Bowman spotted a foraging team from the First Iowa and reunited with their unit.
    Shortly after Granger's deposition was taken on April 21, just as Moss was preparing to forward Gatewood to St. Louis, the prisoner escaped from the guardhouse at Osceola and was not seen or heard from again by Union officials for over a year.

    To be continued...