Almost Like a Tigress: The Story of Annie Hunning

About 8:00 o’clock Saturday evening, December 9, 1911, thirty-six-year-old Martin Hunning, a farmer living in an isolated area south of Murphy in Jefferson County, Missouri, arose from the kitchen table and went to the telephone to call a neighbor. The phone, which had just been installed, was situated near a window, and as Hunning was waiting for the central switchboard to connect him to his neighbor, somebody fired a shotgun through the window. The blast tore half of Hunning’s head off, and he fell instantly dead. Hunning’s thirty-five-year-old wife, Annie, rushed to the door of the cabin and heard a man’s voice say, “We’ve got to beat it. They’ve got a telephone.”

From that statement, Annie deduced that there must have been two men involved in the murder, but it was too dark for her to see. Turning back in fright, she stepped over her husband’s dead body to telephone for help and then “dropped in a swoon.”

At any rate, that was what she told neighbors who answered her call, and none of them questioned her version of events. At least not at first. Volunteers patrolled the roads around the Hunning home until daylight on Sunday, when a search party was organized. The first sign that Annie might not be telling the truth came when the search party found the tracks of only one person around the window through which Hunning was shot. Bloodhounds were brought in, but they lost the scent of the suspect when the searchers came to the edge of a cliff. 

On December 12, Hunning’s funeral was held at a nearby church, and the dead man’s widow and his elderly mother were “the chief mourners.”

One theory of the crime was that an ex-convict who held a grudge against Hunning had killed him for having helped send the man to prison, but Jefferson County prosecuting attorney Albert Miller placed little stock in that idea. He was, instead, developing his own theory.

On December 14, four and a half days after the murder, twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Seidl, a neighbor of the Hunnings, was arrested on suspicion, as a result of Miller's investigation of “neighborhood gossip” about an "eternal triangle" involving Seidl and  the Hunnings that had been spreading since the morning after the murder.

Seidl was arrested for questioning but released after several hours. Asked about the rumors involving her and Seidl, Annie denied that there had been any "domestic infelicity" in her household, and she said she knew Seidl had not killed her husband. 

Despite Seidl’s release, Prosecutor Miller remained dogged in his determination to ferret out the facts behind the murder. On December 18, he announced that he had ordered the exhumation of Hunning’s body for the purpose of convening a new coroner’s inquest. He summoned several neighbors of the Hunnings to the December 19 inquest, and they testified that Annie's reputation for morality was not good and that she was known to have a close relationship with Joseph Seidl. Annie's own father testified as to an angry confrontation he had witnessed between his son-in-law and Seidl the previous summer. At the end of the inquest, both Annie Hunning and Joseph Seidl were arrested and taken to the Jefferson County Jail at Hillsboro.

On Sunday morning, December 24, Seidl finally broke down, after an all-night interrogation, and confessed to an amorous relationship with Annie. He put the blame for the illicit  affair squarely on Annie, saying, "She  tempted me, and I yielded." Seidl still maintained, however, that he had not killed Annie's husband.

Annie was also grilled at length, but she refused to break. Afterwards, the officer who questioned her marveled at her strong will and said that she had eyed him defiantly, "almost like a tigress." 

A joint preliminary hearing was held for Seidl and Annie Hunning on December 29, and the justice ruled that they should be held to await the action of a grand jury. The next day, Miller announced that he had enough evidence to file first-degree murder charges against the pair without waiting for a grand jury. 

Miller filed the charges in early January 1912, and the trial was set for March. Part of the evidence Miller had in his possession were some love letters Seidl and Annie  had exchanged since their incarceration that a trusty had turned over to the prosecutor. Confronted with this new evidence, Annie finally admitted that she had foreknowledge of her husband's murder, but she downplayed her own complicity in the crime. 

When Seidl was told of Annie's story, he begged to differ. He signed a statement that Annie was in on the crime from the beginning and had set the stage for it by placing her sewing machine near the window with a lighted lamp on it, which he used to guide his aim for the murderous shotgun blast.  

A couple of days after giving their confessions, Mrs. Hunning and Seidl repudiated them, saying they had only done so under duress and that they thought they were only admitting to their romantic involvement, not to the murder. However, Seidl’s confession, which was published in full in St. Louis newspapers, was very damning in its detail, as were the confiscated love notes.

Annie's and Seidl’s cases were severed, and his trial began first, in late March at Hillsboro. His confession was admitted as evidence over strenuous objections from the defense. The jury returned a guilty verdict on April 3 with a sentence recommendation of life in prison. 

Annie's trial began immediately after Seidl's concluded, with Seidl serving as the state's star witness. He told how Annie had promised they would get married and that she had over a $1,000 she would give him if her husband were out of the way. He admitted on cross examination that she'd never specifically asked him to kill Martin Hunning, but she knew about the plan all along.

Annie testified in her own defense, repeating the story she'd told from the beginning of hearing a voice outside her window. She admitted being "unduly friendly" with Seidl, but she claimed not to know that he was the one who killed her husband. 

Annie's first trial ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, but at her second trial in mid-May, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and fixed her punishment at life imprisonment.

In late May, Annie and her lover were transferred together to the state prison at Jeff City. Annie was paroled in December 1919 after serving only seven and half years of her scheduled life sentence, and she was restored to citizenship in February 1921. Seidl remained in prison, but he, too, was discharged under parole in 1922.

The story above is a condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/3OA5fbX.

Always the Smile: The Cold-hearted Aggie Myers

In the wee hours of May 11, 1904, two Black men broke into the home of twenty-year-old Clarence Myers at 2313 Terrace Street in Kansas City and attacked Myers and his twenty-one-year-old wife, Aggie, in their bed. One of the intruders knocked Aggie senseless while her husband struggled with the other attacker. Aggie awoke enough to crawl to her back door, where a neighbor heard her cries. The neighbor found Clarence's body lying in a pool of blood in an adjoining room.

At least that's the story Aggie told police when they arrived after daylight, but authorities had their doubts almost from the very beginning. They found the Myers home in total disorder with blood spattered everywhere and furniture broken and overturned. If robbery were the motive for the crime, the intruders had gotten very little, because several valuables, like Clarence's gold watch, were left behind. There were also a number of other troubling inconsistencies. The whole scene looked to police as if it had been staged, and a doctor who examined the victim's body said he thought Clarence had been dead several hours longer than Aggie's version of events accounted for.  

Aggie was taken to the police station for questioning. Authorities learned that her maiden name was Alice "Aggie" Brock, that she'd grown up in Higginsville, and that she's come to Kansas City four years earlier with her parents. She had been married briefly to a man named Payne before divorcing him and marrying Myers. Despite being sternly grilled by police, Aggie stuck to her story that two Black men had broken in and killed Clarence, and she had ready explanations for several of the inconsistencies in her story. Interviewed by a reporter after her release, she gave a lengthy statement pleading total innocence and questioning why police would even suspect her of such a heinous crime. 

Aggie visited her dead husband at the undertaker's office, but she shed few tears and declined an invitation from her in-laws to accompany them to Newton, Kansas, for Clarence's funeral.

On May 20, two Black men were arrested, but Aggie said they were not the men who'd killed her husband. 

In early July, twenty-year-old Frank Hottman was arrested in Walla Walla, Washington, and charged with the murder of Clarence Myers, based on evidence that had been found at the scene of the crime, on Hottman's movements after the crime, and on evidence found on his person when he was interrogated in Washington. Hottman, a childhood friend of Aggie Myers, had been a person of interest in the case early on. He had visited the Myers home and had been seen with Aggie elsewhere in Kansas City in the days leading up to the crime. On the Sunday prior to the murder, the two had been buggy riding together at Higginsville, their childhood home. Then, the day after the crime, Hottman had left town. 

Interviewed in Washington, Hottman initially denied involvement in Myers's murder, but later he gave a full confession and implicated Aggie as the mastermind behind the crime. He said Aggie wanted her husband dead so that she could marry him (Hottman). They had planned to kill Clarence in his sleep, but he woke up and a terrific struggle ensued, with Aggie finally slicing her husband's throat while Hottman held him.

Aggie, however, steadfastly denied any involvement. She stuck to her story of the two intruders and said officers must have coerced a confession out of Hottman. She admitted being friends with him but denied any romantic involvement. 

Despite her claims of innocence, Aggie was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Officers who interrogated her were struck by her stoic manner, as she coolly denied their accusations. No matter how hard they grilled her, she remained calm, looked them in the eye, and offered just the hint of a smile. "Always the smile," said a newspaperman who reported on the police interview. One officer picked up an umbrella and remarked that Aggie was as cold and unfeeling as the umbrella's silver handle.

Hottman was brought back to Kansas City, and when a joint preliminary hearing for him and Aggie was held on August 1, a large crowd turned out, most of them straining to get a glimpse of the "trim figure" of Aggie Myers. While she was "tolerably good looking" and carried herself with dignity, Hottman was a "low-browed fellow" with a "hulking, awkward frame" who met the crowd's expectation "of what a murderer should look like." 

The two cases were severed, and Hottman's trial began first, in January 1905. In addition to getting Hottman's confessions admitted into evidence, the prosecution called several witnesses who testified as to the intimate relationship between him and Aggie Myers. Prosecutors also exhibited several items of evidence, such as some bloody cuffs belonging to Hottman that were found at the Myers place after the crime.

Hottman's only defense was a plea for mercy, based on the supposed coercive tactics of his interrogators. The jury, though, came back with a quick verdict of first-degree murder and a sentence of death.

Aggie Myers was granted a change of venue to Clay County for her trial, and it was held in early June 1905. The courtroom audience seemed to sympathize with her until Hottman took the stand as a state witness and told of the conspiracy between him and Aggie to kill her husband, recounting the horrific details of the crime. Aggie later took the stand in her own defense, but her tired story of two Black intruders failed to regain any of the sympathy she'd lost. She, like Hottman, was found guilty, but she accepted the news with the same aplomb she'd displayed since the crime. One commentator remarked that her self-possession was so marvelous that he wondered why the defense had not put it forth as evidence of her insanity.  

Aggie’s motion for a new trial was denied, and she was sentenced to hang. Upon appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the sentence, but she and her lawyers continued to plead for clemency. Aggie's case drew nationwide attention, and many men even expressed a willingness to marry her if and when she was released. According to the Kansas City Times, though, the women were very slow "in offering themselves to Frank Hottman."

Both Aggie and Hottman eventually had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment by the Missouri governor. Hottman died in the state pen at Jefferson City in 1923, while Aggie was paroled two years later after serving over twenty years behind bars.

She later married again and moved to Colorado.

The story above is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4vppjOW.

A Shotgun Wedding Turns Deadly: The Story of Lulu Prince

Thirty-year-old Phillip H. Kennedy and twenty-two-year-old Lulu Prince got married on December 4, 1900, at the courthouse in Kansas City in a hurry-up wedding that the local Times considered a "queer" ceremony. Kennedy declined to kiss the bride and rushed out of the courthouse as soon as the judge pronounced him and Lulu man and wife. A day or so later, he took Lulu to a theatrical show, but he refused to live with her.

Barely over a month later, the curious story of the Kennedy marriage made headlines again, when the groom applied to the circuit court on January 8, 1891, to annul the marriage. Kennedy claimed in his petition that he'd been forced into the marriage because of threats Lulu's father and brothers had made against him. Kennedy refused to talk about the relationship between him and Lulu prior to their wedding or the circumstances that led to such a hasty ceremony.

In early December, after the wedding but before Kennedy applied for an annulment, Lulu had met with a Kansas City Star reporter to try to dispel the rumors that she and Kennedy had been forced to get married because of “their intimate relations.” She claimed the real reason was simply that she and Kennedy had been engaged and, when she found out that he was planning to wed another young woman, she was determined to hold him to his promise of marriage. Kennedy, on the other hand, denied that he had ever been engaged to Lulu Prince.

But in early January 1901, Lulu's father visited Kennedy in his office and ended up calling Kennedy a "rape fiend" after an exchange of heated words. Lulu also visited or spoke by phone with Kennedy several times after her marriage, trying to get him to change his mind about living with her, but he refused. When Lulu learned from the January 9 Kansas City newspapers that her estranged husband had filed a motion for an annulment, she determined to try again.

On the evening the 9th, she met Kennedy in his downtown office, and tried to get hm to reconsider, but he rebuffed her. Driven to desperation, she resolved the next day to give him one last chance, in the form of an ultimatum. Armed with a .32 caliber revolver, she sent to Kennedy's office building, and when he once again told her he didn't want to have anything to do with her, she pulled out the gun and shot him in the hallway outside his office. As he was pronounced dead, she walked over, kicked him in the side of the face, and declared, “He’ll never seduce another girl.”

The “strikingly beautiful” young woman was arrested, and a coroner's jury ruled that Lulu Prince Kennedy should be held on a first-degree murder charge.  Many people, however, expressed sympathy for any girl who defended her honor against a man who wronged her with a false promise of marriage.

Much of the testimony at both the coroner's jury and later at Lulu's trial centered around the questions of whether Kennedy had indeed seduced Lulu and whether she was in "delicate health" at the time of the marriage. The prosecution said "no" on both counts, and even the prosecution gave mixed signals on these questions. Although Lulu's lawyers argued that Kennedy had, in fact, seduced and impregnated her, but Lulu herself seemed more concerned about protecting her reputation for morality than about the murder charge against her. 

At Lulu's trial in June 1901, she was convicted of second-degree murder. Lulu was released on bond pending an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. In July 1903, the high court overturned her conviction and remanded the case to Jackson County for retrial. At her second trial in January 1904, the defense presented evidence of mental illness in Lulu's family, and the jury found that she was not guilty by reason of insanity but that she had now regained her sanity. Thus, Lulu walked out of the courtroom a free woman.

This is a greatly condensed version of a chapter from my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4sz2VAd. The case of Lulu Prince Kennedy is a very intriguing one with a lot of interesting back story not included in the shortened version above.

“I Have Killed Pete”: Maud Lewis Murders Her Lover

About 2:45 a.m. on Monday morning, May 13, 1895, two shots rang out in the vicinity of Elliott Avenue and Wash Street (now Cole Street) in St. Louis. Tracing the shots to a boarding house at 2719 Wash Street, officers found the dead body of State Senator Pete Morrissey lying in the bed of 28-year-old Maud Lewis, madam of the house. Blood was oozing out of a bullet hole in the victim's head.

Maud was in a state of hysteria, but two young women who boarded with her and their gentlemen callers (who were physician friends of Morrissey) gave testimony implicating Maud in the shooting. Albert Andrews, porter at the Lewis house, was highly excited and unable to give an intelligent account of what had happened.

The doctors said they'd been at Senator Morrissey's saloon about midnight when Maud Lewis, who was generally known as the senator's mistress, came in. Accompanied by one of the women who boarded with her, Maud tried to get Morrissey to go back to her place. Morrissey finally agreed, and he took his two friends along with him. The drunken entourage left for Maud's place and got there about 2:30 Monday morning.

Morrissey's doctor friends and their female companions were upstairs, while Maud was entertaining Morrissey in a downstairs room when shots rang out, only about fifteen minutes after the group arrived.

According to the doctors, when they raced downstairs to investigate, Maud came out of her room crying, "I have killed Pete." Andrews, the porter, said, however, that just moments before the shots rang out, he heard Maud say, "Don't Pete. Don't." He said he rushed into her room, saw Morrissey lying dead, and picked up a .38 caliber revolver that was on the bed beside the body.

At an inquest held over Morrissey’s body on Monday afternoon, the coroner’s jury reached a verdict that the senator had come to his death from gunshots fired by “one Maud Lewis.” Maud was arrested, and when a newspaperman visited her in her cell later that evening, she was "very nervous" and "had a wild look in her eyes." She said her real name was Fay O'Neil, not Maud Lewis, but she refused to go into further details about her background. The next day, however, she told a different newspaper that her maiden name was Laura Lucas.

Maud said Morrissey had treated her badly ever since she'd known him but that she still loved him. She admitted she must have killed him, but she didn't know how because she had no recollection of pulling the trigger. She said both she and Morrissey had been drinking heavily leading up to the incident.

At Maud's preliminary hearing, Albert Andrews, the man she supposedly employed as a porter, tried to shield her by claiming he'd seen a stranger running from the house immediately after the shooting. A newspaper investigation revealed, however, that Andrews was more than just Maud's porter. The two had actually been married at one time. So, Andrews's story was given little credence. Pleading self-defense, Maud testified that she and Morrissey had argued just before the shooting and that he had choked her. However, she was held on a second-degree murder charge at the end of the hearing.

While Maud was still awaiting trial, Albert Andrews signed a written confession that he, not Maud, had killed Morrissey, but his latest story was met with at least as much skepticism as his previous claim of having seen a stranger running from Maud's house.

At Maud’s trial in October 1895, the defendant was found guilty of second-degree murder, and she was assessed a punishment of fifteen years in prison. Despite the verdict against Maud, there was considerable sentiment in her favor. Senator Morrissey had been thrice indicted for fraud, had a reputation for debauchery, and was known to abuse Maud with regularity. So, there were many people who were “not prone to judge too harshly her who cut him short in his career.”

Denied a new trial by the trial judge and later by the Missouri Supreme Court, Maud was taken to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City in November 1896. Within just a few months, though, her friends and relatives began petitioning for clemency, citing, among other things, Andrews's reiteration that he was the real killer of Morrissey. The governor finally pardoned Maud in early January 1901 after she served about four and half years of her fifteen-year term. 

My latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4bVZq0d, contains a much more detailed account of Maud Lewis's story. 

Kill the Son of a Bitch: The Story of Blanche Connors

In the wee hours of Sunday, December 25, 1887, the body of a "colored" man identified as Joseph Peters was found in Kansas City in a pool of blood near Ninth Street and State Line Road on the Missouri side of the line. Peters had two deep cuts and a severed artery.

Shortly after daylight, a police officer followed a trail of blood from the scene and found a second pool of blood a block or two away outside the home of “Aunt Jane” Grisby. Upon inquiry, he learned that Aunt Jane had hosted a Christmas Eve party on Saturday night at which “bad whiskey flowed freely” and that there had been a serious disturbance.

About 1:00 a.m. an “octoroon named Blanche Connors” had been playing the organ when Peters approached and whispered something to her. Almost instantly, a Black man named Paul Enders struck Peters, and the two ran out of the house, followed by Blanche and a third man, later identified as George Thomas, alias Bony George. 

The officer found Enders and the woman at a nearby house. Blanche was wearing an apron that had a blood on it and had a cut in it, and a knife that appeared to have been recently washed was lying on the bed.

Blanche and Enders both denied knowledge of the fatal stabbing, but the officer arrested both of them as suspects. At a coroner’s inquest held over Peters’s body, a young Black woman named Alice Marr testified that she witnessed the assault. She said Paul Enders, Bony George, and Blanche Conners (alias Matt or Mattie Mason) had the victim down in the yard in front of Aunt Jane’s house, and she heard Blanche say, “Kill the son of a bitch.” Alice said she saw Enders the next morning, and he admitted they had attacked and killed Peters for his money.

The coroner's jury ruled that Peters had died from wounds inflicted with a knife wielded by either Paul Enders, Bony George Thomas, or Blanche Connors and that, regardless of which one had inflicted the fatal wound, the other two were active accomplices. Enders and Blanche were charged with murder, but Thomas could not be located.

Enders’s case was severed from Blanche’s, and he was tried first. The jury failed to agree, largely because Alice Marr, the state’s star witness, had disappeared, and the judge declared a mistrial.

When Blanche’s trial began in mid-April 1888, she sat in the courtroom “gorgeously arrayed,” according to the Kansas City Star. A rival newspaper described her as “a good-looking octoroon, about 25 years of age.” Although Alice Marr was again missing, the state made a stronger circumstantial case against Blanche than it had against Enders, and the jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder. Blanche Connors became the first woman in Jackson County ever convicted of first-degree murder. 

Interviewed shortly after her conviction, Blanche was described as "a handsome quadroon” with “great brown eyes.” The “quadroon” appellation was accurate, even though the term would be considered politically incorrect today, because Blanche was, in fact, one-fourth Black, not one-eighth as “octaroon,” the term by which she’d been described in previous reports, denotes. 

Blanche’s maiden name was Martha “Mattie” Mason, and she had been born in the Indian Nation, the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and a half-Black, half-Cherokee father. Her mother died when she was only eight days old, and she was raised at first by her father's family but mostly by a German woman in Franklin County, Missouri. She was still a mere girl when she struck out on her own and moved to St. Louis, where she married a Black man named Connor. However, they stayed together only about a year. She got the nickname Blanche because of her light complexion.  

At Paul Enders’s second trial in late January 1889, the defendant was found not guilty. A month later, Blanche was granted a second trial because the judge said the same evidence had been used to convict her that had been presented at Enders's trial and yet she'd been found guilty while he was found not guilty. 

At her second trial in April 1889, Blanche was found not guilty. Appearing dazed, she left the courthouse in the company of a Black woman who reportedly kept a bawdy house on Broadway in Kansas City.

A year or so later, Blanche was convicted of feloniously assaulting another woman, and she spent about a year and a half in the Missouri State Prison. What happened to Blanche after that has not been traced.

The story above is a condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/47KQOZ1.

Alice Dyke: Cold-Blooded Murderess or Self-Defender?

Who are you going to believe? Inhabitants of “a resort for the lowest kind of harlots” or the companions of a young real estate agent from a “highly respected” family who was killed at the ill-famed resort? That was the question facing residents of Kansas City when they awoke on July 31, 1887, and picked up the Sunday morning newspaper. 

Earlier that morning, shortly after 12:00 a.m., 27-year-old Alice Dyke shot and killed a young man named John Hamilton in the doorway of her brothel or “saloon” at 449 West Fifth Street. His two companions claimed that they and Hamilton had merely been passing along the street when they saw a woman, later identified as Alice, standing in the front doorway of the house. 

When Hamilton said "good evening" to her, so their story went, Alice immediately started cussing Hamilton, rushed up to him, and shot him with a .32 caliber pistol. They said they didn’t know the woman and that the shooting was entirely unprovoked. 

Alice Dyke was arrested and interrogated at the police station. She refused to talk at first, but when she finally did tell her story, it was entirely different from that of Hamilton's companions. She said the three men had been to her place two or three different times prior to the shooting. On the last visit, they got into a dispute with Alice over the price of a bottle of soda, and Hamilton went away cursing and threatening her. She said that when they came back around midnight, she refused to admit them because she feared they were trying to steal the $450 she had on the premises. Feeling threatened, she shot Hamilton in what she thought was self-defense when he began kicking at her door and trying to break it down.  

Two girls who boarded with Alice said they had not actually witnessed the shooting but that they did hear a big commotion at the door, such as Allice described, before they heard shots fired. They also confirmed that Hamilton or someone who looked exactly like him had visited the house and raised a ruckus prior to the fatal visit. 

Alice Dyke, who went by various aliases from time to time, had lived in Kansas City much of her life and had a reputation as someone with "a long acquaintanceship with vice.” 

At a coroner's inquest held over Hamilton’s body, one of his companions admitted that the three young men had visited a saloon in the vicinity of Alice Dyke’s place early Saturday night, where they had purchased and drunk some soda pop, but he suggested that it was not the same house where the shooting took place. The coroner's jury returned a verdict charging Alice Dyke with felonious assault resulting in death, but a grand jury later indicted her for murder in the first degree,

At her trial in October of 1887, much of the prosecution testimony focused on Alice's reputation for immorality, but even a policeman who served as one of the prosecution witnesses admitted that, despite her bad reputation, he thought she was very honest. In addition, defense testimony tended to confirm Alice's story that the three men had been kicking at her door when she fired the fatal shots. She was found guilty of murder in the second degree and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. 

Alice was transported to the penitentiary in Jefferson City, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed her guilty verdict in November 1888. Her second trial in April 1889 ended in a hung jury, and she was released on bond. At her third trial in September 1889, the state’s case was “very weak,” owing to the absence of at least two critical witnesses, and the jury found Alice not guilty after 3 or 4 hours of deliberation. 

The story above is a greatly condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/3NnJyLN.

Unlawfully Intimate

    On Sunday morning, July 22, 1876, a man standing on the north bank of the Missouri River in southern Warren County, Missouri, discovered a body floating downstream. The body was pulled to shore and identified as that of Samuel Taylor, a thirty-eight-year-old man who lived nearby with his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Martha, and one child. 

   Taylor was described as a man of “rather loose habits and of very weak mind.” Although he was white, he was known to associate mainly with his Black neighbors. Examination of Taylor's body revealed several wounds that appeared to have been made by a large pocketknife or similar object, and authorities concluded that he'd been killed by some unknown party.

   Suspicion soon settled on Dan Price, a thirty-three-old Black man who was a close associate of Taylor. He and Price often fished and hunted together. Price, a widower, frequently visited the Taylor home, and rumors had been circulating in the neighborhood that Price had been “unlawfully intimate” with Taylor’s wife. 

  Price and his paramour were both arrested on August 4 and taken before a justice for examination. Testimony at the hearing centered around the alleged romance between Price and Mrs. Taylor and the fact that Price and the victim had been seen together shortly before Taylor disappeared. At the end of the hearing, the case against the woman was dismissed, but Price was held for murder. 

    Martha Taylor left the area after her discharge, but additional evidence against her soon came to light. She was brought back to Warrenton, charged as a conspirator in her husband's murder, and given a new preliminary hearing. The primary witness against her was Maggie Price, Dan Price's 16-year-old daughter, who said she'd overheard Martha and her father talking about "putting Taylor out of the way." Some of the other testimony against Mrs. Taylor was too salacious "to give publicity to," according to the local newspaper.

  Although the outcome of Martha’s preliminary hearing is unclear from newspapers, she apparently was charged as an accessory to murder and let out on bond. Shortly after the hearing, Dan Price escaped from the Warren County Jail, and Martha temporarily harbored him before he fled the territory.

   Price was arrested in Illinois in late October and brought back to Warren County, where a joint indictment was found against him and Martha Taylor. As principal in the crime, Price was charged with first-degree murder, and Martha, as an accessory before the fact, was charged with second-degree murder.

   In late November, Price was found guilty and sentenced to hang. Martha Taylor’s trial began almost immediately after Price’s ended. She was found guilty of murder in the second degree and sentenced to twenty-five years in the state penitentiary.

   Dan Price was executed on January 18, 1877. After serving less than five and half years in prison, Martha Taylor received a full pardon and was released in April 1882.

   The brief account above is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4le5mWs.