She Shot to Kill: A Very Merry Little Woman

On the evening of May 24, 1899, twenty-nine-year-old Robert Blunk, who worked as a switchman at the Frisco Railroad yards in Springfield, Missouri, came home drunk and started abusing his wife, twenty-eight-year-old Alice. Blunk, whose "reputation as a husband" was "anything but commendable," had often been known to mistreat Alice. This time he said he was going to quit his job and leave Alice, and he even threatened to kill her.

The next day, Alice made up her mind that, if Robert started abusing her again, she was going to do something about it, and she armed herself with a .32 caliber pistol. Wrapping the weapon in paper, she walked downtown carrying the pistol in her hand. She met her husband on College Street just west of the public square, and they started west together on College. Alice learned that Robert had quit his job and drawn all his pay, as he'd threatened, and the couple almost immediately started arguing over his refusal to turn over any of the money to Alice. Robert became more and more abusive as they went along, calling her vile names. As they passed Market Street, he noticed her carrying something in her hand and demanded to know what it was. She told him he'd find out soon enough. When they neared Main Street, he cursed her and struck her in the face. Alice took a step back, unwrapped the pistol, and fired two shots. One passed through Robert's coat without injuring him, but the other struck him in the hip. Still on his feet, he and Alice began wrestling over the pistol. Two firemen standing nearby then stepped in and disarmed the young woman. Decrying her husband's abuse, Alice beseeched the firemen to let her finish him off, but they instead called to a nearby police officer, who took Alice into custody.
Later on the evening of the 25th, a Springfield Republican reporter visited Alice in the calaboose. She told the newsman: "We have been married now for three years and how I have ever stood his abuse as long as I have I don't know. Why I have worked and done everything for that man, and a suit of clothes that I bought with money that I made by sewing he sold yesterday. Wednesday night he threatened to kill me and struck me several times.
"Yesterday," she continued, "I just got a revolver and thought that if he attempted anything of that kind I would take part in it myself. I carried my revolver in my hand, but hardly expected to meet him. When I did, he was in his usual condition. I asked him for money that he drew and he struck me. Stepping behind him, I fired twice, and am sorry that I did not kill him. And I swear I will," she concluded, "if I ever get a chance," even if she hanged for it.
After listening to Alice's story, the reporter opined that, because of all the cruelties she had endured, the shooting was "justifiable as well as in self-defense." He described Alice as "a very pretty little woman." Her maiden name was McCoy, and came from a respectable family of Ozark. Later the same night, Alice was released on $300 bond to appear in court the next day.
At her initial court appearance the next day, word arrived from Robert Blunk that he did not want to prosecute his wife. Although he was in pain and unable to attend the hearing, his condition was not considered serious. Blunk told a Springfield Leader-Democrat reporter that there was no one to blame for what happened but himself. He denied physically abusing his wife but admitted that he had given her plenty of provocations for her anger. He also denied that he planned to leave town once he was able. Despite Blunk's expressed desire that authorities go easy on his wife, her bond was continued, pending a preliminary hearing. In contrast to the Republican's description of Alice, the Leader-Democrat considered her appearance "careworn."
After her release on bond, Alice returned to her husband and took over his care, trying to nurse him back to health. She made it clear, however, that she was only doing so out of a sense of wifely duty and that once he recovered sufficiently, "their paths must henceforth lead in different directions." She said she regretted the shooting, but she still maintained that she was driven to it.
In early June it was reported that Robert Blunk had taken a relapse and, despite the fact that his condition at first was not deemed serious, "fatal results" were now feared. At the time, Alice was still "devoting all the wifely care within her power" to nurse her husband back to health but still declaring that she would not live with him once he recovered. The Republican concluded that Mrs. Blunk would no doubt be prosecuted as a routine course of law but that much sympathy was expressed for her and she would probably not be convicted.
A day or two later, another report circulated that Blunk was not dying after all and that Alice was continuing to care for him.
After a couple of more weeks of care, Blunk was able to appear in court, and Alice's preliminary hearing was held on June 19. The Republican, reporting on the proceeding the next day, took a dim view of what Blunk had to say: "Yesterday, the big, strong, burly man, whom she nursed back to life, sat in court, apparently without feeling, and told the story of the shooting with no mitigating circumstances to ease her lot. He forgot to tell the court of his barbarous and unmanly conduct towards her."
Alice, on the other hand, was "a medium sized woman with bright black eyes and hair, slender, pale and nervous," who "did not look like a desperate character, or a woman who would wantonly attempt to take human life," said the Republican. "As she sat on the witness chair telling her story to the court, clothed in a neat pink dress and fanning herself complacently with a large black fan, she appeared anything but wicked and heartless. There was a choke in her throat and a tremor in her voice as she said to the court, 'I've been a perfect, true, honest, upright wife, and when he struck me it didn't hurt where the blow fell, but it wounded my heart; there's where the wound was, and it is there still. I didn't marry him to desert him. I married to live for him."
Alice went on the tell of her husband's constant drunkenness, the many abuses she had suffered at the his hands, and "the black and blue bruises she had carried about for weeks at a time." She said she had been driven to desperation by his abuse, especially on the night before the shooting, and hardly knew what she was doing when she shot her husband.
Despite much sympathy for the defendant, she was bound over under $300 bond to await the action of a grand jury. When the grand jury met in late July, however, they declined to indict Alice, and she went free.
True to her word, Alice refused to live with her husband after he regained his health. At the time of the 1900 census, she was living in Springfield with another young woman. Although Robert was still alive, she listed her marital status as "widowed." Robert also followed through on his vow to leave Springfield and was living in Nevada, Missouri, in 1900. Six years later, in 1906, Alice finalized her split from Robert Blunk by obtaining a divorce in Greene County Court.

A Gay Lothario and an Over-protective Old Man

An incident happened in the southwest corner of Polk County, Missouri, in June of 1895 that "caused a commotion" at nearby Walnut Grove, just across the Greene County line. About the middle of the month John Slatter, living about four miles north of Walnut Grove, paid a visit to the adjoining farm of Aaron Estabrook. Old Man Estabrook came into the house and caught his daughter-in-law and Slatter in "a compromising position." Estabrook "took quick action in the matter," said the  Springfield Democrat, "and, getting a bead on Slatter, opened fire." The ball struck Slatter in the right arm between his shoulder and elbow.
Mrs. Estabrook "made a clean cut denial of intending to do anything wrong, and a warrant was, therefore, served on Slatter charging him with attempted rape." Aaron Estabrook, meanwhile, was charged with assault with intent to kill. "The case of the elder Estabrook is a rather peculiar one," observed the Democrat. "If he had been the husband of the woman, it would have been 'perfectly regular,' but as he is the father-in-law it is a question to be solved how much right or provocation he had to shoot.

"It is most likely, however," concluded the Democrat, that the whole matter will be hushed up and little or nothing more heard of it." And that's exactly what happened. Both Slatter and Old Man Estabrook were scheduled to have their preliminary examinations before a Polk County justice of the peace on June 22, but even the Democrat, which had taken such an interest in the minor scandal, didn't report the outcome of the hearing.

Warrenton's Katie Jane Memorial Home Fire

I've written in the past on this blog about destructive fires, especially business district fires and school fires, in the Ozarks and surrounding region, but I know of only one fire in the immediate Ozarks area that claimed a multitude of lives. (By "multitude," I mean more than just a half dozen or so.) That one fire was the West Plains dance hall explosion/fire in 1928, which claimed somewhere around 38 lives, I think. However, if we look beyond the immediate Ozarks region to include the entire state of Missouri, there has been at least one fire in the Show-Me State that was more deadly than the West Plains disaster. (Maybe more than one. I haven't tried to research the topic extensively.)
On February 17, 1957. a fire broke out at the Katie Jane Memorial Home, a nursing facility for the elderly, in Warrenton, Missouri. Initial reports said at least 71 people perished in the blaze, and later estimates upped the figure a notch or two. At the time, it was the worst fire in Missouri history in terms of the number of victims, and, as far as I know, it still holds that dubious distinction.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and about 100 visitors were at the home in addition to the 150 or so patients/residents. The fire broke out about 2:30 p.m. in a first-floor sitting room and quickly spread to other parts of the 2 1/2-story brick structure, which had formerly housed the Central Wesleyan College. The fire swept down hallways and from room to room, feeding on wood furniture, wood floors, curtains, rugs, and other flammable materials. Almost all of those who died were elderly and infirm patients at the home.
Headlines in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch told the horrifying, heartrending story: "Screams of Elderly Patients Were Quickly Stilled by Flames" and "Rescuers Worked in Eerie Silence Soon After Fire Engulfed Nursing Home."
Several survivors told harrowing stories of their attempts to rescue others from the burning building. A Lutheran minister who was conducting a Sunday service for about 20 people told of leading his congregants to safety and then going back into the building to save other people. His first trip back into the building was successful, but then he got trapped by the fire and had to be rescued himself by climbing through a window and down a ladder. A nurse led several old men to safety, but when she tried to re-enter the building, the front entrance was already engulfed in flames. A neighbor who lived just a block or so away hurried to the scene with a ladder and began rescuing people. He told of one old woman who didn't want to abandon her belongings, and he had to coax her out the window. "I used some pretty strong language," he said. "I got hold of her and dragged her out over my shoulder."
Investigators blamed the fire on faulty wiring. The home had recently been inspected in order to have its license renewed, and the license was being held up, partly because the wiring had yet to be inspected by a competent electrician. After the fire, Missouri governor James T. Blair, Jr. called the fire "a terrible tragedy" and said he was going to appeal to the legislature for stricter inspection laws in the state.

The Funeral of Mass Murderer Bill Cook

After Bill Cook, who killed the Mosser family in Joplin, was sentenced to death in California and was scheduled to die in the gas chamber, a funeral director from Comanche, Oklahoma, Glen Boydston, contacted the Cook family and offered to bring the body back for them if they would agree to let him hold a small service in Comanche before bringing Bill on to Joplin for burial. Boydston said a wealthy Comanche resident had offered to foot the bill as a tribute to his own wayward son, now deceased. Bill's father, William Cook, signed papers agreeing to the arrangement because the family didn't have the money to pay to have the body transported. When Badman Bill, as he was sometimes called, was executed on December 12, 1952, at San Quentin, Boydston was there waiting to take charge of the body.
But what happened after the undertaker got the body back to Comanche wasn't quite what the Cook family had bargained for.
When Boydston pulled up outside his funeral home early Sunday morning, December 14, a large crowd was waiting to greet him. The body was then displayed in an open casket inside the funeral home with the tattooed words "Hard Luck" still plainly visible across Cook's knuckles. Curiosity seekers streamed by all day Sunday, eager to get a glimpse of the notorious killer. "Mothers carried babies in their arms and fathers held their sons by the hand," said an Oklahoma newspaper, "as they stopped to look at the body of the killer from the Joplin slag pits."
One little boy told a reporter that he'd read about Cook in the newspaper and that he'd talked his mama into bringing him to the funeral home to get a look at him. A man said he came because he just wanted to see what "a real bad man" looked like. Women visitors, though, outnumbered men, and several them remarked on Cook's physical features. One woman said, "What a fine looking boy. He has beautiful hair. He doesn't look like a man who would do such a thing." The crowds on Sunday were still coming in droves when Boydston's wife finally locked the doors at 9 p.m.
The next day, Monday the 15th, the curious crowds kept coming and even increased. From all sections of Oklahoma they came and even some from surrounding states like Texas and Colorado. Seven busloads of kids from a school in Texas stopped by, after some school official apparently decided that viewing the corpse of a heinous and notorious killer would make an edifying activity for a field trip. By the end of the day on Monday, an estimated 10,000 people had paraded through the funeral home to view the body.
By Tuesday, so many people had come to take a gander at Cook's body that the funeral directors stopped trying to count them. "The number just got away from us," said one representative of the funeral home. On Tuesday evening, though, it was estimated that 15,000 people had paid a visit since Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, in Joplin the Cook family heard a radio report Tuesday evening about the carnival atmosphere in Comanche and the huge number of people who'd been allowed to view Bill's body. They called the Joplin Globe in anger requesting that word be disseminated demanding that the public display of Bill's body and plans for a public funeral in Comanche the next day be immediately halted. The family was particularly upset by reports that a collection box had been put out near the coffin for donations, because they said they did not want to try make money from Bill's death and they didn't want anybody else to do so either. They said Boydston had violated the agreement he had made with them to hold only a small, private funeral in Comanche and not to seek publicity. The Cook family left for Comanche later Tuesday night with plans to drive all night and personally "put a stop to" the funeral service slated for the next day.
When an Oklahoma newspaper reporter called at the Boydston funeral home in Comanche Tuesday night and informed the attendant of the Cook family's anger, the attendant said Boydston himself was home resting because he was so exhausted from the past few days' activities but he added that only $31 had been collected in the donation box and that it had been used to buy flowers.
Representatives of the Cook family arrived in Comanche early Wednesday morning and threatened a lawsuit if the funeral scheduled later that day was not called off. Boydston, saying he never meant any harm, immediately canceled the service, and the body was taken to Derfelt Funeral Home in Galena, Kansas, later on the 17th. After dark that same evening, the body was taken by back roads to Peace Church Cemetery at the northwest edge of Joplin for burial, arriving about 8:40 p.m. Although one newspaper headline called it an "eerie night service," the burial was, by most accounts, a small, private, brief, and simple service attended only by family, close friends, a minister, an undertaker, and one Joplin newspaper reporter, about fifteen people in total. The Rev. Dow Booe of Galena, minister of Joplin's First Gospel Workers' Church, delivered a short sermon before Cook was lowered into an unmarked grave next to where his mother had been buried almost twenty years earlier, the whole service lasting about ten minutes.

George "Pea Ridge" Hayes and the Murder of Officer Frank Keller

It apparently came as no surprise to the editor of the Springfield (MO) Leader when George "Pea Ridge" Hayes killed Deputy Frank Keller on July 9, 1895, because the Leader headline the next day read, "Murder At Last." Not only had Hayes previously threatened Deputy Keller, he'd long had a reputation as a "malicious, dull fellow" who was considered insane by many but also very dangerous.
Hayes was born in Arkansas about 1868 and grew up in Benton County, Arkansas, near Pea Ridge. When he was still just a kid, he struck out on his own, traveling from town to town in northwest Arkansas and Southwest Missouri. Somewhere along the line, he picked up the nickname "Pea Ridge" because of the town in Arkansas where he was from.
In April 1888, a man named George Hayes (presumably Pea Ridge) was run out of Springfield as a vagrant. In early 1891, Hayes was convicted of assault with intent to kill in Lawrence County and sent to the state penitentiary for a two-year term. Pardoned by the governor after only nine months, Pea Ridge returned to southwest Missouri and resumed his "worthless, thieving" ways. In July of 1893, he was sent back to Jefferson City, this time on a grand larceny conviction in Jasper County. At some point in the early 1890s, he also spent time in the Aurora City Jail on a minor offense. During his incarceration, he set fire to the jail "but unfortunately was not roasted alive," according to the Leader. In addition, during the same time period, Hayes picked up a chair in a Springfield courtroom and attempted to assault a judge with it after the judge sentenced him to a short term in jail for a minor offense. He was prevented from carrying out the attack by the constables guarding him, however. According to the Leader, Springfield city officers had made numerous attempts to get Hayes to leave town, including arranging a bogus jailbreak for him, which he took advantage of, but instead of leaving town, he hung around and had to be re-arrested.
Pea Ridge was discharged from his second term in the state prison in November of 1894 after serving three-fourths of his sentence. Returning to the Springfield area, he promptly got into trouble again. In the spring of 1895, he was arrested for stealing a lawnmower and sentenced to 90 days in jail. Sometime in June, while on a work detail, he tried to escape by darting into a saloon, but Frank Keller, the deputy sheriff guarding him, rushed in after him. Hayes picked up a chair and attempted to assault the officer, but Keller subdued the prisoner by hitting him with his billy club. After being recaptured, Pea Ridge swore to kill Keller.
He got his chance on July 9, 1895, when he and a number of other prisoners were out working on a chain gang at a stone quarry on North Grant Street. When Keller leaned down to inspect some work the men were doing, Pea Ridge, who was carrying a pick, hit him on the head with the tool, knocking the officer unconscious and severely wounding him. Another guard, with the aid of one or more of the prisoners, was able to overpower the assailant before he could do additional damage.
Keller died just a few hours after being attacked, and Pea Ridge was charged with first-degree murder and thrown in the dungeon at the Springfield City Jail. When word of Hayes's murder of Keller spread throughout the Ozarks, stories of Pea Ridge's notoriety began filtering back to Springfield from other towns. A report from Eureka Springs, for instance, said that the chief of police at that place had once run Hayes out of town by whipping him with a cowhide.
At his trial later in 1895, Hayes's attorneys put up an insanity defense. Although most people agreed that Pea Ridge was crazy, most felt he still knew right from wrong and should be held accountable for his actions. The jury accordingly convicted him of second-degree murder, and he was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Hayes was received at the Jeff City prison in October 1895. He was transferred to the insane asylum at Fulton in 1901, and in 1904, the governor once again intervened on his behalf, granting him a pardon after he'd served less than nine years of his assessed 99-year sentence.
Recollecting Hayes in 1929, a Springfield Leader columnist recalled that Pea Ridge went back to Arkansas after being discharged from his third prison sentence and "all trace of him was long since lost." The columnist remembered Hayes as a "criminally inclined" nut who was "often in jail." According to the columnist, Hayes was saved from the gallows only because it was shown at his trial that he came from "a family of nuts" who had intermarried and were "all kin to each other." One story said his paternal grandparents were first cousins to each other and his maternal grandparents were also first cousins to each other. A variation on the story claimed all four grandparents were first cousins to each other. In any case, insanity was said to run in the family, although George was admittedly the worst of the lot.
The reason the name of Pea Ridge Hayes was called to the columnist's mind was the recent fame of Pea Ridge Day, a well-known baseball player of the time, who was known as much for his comical antics as for his playing ability. His nickname, like that of Hayes, came from his hometown in Arkansas.

Murder at Schaupp's Store

I recall a murder that took place at a store/service station just north of Crystal Cave on Highway 65 about halfway between Springfield and Fair Grove when I was growing up at Fair Grove. There was a little buzz around Fair Grove about it at the time, and I think my dad might have even pointed out to me the place where it happened during a trip to Springfield not long after the incident. Up until a day or two ago, that's about all I could have told you about the crime, but I happened to find a news story about the event in a Springfield newspaper.
Come to find out, the incident happened on August 13, 1956, when I was nine years old. A young man came into the store with a high-powered rifle about ten o'clock that morning and shot two people: Leonard W. "Bill" Murrell, 61-year-old owner of the nearby Avalon Club, who was in the store as a customer; and thirty-eight-year-old Miss Myrtle Schaupp, who was operating the store at the time for her father, C. B. Schaupp. Shot in the head, Murrell was killed instantly, and Miss Schaupp had her right arm practically blown off by a shot just below the shoulder. She was admitted to the hospital in critical condition and had to have the arm amputated, but she survived.

The killer fled, but he was soon identified by eye witnesses, including the teenage granddaughter of the store owner, from police photographs as Robert Lee Popejoy. The girl said the killer just started shooting for no apparent reason, and officers could offer no motive for the crime, except that the suspect had a history of mental illness. He was tracked down at his father's farm north of Strafford on Highway 125 later the same day. Officers from several different law enforcement agencies surrounded the house and demanded his surrender. When he refused, they laid siege to the place. The young man still refused to surrender even after his father went up to the house and pleaded with him to give himself up. Late in the afternoon, authorities finally employed an armored car to get close enough to the house to fire a tear gas canister through a window. Popejoy emerged moments later and surrendered, laying down his Winchester rifle. Bullets recovered from the scene of the crime were later positively identified as having come from Popejoy's rifle.
Popejoy had been taken into custody several times on relatively minor charges, and authorities had recommended to the father that the young man be committed to a mental institution. His mother was already a resident of the state hospital at Nevada. Sheriff Glenn Hendrix said he'd told the father that something like this might happen if his son was not committed, and now it had. Asked about his mental condition as he was taken into custody, Robert Lee Popejoy told officers, "I'm not crazy, you are." He admitted being in the vicinity of Schaupp's store at the time of the crime, but he said he had no memory of having even gone inside.
At his trial in December, Popejoy was acquitted on the grounds of insanity, but he was ordered committed to a mental institution for the dangerously insane.

The Most Terrible Deed Ever Committed in Warren County: The Murder of Henry and Nettie Yeater

On Monday, August 31, 1903, rural mail carrier Otto Guggenmoos was running his route in Camp Branch Township northwest of Warrenton, Missouri, when he came to the mailbox of Henry and Nettie Yeater, an elderly couple who had lived in the vicinity for many years. Inside the mailbox Guggenmoos found a mysterious note that read, “Mr. and Mrs. H. W. Yeater have bin killed. Please report.” Not quite sure what to make of the note, Guggenmoos showed it to two or three people who lived in the neighborhood, but they told him it was probably some kind of joke.
The mail carrier wasn’t so sure, though, and when he got back to Warrenton late that afternoon, Guggenmoos showed the note to a US marshal who was personally acquainted with Henry Yeater. The marshal sent a deputy out to Camp Branch with instructions to round up some of Yeater’s neighbors and check on the old couple.
The small posse went to the Yeater home and discovered a ghastly sight. Henry Yeater was lying in bed with his throat cut, and at the foot of his bed, his wife, Henriette “Nettie” Yeater, lay on the floor with her throat slashed in three or four places and several small cuts on her face and arm.
Suspicion immediately settled on twenty-two-year-old William E. Church, the couple’s foster son. The note found in the mailbox seemed to match his handwriting, and he had not been seen since the previous afternoon, when neighbor Daniel Buescher saw him in a nearby field.
Mr. and Mrs. Yeater had no children of their own, but they had taken young Church out of the Moberly House of Refuge when he was about nine years old and raised him as their own. He had always been a wild boy and had been sent to reform school at Boonville when he was about fourteen for stealing a gold watch. Nettie Church, though, doted on the boy and believed he was innocent. She got him returned home after less than a year at the reformatory.
Now Church had apparently repaid his foster mother’s kindness by killing her.
A young man answering Church’s description had been seen boarding an eastbound train in southwestern Warren County a few hours before the bodies were discovered, but all trace of the suspect was lost after that.
Although a small amount of cash belonging to the Yeaters was missing, no reasonable motive for the murders could be offered, since Yeater had recently made out a will bequeathing all his property to Church upon his and his wife’s deaths. The Warrenton Herald called the crime “unquestionably the most terrible deed ever committed within the borders of Warren County.”
The train Church had caught arrived in St. Louis at mid-afternoon on Monday, August 31. He promptly bought a ticket for Chicago and spent the next few months traveling around the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes area.
During his ramblings, Church wrote a number of defiant letters to various people back in Warren County threatening to come back and kill several of his supposed enemies. On December 22, Church enlisted in the US Marine Corps at Cleveland under the name William Buescher, the same surname as the near neighbor back in Warren County. The new recruit was shipped to League Island Navy Yard in Philadelphia nine days later.
Church was tracked to League Island based on letters the young man calling himself William Bueshler wrote to a girl back in Warren County, and he was arrested in late March 1904 and lodged in the Philadelphia City Jail, where he made a full confession of his heinous crime, describing in chilling detail how he’d slit the throats of his elderly foster parents. He said he’d been thinking about killing the couple for four years, because he was convinced they weren’t going to leave him any money (although they had already done so at the time of his crime).
Brought back to Missouri, Church went on trial at Warrenton in late June 1904. His lawyer pursued an insanity defense, and several witnesses described the defendant’s strange and sometimes cruel behavior as a boy and young man. Prosecution witnesses, however, attributed Church’s behavior to pure meanness rather than insanity.
The trial concluded on June 30 with a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, and Church was sentenced to hang. After a series of unsuccessful appeals, the execution was finally set for January 10, 1907. On the evening before his date with death, Church talked freely of his crime. He said he regretted the deed and wasn’t sure why he did it, except that he’d argued with his foster parents continually in the weeks leading up to the crime and had argued with them again on the fateful night.
On the morning of the 10th, Church walked to the scaffold “with a steady step and did not show the least sign of weakening,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He dropped through the trap into eternity at 9:11 a.m.

This story is greatly condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

The Most Atrocious Crime in Dunklin County History: The Murder of the Tettaton Family

About 9:00 p.m., April 25, 1899, neighbors of Jane Tettaton living about a mile and a quarter north of Malden, Missouri, were aroused by the sight of Mrs. Tettaton’s home ablaze. Rushing to the scene, they found the home nearly consumed and smelled burning flesh. Five bodies were dragged out of the fiery embers. Although badly burned, they were identified by those familiar with the age and size of each family member as Jane Tettaton and her four children: George, Ben, Ida, and Ada.
Found lying in the yard not far from the burning house was James Henry Tettaton, stepson of Jane Tettaton and an older half-brother of her four children. The 29-year-old Tettaton had numerous knife wounds to his head and face, and he appeared unconscious. However, most people on the scene thought the superficial wounds were self-inflicted, because a bloody pocketknife belonging to Tettaton was found nearby, and most thought his blackout was a pretense. He was taken to a nearby house, where he soon revived enough to relate his story of what had happened.
He claimed the crime had been committed by two unknown men. He’d been talking to his stepmother shortly after eating supper with the family when the men entered the house with weapons drawn and demanded all the money he was carrying. When he refused, they started shooting and hit Jane at first fire. Tettaton said that he ran out of the house into the yard, where he was cut and beat into unconsciousness, and that he was unaware of what happened after that.
Tettaton had previously borne a good reputation, but few people believed his tale, because he told conflicting stories and was known to have previously been at odds with his stepmother over his father’s estate. After James’s mother died when he was a young child, his father, Washington Tettaton, remarried Jane Smith when James was not quite twelve. Wash died about 1897, and James, now an adult, was named administrator of his father’s estate. A dispute developed between James and Jane over his apportioning of the estate. She sued and won a settlement in circuit court.
One of the conflicting stories James Tettaton told involved a note found near the spot where he was lying that related to the settlement he owed Jane. Another inconsistency concerned a pistol found in the debris of the burned house, which, Tettaton acknowledged, belonged to him. He said he’d unloaded the weapon, but the cartridges were not in his vest pocket where he said he’d put them. In addition, a neighbor girl of Mrs. Tettaton told of a conversation she’d had with Jane on the day before she died during which Jane said she feared something might happen to her, and the girl’s mother said James Tettaton had recently paid a mysterious visit to Jane’s home late at night.
Tettaton was arrested on suspicion on the night of the murders, and a day or two later he was taken out of Dunklin County for safekeeping. He was brought back to the county seat at Kennett in late May and indicted on five charges of first-degree murder. Prosecutors elected to try Tettaton first on the charge of murdering his half-brother George, because the identity of the victim and the evidence of his death by gunfire prior to the house-burning were the clearest in his case. The trial was held during the October term of Dunklin County Circuit Court. On November 3, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the next day Tettaton was sentenced to hang on December 15, 1899. The defense’s immediate appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, however, acted as a stay of execution.
In early January 1890, Tettaton and another convicted killer named Gregory escaped from the Dunklin County Jail. They were recaptured in mid-January in Butler County and brought back to Kennett. A few months later, the two condemned men were taken to St. Louis for safekeeping.
In October 1900, the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the verdict in Tettaton’s case and reset the execution day for January 25, 1901. The Missouri governor later granted a stay, and the hanging was rescheduled for February 19. Both Tettaton and Gregory, who was also scheduled to die, were taken back to Kennett.
Just three days before the execution, Tettaton attempted suicide by cutting his wrist with a piece of broken mirror. Gregory, his cellmate, saw him slice his wrist but declined to alert anyone. Instead, he simply watched as Tettaton lay bleeding to death.
The dying man was discovered “very weak and almost unconscious” and a doctor was promptly summoned. When Tettaton regained full consciousness, he “seemed greatly chagrined” that his attempt to kill himself had failed, and a close guard was placed over him to prevent him from re-opening the wound.
About 1:30 in the afternoon of February 19, Tettaton was led to the scaffold by the sheriff and several deputies. Speaking to the large crowd that gathered outside the stockade, he admitted instigating the murders but claimed he hired two other men who actually did the bloody work. Tettaton was dropped through the trap at 2:10 p.m. in front of about 100 spectators who’d been allowed on the platform.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

They Want Me to Say Yes: The Lynching of Henry Williams

About midnight May 23, 1898, someone slipped into Ann Browitt’s home a mile west of Macon, Missouri, and attacked Ann’s two older daughters. However, he was frightened off before he could complete his hellish work when Ann and a younger daughter awoke and lit a lamp. The younger daughter said she saw in the light of the lamp that the attacker’s skin was black. That was enough to help get Henry Williams lynched when a similar attack occurred in Macon a month later.
On the late night of Tuesday, June 28, a man entered John Koechel’s home at Macon and went into the bedroom of Koechel’s stepdaughters, Amelia and Ann Leubke. Grasping Amelia’s arm when she awoke, the intruder threatened, “If you holler, I’ll do you as I did the girls at the waterworks.” At this point, an older stepdaughter heard the commotion from an adjoining room and appeared on the scene to frighten the man away.
As he was fleeing, the intruder stole a sack of flour from the kitchen. Unbeknownst to the thief, the sack had a small leak in it, and after daylight the next morning, two local officers followed the trail of flour to the home of Henry Williams, a thirty-year-old married black man. Not only was the bag of flour found at the residence but so, too, were a number of other articles that were identified as having been stolen from various Macon area homes in recent months. In addition, a bloody coat found in the home was thought to have been the coat worn by the assailant of the Browitt girls.
Williams was arrested and tossed in the Macon County Jail. He vehemently denied assaulting either the Leubke girls or the Browitt girls, and he offered explanations for how he’d gotten the flour and the coat. But no one believed him, partly because of his reputation for prior bad acts. A few years earlier, he’d been arrested for attempting to criminally assault a young white woman in a room over a downtown Macon store, but he’d received just ninety days in jail because of the woman’s “bad reputation.”
As word of Williams’s arrest spread throughout the morning of the 29th, people began gathering on the streets of Macon. That afternoon, the prisoner repeated his denials to a local reporter who called on him at the jail. He said he did not attack Amelia Leubke and did not say to her that he would do to her as he did the girls at the waterworks, because he did not commit either break-in. Informed of the mob that was forming, he said, “They want me to say yes, but they can kill me before I’ll do it.”
And kill him is exactly what they did.
Around ten o’clock that night, knots of men formed near the courthouse, and they soon came together into one crowd, determined to carry out vigilante justice. A local minister made a speech imploring them to let the law take its course, but he was howled down.
The mob marched to the jail and demanded the sheriff turn over the prisoner. He refused, but the determined gang knocked down a fence surrounding the jail and made a rush on the officers guarding it. The sheriff and his deputies were quickly disarmed, and the front door of the jail battered in. The key to the jail corridor was located and the iron door unlocked. The would-be lynchers took Williams from his cell and herded him outside, where his appearance was greeted with wild hurrahs from the crowd.
The prisoner was taken south through the streets of Macon to a railroad bridge at the edge of town. The doomed man was positioned beneath the bridge, a rope was looped around his neck, and the other end was thrown up to some men on the bridge. The gang leader, described only as a tall man, signaled the men on the bridge to pull, and Williams’s body shot up. It was 12:30 a.m. on the 30th of June, 1898.
The lynch mob tied the rope to the bridge and marched off into the night, leaving Williams’s body dangling. It was still hanging there after daylight on the morning of the 30th, “furnishing an uncanny spectacle for the passengers on the Hannibal and St. Joe Railroad trains,” according to the local paper.
The body was finally cut down about 8:30 a.m., and a coroner’s jury reached the meaningless verdict that the deceased had come to his death “at the hands of some two or three hundred men whose names, identities and residences are to these jurors unknown.”
This despite the fact that the identity of the tall leader was “pretty well known” in Macon, according to a county history written twelve years later.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

A Case of Patricide? The Murder of Dr. Perry Talbott

After Dr. Perry Talbott was shot on Saturday night, September 18, 1880, through the window of his home about seven miles south of Maryville, Missouri, investigators rushed to the scene to see the critically wounded victim and learn what they could about the incident.
They found the doctor still clinging to life, and when asked who had shot him, Talbott, an outspoken supporter of the Greenback Party, offered a vague opinion that some “enemy of the great cause” sent out by the national banks had done it.
After lingering in pain, Talbott died the next day. A coroner’s jury concluded he’d been killed by unknown parties, but over the next few weeks many people began to suspect that Talbott’s sons, twenty-one-year Albert “Bud” and sixteen-year-old Charles Edward, had murdered their own father. At least one of the brothers had recently argued with the father, and it was also speculated that the boys might have killed the father to protect their mother, Belle, whom the doctor reportedly mistreated.
Detectives were put on the case, and one of them, Jonas Brighton, found work under the name of Hudson on a farm neighboring the Talbott place. Brighton and his wife, Virginia, whom he represented as his sister, moved into a tenant house on the farm and quickly became acquainted with the Talbott brothers. According to later reports, “Miss Hudson” feigned romantic interest in Bud to gain his confidence, and he soon confessed his involvement in his father’s murder.
Brighton promptly relayed the news of Bud Talbott’s confession to Nodaway County authorities. He also told officials the Talbott brothers had offered him $50 to kill the Talbotts’ hired hand, Henry Wyatt, because he was in on the murder and they were afraid he would give them away.
Acting on Brighton’s statement and other evidence, Sheriff Henry Toel arrested the Talbott brothers and Henry Wyatt on October 26 and escorted them to the Nodaway County Jail in Maryville. A preliminary examination began on the 27th.
At the hearing, Brighton described how he and his wife had inveigled their way into the Talbott boys’ confidence and the brothers had revealed their secrets to them.
Belle’s brother-in-law Wilford Mitchell, who was in on Brighton’s scheme to trap the Talbott boys, also took the stand to testify against the brothers. He added that Belle had previously confided to him that Dr. Talbott abused her.
Henry Wyatt also testified, claiming that he was not in on the shooting but that the Talbott boys told him about it afterward.
At the close of the preliminary hearing, Bud Talbott, Ed Talbott, and Henry Wyatt were held on first degree murder charges, Bud as the principal and the other two as accessories before the fact. All three were committed to jail without bail. Although Belle Talbott was suspected of knowing about the plot but not actively participating in it, the grand jury declined to indict her.
Wyatt’s case was severed from that of the Talbott brothers, and when the Talbott trial got underway in January 1881, Wyatt, striking a deal, was one of the main witnesses against the boys. Jonas Brighton was also a principal witness, as was his wife. The defense attacked Brighton’s credibility, because he was an ex-convict and all-around desperado. The defense also attacked Virginia Brighton’s character. The defense theory of the crime was that Wilford Mitchell, Bellle’s brother-in-law, had hired Wyatt to commit the crime.
On January 28, the jury declared the brothers guilty of first degree murder. They were sentenced to hang on March 25. An appeal to the state supreme court automatically stayed the execution. In late April, the high court affirmed the verdict of the lower court and rescheduled the hanging for June 24.
As the execution date neared, many people pleaded with Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden to intercede. Even Brighton and Wyatt thought the boys deserved mercy. Belle Talbott traveled to Jefferson City to meet personally with the governor, but he still declined to intervene.
Until the very last minute.
All preparations for the hanging had been made and a large crowd had already gathered to witness it on the morning of the 24th when the sheriff received a telegram from Jeff City postponing the execution until July 22. It was feared for a time that vigilantes might try to hang the brothers anyway, but no such mob formed.
On July 5, Ed Talbott signed a sworn statement confessing that he had fired the shot that killed his father when he found his father beating his mother and her crying for help.
Bud Talbott signed an affidavit saying that Ed’s statement was true as far as he knew, from the time he entered the house, and he admitted helping cover up the crime. He said he’d been willing to die alongside Ed if his brother preferred to keep the secret, but now that Ed had confessed he was hereby confirming that part of the confession he knew about.
Many observers believed the boys’ affidavits showed “beyond all question the true state of facts” surrounding Dr. Talbott’s murder. But others thought the confession was a self-serving, phony plea for mercy.
Governor Crittenden was among those not persuaded. He said that if Ed Talbott’s confession was true, then his and his brother’s previous defense, including their appeals to the supreme court and to the governor, was based on a falsehood; that the boys had ample opportunity to tell the truth before now; and that he was not inclined to grant clemency based on a last-minute appeal that might also be a falsehood. The governor cited the fact that Mrs. Talbott had not confirmed Ed’s confession as strong evidence of its untruth.
On the evening of July 20, just a day and a half before the scheduled hanging, Bud Talbott issued a detailed confession retracting what Ed had said two weeks earlier, once again fingering Henry Wyatt as the person who’d shot Dr. Talbott, and naming Mitchell as an accomplice. Bud’s latest story turned many people against the Talbotts and soured the faith of those who’d previously argued for clemency.
On July 22, Bud and Ed Talbott, declaring their innocence to the very last, were escorted to a scaffold on a hill just northeast of Maryville and launched into eternity before 12,000-15,000 gaping spectators.
This story is a greatly condensed version of a chapter in my latest book Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri.

For God’s Sake, Give Me a Chance: The Lynching of Walter Mitchell

On Thursday evening August 6, 1925, twenty-one-year-old Leonard Utt and his teenage girlfriend, Maud Holt, attended a social event at Excelsior Springs, Missouri. About midnight, as Leonard was driving the girl to her home near Lawson, several miles north of Excelsior Springs, a black man waved the couple down, knocked Utt senseless, and tried to sexually assault Maud but was scared off by her screams and flailing.
The assailant fled toward Excelsior Springs, and when a black man was found asleep in a vacant house in Excelsior Springs early the next morning, Utt identified him as the attacker. The suspect was taken to the city jail, where he was identified as Walter Mitchell (aka Miller Mitchell), a thirty-three-year-old black man originally from Meridian, Mississippi.
Maud Holt was summoned to Excelsior Springs, and she, too, identified Mitchell as the man who had attacked her. Mitchell’s arraignment on an assault charge was set for 2:00 p.m. that afternoon.
As word of the attack on Maud and the identification of a suspect spread, angry citizens poured into Excelsior Springs throughout the morning of August 7. As the mob increased in numbers and became more threatening, Chief of Police John F. Craven and several deputies attempted to remove the prisoner to safety through a basement door but were turned back by members of the mob.
Shortly before noon, Clay County prosecutor Raymond Cummins was notified at Liberty of the tense situation in Excelsior Springs, and he immediately set out for the scene. Upon arrival, Cummins pled with the mob not to resort to violence. He organized a committee of citizens and law officers to speak directly with Charles Holt, Maud’s father. Holt was brought into the city hall, but Holt declined an invitation to help escort Mitchell to safety.
About 2:00 p.m., Cummins, realizing that mob action was imminent, called the Kansas City police and asked for reinforcements. A riot squad of over fifty officers was dispatched to Excelsior Springs.
Before they could arrive, however, the mob, now numbering about 500 men, broke into the jail about 3:00 p.m. and knocked the lock off Mitchell’s cell with a sledgehammer. They dragged the prisoner outside, brushing aside a token resistance from the guards. Despite being handcuffed, Mitchell screamed and resisted as he was dragged into the street.
A few men lifted the prisoner above their heads and started down the street with him, carrying him a short distance in that manner before setting him back down and forcing him to walk. As the lynch mob and their victim marched past the Elms Hotel, the town’s most fashionable mineral-water resort, tourists and health seekers gawked at the terrible parade.
A rope was fastened around the doomed man’s neck as he was dragged along, and when the vigilantes reached an oak tree near the south edge of town, the leader of the mob asked Mitchell if he had anything to say. He replied, “Yes, I’m guilty, but for God’s sake give me a chance.”
But the ruthless mob had no intention of giving Mitchell a chance. One of the gang climbed up the oak tree and tossed the other end of the rope over a high limb. Mitchell continued to squirm and moan, even as “willing hands” drew him several feet into the air. He died, though, within three or four minutes, and the mob promptly dispersed.
The first police reinforcements from Kansas City arrived about ten minutes too late to prevent the lynching. They cut down Mitchell’s body, and it was taken to a local undertaker’s office, where a long line of people stood in the street outside waiting to view it.
Clay County officials declined to investigate the lynching, despite the fact that Chief Craven and others said they knew who the leaders of the mob were. The Missouri governer then stepped in and ordered an investigation. A grand jury was subsequently held, but it was discharged after 100 witnesses were examined and “no one remembered who actually pulled the rope that took Mitchell’s life.”
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

Joplin's Ku Klux Klan Cave

The Ku Klux Klan, as most people know, arose in the aftermath of the Civil War, ostensibly as a law-and-order organization, but it ended up dishing out its brand of justice in a discriminatory manner, mainly targeting freed slaves. The group fell out of favor after a few years as its racist tendencies became increasingly clear.
However, the KKK enjoyed a revival starting about 1915, and in 1921 a local conclave of the secret organization was formed in Joplin. The organizational meeting at Schifferdecker Park drew an estimated crowd of 1,500 people. Not long after the local conclave was formed, the group purchased a cave near Belleville a few miles west of Joplin (a couple of miles north of Seventh Street on Malang Road). The first specific references to the cave in local newspapers that I've found come from 1924, but it's clear from the context of these references that the cave had already been in use as a KKK meeting place for some time.
In 1922, members of the Joplin conclave traveled to Fantastic Caverns, where they conducted the initiation rituals for 125 new inductees into the Springfield conclave. So apparently caves were a favorite meeting place for KKK conclaves. I suppose that was because they were conducive to secrecy.
During the early 1920s, the KKK was often seen as a patriotic, law-and-order organization, and it won widespread acceptance. Many of its members held positions of leadership in churches and local government, and its membership even included well-known national politicians. In 1923, the KKK Imperial Wizard, the group's national leader, visited Joplin, and the local conclave held a parade on Main Street.
The Joplin KKK was definitely not without its opposition, however. In late 1923 or early 1924, a local anti-Klan group arose, and in the spring 1924 school and city elections, the anti-KKK organization mounted a strong campaign against the Klan and for its own members to be elected to the school board and to city commissions. The group charged that the Klan was dividing the city, threatening the local institutions of government, intimidating citizens, and endangering their liberties. "Will you vote for a continuance of this condition," one anti-Klan newspaper ad challenged, "or do you desire release from this stranglehold of a group...who have so dominated our city affairs that you have no voice in its administration, and must perforce accept the dictates of a secret society that issues its edicts from the Ku Klux Klan cave at Belville." In another ad, the anti-group appealed to the people to oppose "the domination of churches by secret cricles taking orders from the Cave at Belville" and for them to vote for government conducted in the open light of day. Apparently, however, the KKK still held sway in Joplin, because all the candidates endorsed by the anti-Klan group lost.
On the national level, though, the Klan was already starting to lose influence, just as it had after its brief period of popularity in the wake of the Civil War. The group was again exposed as a discriminatory organization that was anti-black, anti-Catholic, and anti-foreigner. It soon faded into the background, in Joplin as well as the rest of the country, and the old cave fell into disuse.
In the summer of 1939, a fiery cross was burned near the intersection of 4th and Maiden Lane, and rumors of an attempt to revive the local KKK circulated. A couple of days after the cross burning, Joplin detectives trekked out to the former KKK cave but found no signs of recent activity. The pathway leading to the cave was so obscured by weeds that it was scarcely visible, and the iron door across the entrance was padlocked. The lawmen got inside somehow, though, and discovered a room large enough to hold about 2,000 people.
In 1940, with World War II on the horizon, some Joplin city officials proposed to the federal government that the old KKK cave be used as a war industry site, perhaps a munitions plant. The local officials said the cave was two miles long with openings at both ends and that it was 20 to 30 feet high and could be widened to 20 to 50 feet, so that vehicles could be driven through it. The government rejected the proposal, however.
In the spring of 1956, a beer party at the old cave by a large number of young people got busted by police when a resident living near the cave reported the young people for disturbing the peace. About 35 young people were arrested, while another 60-70 left before they could be rounded up. Of the ones arrested, over 20 of them were charged with disturbing the peace. Two nights later, a carload of young men returned to the old cave and were harassing the man who'd called the police, driving past his house and calling him vile names, when he responded by firing a shotgun at the car, wounding a 17-year-old boy in the vehicle. The boy was not seriously hurt, though, and no charges were filed in the case, at least not in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
In the spring of 1971, a group of Memorial High School students went out to the old KKK cave and cleaned up the premises as a project for Earth Week.
In 1980, someone wrote to the Joplin Globe proposing that the KKK cave should be preserved as a historical site. A day or two later, someone else fired off a response, asking why anyone would want to preserve a monstrosity that amounted to little more than a pile of rocks.
In 1989, the Klan cave, along with ten surrounding acres, was sold at auction.
Maybe the person who bought it was a member of the Fir Road Christian Church, because a few years later, in 1996, the church used the old cave as a site for its Easter morning sunrise services. The following year, the same church presented a crucifixion drama at the cave.
In recent years, the cave, dubbed the Old Haunted Belleville Cave, has been used as a commercial spook house during the Halloween season. In fact, I think it's open right now. Not this very instant, but probably tonight.

The Tramp Became a Demon

About 6:00 p.m. on September 2, 1896, Alice Gammon, an eleven or twelve-year-old deaf girl, left the canning factory in Rhineland, Missouri, where she worked, and started on foot to her home a half mile away. Meanwhile, a “tramp mechanic” named Tom Larkin had arrived in Rhineland by rail early that morning with two companions, and they spent the day repairing gasoline stoves for whoever would hire them. Late in the afternoon, Larkin left his two companions in Rhineland and walked out into the surrounding countryside alone.
Shortly after leaving the factory, Alice noticed someone following her. As she neared her home, the path she was on took her into a thicket of woods, and halfway through it, the man who’d been following her made a rush toward her. Seizing Alice, he threw her to the ground and smothered her cries with her skirts. The girl struggled and fought, as the assailant, in the words of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “clutched her throat and pressed his sharp finger nails into the soft white flesh until the blood came.
“Failing in his design,” the St. Louis newspaper continued, “the tramp became a demon.” He pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed Alice, then withdrew the bloody blade and plunged it into her flesh again.
The attacker then released the girl and dashed into the woods.
Weak and bleeding from the attack, Alice staggered and crawled to her nearby home, where she told her eight-year-old sister what had happened, and the little girl summoned help.
After a doctor treated Alice, she revived enough to describe her assailant. Constable William Dixon found a man answering the description at the railroad depot about 300 yards from the scene of the assault. The suspect stoutly denied the attack, but his missing finger, which Alice had mentioned, was convincing evidence. In addition, the constable took the suspect to Alice’s house, and she positively identified him.
Since Rhineland was a small village with no jail, Dixon escorted the suspect to the town’s only hotel and placed him under guard in one of the rooms. The prisoner identified himself as Thomas Larkin from Chicago.
Larkin had scarcely been confined when word spread that the doctor attending Alice had said her wounds were likely fatal. The people of Rhineland began collecting near the hotel and plotting to take Larkin from his guards so they might visit a swift vengeance upon him. The deliberate German folks of Rhineland took several hours talking over the matter, while Larkin moaned and quaked in fear.
After midnight, the crowd, now swollen in numbers, began to grow impatient. About 3:00 a.m. on the morning of September 3 they started toward the hotel with a rope. Constable Dixon came out in front of the hotel to plead with them, and they finally disbanded. For the time being.
After daylight, though, more citizens from the surrounding countryside poured into town, and by mid-morning, Dixon realized he and his deputies could not hold off the horde for long. He sent for the Montgomery County sheriff, but before the sheriff could arrive, reports of indecent proposals Larkin had made toward other women began to circulate.
By the time the sheriff arrived in the late afternoon, the crowd at Rhineland had grown so large and so indignant that the lawman was unable to remove the prisoner as he had planned, but his presence helped deter the would-be lynchers from trying to act during the daytime.
About ten o’clock that night, though, word reached the mob that Alice Gammon was dying. Whether the report was valid and the girl did, in fact, later die is not clear, but the mere rumor of Alice’s impending death was sufficient to incite the horde to action.
Eight or ten masked men, one of them toting a long rope, advanced out of the crowd and started battering the front door. The sheriff, the constable, and a deputy were on the other side of the door, and when it yielded, the officers put up a stiff resistance, knocking one of the besiegers down. The other vigilantes, though, overpowered the lawmen and quickly located Larkin. They tossed the rope around his neck with a running noose and half-dragged, half-carried him outside as he struggled for his life. The mob took him to a spot about 200 yards east of the railway station and just north of the track near the woods where Alice Gammon had been attacked.
The other end of the rope was thrown over a limb of an oak tree at the edge of the woods, and the howling mob grasped the rope and drew Larkin up. They left him dangling beneath the limbs of the tree for passengers and crew to see as they passed on the nearby railroad tracks. When a freight train went through Rhineland after daylight on the morning of September 4, about seven hours after the lynching, Larkin’s body was still swinging from the limb, and a number of curious onlookers were standing nearby gawking at the grisly sight.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my book Show-Me Atrocities: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.
This month marks ten years that I've been doing this blog. Hope I'm still around in another ten years.

John Nelson's Murder of John Stull

By all accounts, John Stull was a compassionate person who was always willing to help out his neighbors. Little did he know that his kindness would end up getting him and his mother killed.
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, Stull lived with his elderly mother and his two young children in a crude house at Salt River Switch in Ralls County, Missouri. Stull’s wife had been dead several years, his mother was feeble, and his children were too young to work. Stull was the family’s sole support, and he was considered a hard-working man.
In the spring of 1893, John Nelson and his wife, Lavinia, moved to the Salt River Switch area and pitched their tent about three hundred and fifty feet south of the Stull home. A short time later, Nelson’s mother and stepfather, Samuel Minor, showed up in a covered wagon and parked it near Nelson’s tent. Minor and his wife lived in the wagon but cooked their meals on Nelson’s stove and ate from his table.
After a while, though, Nelson and his wife had a falling-out with the Minors and wouldn’t let them cook on their stove or eat at their table. Neglected by her son, Mrs. Minor fell ill, but rather than help her out, Nelson and his wife pulled the wagon, with the mother in it, away from their tent and left it in a swampy area nearby.
Neighbors, came to Mrs. Minor’s aid, and Stull agreed to shelter her at his house. He gave Mrs. Minor his best bed, and his mother, Mary Hughes, tended to the needs of their houseguest. Although Mrs. Minor was sick enough for a local doctor to pay a house call, Nelson and his wife never visited at all nor expressed any concerns about her welfare.
On Wednesday, August 2, 1893, Stull’s seven-year-old son, Willie, and Willie’s cousin wandered over to the Nelson tent, where Nelson enticed them into fighting each other. Stull’s daughter, fourteen-year-old Mary, went over to the Nelson place to bring the children home. When the girl arrived to summon her brother and cousin home, Nelson abused her, calling her vile names.
Informed of what had happened, Stull confronted Nelson on Thursday. Stull demanded to know why Nelson had mistreated the little boys and verbally abused his daughter. Nelson cursed Stull, and Stull told Nelson and his wife he didn’t want anything more to do with them and for them never to come to his place.
Although Nelson and Lavinia had shown no inclination to visit Stull’s home, Stull’s decree banning them from his place made them determined to go there in defiance. On Friday, the day after the argument, Nelson told one of his neighbors that Stull had prohibited him from coming into his yard but that he “was going in if he had to bore his way in.”
True to his word, Nelson showed up at the Stull house on Saturday morning, August 5, carrying a revolver, with Lavinia by his side. They walked into the house uninvited but stayed less than five minutes when they realized Stull was not home, scarcely staying long enough to check on Nelson’s sick mother.
Shortly before 6 p.m. the Nelsons went back to Stull’s place with Nelson still carrying the revolver. Lavinia picked up a piece of iron as she and her husband approached the Stull home. Stull, who’d just gotten home, was sitting on the doorstep and saw the couple walking toward his yard. He told them to stay out, but they stepped through an opening in the fence and kept coming.
Hearing the commotion, Stull’s mother stepped outside, and about that moment Lavinia Nelson struck Stull with the piece of iron she was holding. In return, Stull slapped her with his hand. Nelson then fired a shot at Stull, but it missed and struck Mary Hughes instead. She fell to the ground and died very shortly.
After the first shot, Nelson fired again, this time striking Stull in the abdomen. Nelson and his wife then turned and left, with Stull staggering after them. At the top of a nearby railroad grade, Stull fell on the track, and Nelson hallooed that he’d shot him. Two men who’d heard the shots hurried to the scene and arrested Nelson.
Stull died the next day, and Nelson was lodged in the Ralls County Jail at New London. When he was arrested, Nelson bragged to the sheriff that, if he had it all to do over, he’d shoot Stull again.
Nelson and his wife were jointly indicted for double murder with Nelson as the principal and Lavinia as an accessory. Lavinia later applied for and obtained a severance of her case from her husband’s.
Nelson’s case was continued until July of 1894, when he obtained a change of venue to neighboring Marion County. His trial at Palmyra in October 1894 for the first degree murder of John Stull ended in a hung jury after his attorneys claimed self-defense. A new trial took place in April 1895, and Nelson was convicted and sentenced to hang. The execution was stayed by an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Lavinia Nelson was acquitted at her trial in Ralls County, also during April of 1895. After her acquittal, Lavinia utterly deserted her husband, taking no interest in his case and refusing even to answer his letters.
In January 1896, the supreme court affirmed the lower court’s ruling in John Nelson’s case, and the execution was reset for February 28 at Palmyra. The condemned man was led to the gallows abut 11:00 a.m. late that morning and dropped through the trap in front of about fifty spectators who’d been invited inside the stockade surrounding the platform.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my most recent book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

A Devilish Temper and Cruel Disposition: The Story of Hade Brown

In early 1876, 18-year-old Susan Parrish of Randolph County, Missouri, left her parents’ home near Cairo to elope with James Hayden “Hade” Brown. Hade was the son of the notorious Bill Brown, who’d killed a man in 1865 and was later killed himself by his brother-in-law for abusing his wife (Hade’s mother). Sue’s parents, Dr. J. C. and Martha Parrish, bitterly opposed her marriage to Hade, who had already earned a mean and rowdy reputation of his own.
Susan was madly in love and wouldn’t listen to her parents, but soon after the wedding, according to the county history, Hade’s “devilish temper and cruel disposition was manifested toward his wife.” On July 21, 1877, while Hade was in neighboring Monroe County, Sue left home with her infant son and came to her parents’ house to plead with them for help in escaping her abusive husband. Despite their initial opposition to Sue’s marriage, the couple had counseled patience when Sue had previously appealed to them, but this time they yielded to their daughter’s entreaties. Dr. Parrish took her and the little boy in a wagon to stay with her older brother in Howard County.
On Monday the 23rd, Dr. Parrish made the return trip, accompanied by Sue’s twin sister, Sarah. As the doctor and his daughter neared their home, Hade rode up from the opposite direction wielding a double barrel shotgun and, after an angry confrontation, shot and seriously wounded Parrish, who was taken into a neighbor’s house. Hade fled but came back a few minutes later, just as Martha Parrish, who’d been summoned to the scene, arrived in a wagon to see about her wounded husband. Hade forced the driver to halt, ordered Mrs. Parrish out of the wagon, and shot and killed her.
Brown took off again and was not arrested until almost a year later, when he was recognized on the streets of Rochester, Minnesota, and brought back to Missouri. His murder trial finally got underway at Moberly in February 1879. Although Hade had killed her mother and shot her father, Susan was beside her husband supporting him throughout the trial. Hade’s lawyers put up a defense of emotional insanity, and the jury could not agree on a verdict, causing a mistrial.
Brown’s second trial began in December 1879 but was postponed twice, because of a suicide attempt by Brown and because one of the jurors got sick. The trial began for real in late January 1880. In early February, the jury came back with a guilty verdict, and the judge sentenced Brown to hang on March 26. An appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, however, stayed the execution. In early May, the high court affirmed the lower court’s verdict and set Brown’s new execution date for June 25, 1880.
Hade had been moved to Kansas City for safekeeping, and after the supreme court decision, a Kansas City Journal reporter visited him in his cell. Brown said he’d never gotten along with Dr. Parrish but had nothing against Mrs. Parrish. He claimed not to remember shooting her but agreed he must have done so. The only reason he could give for the crime was that whiskey had injured his brain.
Susan came to Kansas City to live so she could be near her husband. As time for his execution approached, Hade enlisted his wife to help him kill himself, and Sue made up her mind to join her husband in a suicide pact. On June 21, she visited Hade at the jail and slipped him some poison. Returning to her room at the home of Belle Fisher, she took her 3-year-old son to a neighbor’s house, came back and wrote out two suicide notes, and then lay down and shot herself in the head with a pistol. She died instantly. The suicide notes contained instructions for the rearing of her son and declared that she loved her husband more than life and wanted to die with him.
As officials approached Hade in his cell to inform him of his wife’s death, he desperately tried to swallow the poison Sue had handed him earlier, but they wrested it away from him after a terrific struggle. Hade was placed under a heavy guard and transferred from Kansas City to Huntsville on Thursday, June 24, 1880. About noon the next day, he was taken from the Randolph County Jail to the scaffold and hanged before a gaping crowd of almost 15,000.
After the body was cut down, it was placed in a double coffin and taken to the train depot. When the train carrying Sue’s body, which had been held in Kansas City, arrived, Hade’s body was placed on the same train. At Moberly, Sue’s body was placed in the same coffin as Hade’s, according to the couple’s wishes, and they were buried the next day at Swindell Cemetery in Monroe County.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

A Black and White Lynching

After prominent Lafayette County farmer George W. Johnson was killed in the wee hours of August 5, 1902, when he interrupted two chicken thieves on his farm south of Lexington, Missouri, Charles Salyers and Harry Gates were arrested on suspicion later the same morning. Fearing mob violence, Sheriff Oscar Thomas tried to move the prisoners to Kansas City that afternoon, but he and his posse were overtaken west of Lexington by a mob demanding the suspects be brought back to Lexington. The gang assured the sheriff they would do the prisoners no harm if they were brought back, and Thomas let himself be persuaded. Rumors of vigilantism continued for the next day or two, but by August 9, things had settled down to the point that the Lexington Intelligencer was convinced that the law would be allowed to take its course.
Well, not quite, as it turned out.
Both Gates, who was black, and Salyers, who was white, gave confessions after they were brought back to Lexington, and their stories largely agreed as far as their movements leading up to the killing of George Johnson. The two men had gotten together in Lexington on the night of August 4 to shoot craps, and when they parted that evening, they agreed to meet up a few hours later near Johnson’s place to steal some of his chickens. They sneaked into Johnson’s henhouse shortly after 2:00 a.m. and loaded more than a dozen chickens each into two gunny sacks. They had just made their escape through a fence when Johnson, alerted by an electric alarm system he’d recently installed in his henhouse, confronted them on the road that ran in front of his house.
Both men agreed that Johnson fired two shots at them when they failed to respond promptly to his order to halt and that one of the shots slightly wounded Gates. But what Gates and Salyers couldn’t agree on was whose idea it was to steal the chickens in the first place and who fired the fatal shots at Johnson. Each one blamed the other on both counts.
Salyers claimed at first that neither he nor Gates had a weapon when they went to the Johnson place but that, after Johnson fired at them with a pistol, Gates wrested it away from Johnson and shot him with it. Gates countered that Johnson fired at them with a shotgun and that Salyers returned fire with a pistol he had brought with him, killing Johnson. Gates said he didn’t even know his partner in crime had a weapon until he heard Salyers fire the shots that killed Johnson as he (Gates) was running away.
Salyers’s initial claim that Johnson had fired at him and Gates with a pistol cast doubt on his story, because the evidence showed that Johnson had used a shotgun, as Gates said. Salyers finally admitted the pistol that killed Johnson belonged to him, but he claimed he’d given it to Gates on the night of August 4. Still, few people believed Salyers’s story. “The statement made by Salyers is incorrect,” declared the Lexington News, “as it is definitely known by the officers that he fired the shot that killed Mr. Johnson.”
Gates’s lesser culpability, however, didn’t matter to the would-be lynchers of Lafayette County. He was a black chicken thief, and George Johnson was dead. That was good enough for them.
In the wee hours of August 12, exactly a week after Johnson’s death, a mob of about 200 masked men swarmed into Lexington from the south, shut off electricity to the downtown area, and surrounded the courthouse square. On foot except for two surreys they’d brought along in which to convey the prisoners, the vigilantes knocked down the door of the jail and overpowered Sheriff Thomas and his deputies. Part of the mob broke open Salyers’s upstairs cell and hauled him downstairs while another group went to work on Gates’s downstairs cell door. It soon yielded to the hammer, and Gates was herded outside to join his fellow prisoner.
The two men were loaded into the surreys and taken about two and half miles to Edenview Church, not far from the scene of the week-old crime. Positioned beneath an elm tree, the two were invited to say any last words, and they got into an argument, each accusing the other of having killed Johnson and now lying about it. Gates’s statement was “more consistent,” according to the Lexington Intelligencer, but his apparent honesty bought him no mercy.
Both men were swung up simultaneously to the same limb of the elm tree and left “hanging between heaven and earth,” as the mob dispersed. About 4:00 a.m., county officers went out the scene, cut the bodies down, and brought them back to Lexington. As was usual in early nineteenth century lynchings, very little effort was made to identify and prosecute the leaders of the mob.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

Silver Dollar City Grand Opening

I recall visiting Silver Dollar City in the early 1960s when it was just a reconstruction of a small nineteenth century village situated on the grounds of Marvel Cave Park, and admission was free. I don't recall the exact date or even the exact year, but it couldn't have been terribly long after the place opened because, as I say, there wasn't much to it at the time. The grand opening occurred on Sunday, May 1, 1960, and I'm guessing that this might have been a year or so after that.
Silver Dollar City was completed in April of 1960 by Mary Herschend and her two sons, Jack and Pete, who jointly owned and operated Marvel Cave. The village was represented as an "authentic reproduction of a little village that once occupied the very same spot."

The place was designed by architect Russell Peterson. He had also built Frontier City on the outskirts of Oklahoma City and was nationally known for his reconstruction of pioneer communities. When Silver Dollar City opened on the first of May, it consisted of a general store, a miner's shack, a candy store, a stage coach inn, and a print shop, along with authentic facades of a doctor's office, a gun shop, a barber shop, a courthouse, and a jail. Some of the structures were actual buildings moved log by log from their original locations in the Ozarks. An old country church and a rural schoolhouse were also in the process of being dismantled, moved timber by timber to the site, and reconstructed as part of Silver Dollar City. Plans called for a few of the buildings to be turned into businesses. For example, a Springfield restaurateur was opening up an eating place in the stage coach inn.
About 300 area motel and resort owners participated in a mass ribbon cutting to kick off opening day ceremonies, and an estimated 8,000 people visited Silver Dollar City throughout the day. At one point, cars waiting to enter the park were backed up for a mile in each direction along Highway 76. The place continued to draw "tremendous crowds" throughout the summer. One person who visited during July was Lucille Morris Upton, legendary Ozarks author and columnist for the Springfield Daily News. She was struck the welcoming and smiling faces of the folks who ran the reconstructed village, and she called it "the cutest attraction you can imagine." I wonder what she would think of Silver Dollar City if she could see it today?
The newspaper photo above is from the Springfield Leader and Press. It was published on the day of the grand opening and presumably taken a day or two before.

The Texas County Hotbed Murder

After thirty-six-year-old Gilbert Hall was arrested for murder in Texas County, Missouri, in February 1920, he maintained a total silence regarding the crime. He’d lived in the county only a few months, having moved in with his victim, fifty-eight-year-old Frank Elliott, on a forty-acre farm south of Cabool the previous fall, but little else was known about him. Once in custody, Hall started growing a beard and hiding his face whenever anyone tried to take a picture of him. A number of Hall’s letters were found in the shack he and Elliott had shared, but all of them were signed only with a capital “M” or “C.” All through the letters there was “a secrecy about names,” said the Houston Herald. There was “a mystery about Hall,” which he seemed to be trying to cover up in the letters.
As it turned out, there was good reason why the prisoner didn’t want to have his picture taken or to talk about his past, but at six feet, seven inches tall, Hall found it hard to conceal his identity for long. Authorities soon learned his real name was Samuel Bitler, that he’d raped and killed a woman in Kansas over ten years earlier, and that he’d escaped from the Kansas State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence, less than a year ago. In the fall of 1919, Bitler showed up in Texas County under the name Gilbert Hall and negotiated a deal to buy Frank Elliott’s farm south of Cabool. Elliott, however, was allowed to stay on at the farm through some sort of arrangement between the two men.
In early 1920, neighbors began to get suspicious when they repeatedly called at the farm and Hall (i.e. Bitler) kept telling them that Elliott had “gone south.” One neighbor noticed during one of his visits that Hall was making a hotbed even though it was still too early in the season for a hotbed.
During late January and early February 1920, Hall forged Elliott’s name on a number of checks and cashed them on Elliott’s account at the First National Bank in Cabool. On February 10, Hall showed back up at the bank and presented a couple of more checks that had been written on Elliott’s account and made out to Hall. Cashier Robert W. Clifton cashed the checks, but he’d begun to get suspicious because Elliott’s signature didn’t seem quite right and the cashier knew that Elliott had supposedly left Cabool.
After making the transaction, Clifton reported his suspicions to Texas County lawmen, and they found Hall in Cabool and detained him for questioning. While Hall was temporarily under arrest at Cabool, a search party went out to the Hall farm and found Elliott’s body buried in the hotbed behind the house. Confronted about Elliott’s death, Hall denied any knowledge of it. An inquest the next day revealed that the victim had been shot three times in the head with a .32 caliber pistol, and Hall had been carrying a .32 pistol when he was arrested. The suspect was taken to the Texas County Jail in Houston.
Further investigation at the Hall farm turned up the cryptic correspondence between “M” and “C.” M appeared to be a young woman, while C referred to Hall. In one of the letters, M cautioned C to “be careful,” and the couple appeared to be making plans to get married. Authorities determined that May Dale of Peoria, Illinois, was likely the mysterious Miss M, but she was apparently never arrested, as Hall did not implicate her in the crime in any way.
The search of the premises at the Hall farm also revealed blood stains on the mattress of the bed where the two men slept, and a pair of bloody overalls belonging to Elliott was found in the house. Investigators concluded that Elliott had been shot while lying in the bed and carried to his makeshift grave. Hall had apparently continued to sleep in the bloody deathbed even after the murder.
When Missouri authorities learned of Hall’s true identity and his escape from the Kansas prison, they chose not to send him back to Kansas but to go ahead and try him on the Elliott murder. At his trial at Houston in April, the jury could not agree on a first-degree murder charge and ended up compromising on second-degree murder and a life sentence. On April 26, 1920, Hall (i.e. Bitler) was transferred to the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City. He died in the prison hospital on December 4, 1929, from tuberculosis.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

A Tragedy of the Tenderloin District

During the spring and summer of 1901, Poplar Bluff, Missouri, witnessed what the local Daily Republican called a “tragedy of the tenderloin district.” Twenty-six-year-old Pearl Clark “conducted a house of prostitution in a two-story yellow frame house in the southeast corner of the city.” Citizens of Poplar Bluff called the place the “Rabbit House.”
Pearl, whose maiden name was Alice Bryan, had been married twice, once to a man named Giles, and some reports gave her name as Alice Giles. But she went by Pearl Clark, because she’d taken in professional gambler Steve Clark as her lover and common-law husband.
The thirty-five-year-old Clark “encouraged her loathsome profession by pimping for her resort” so he could avoid having to work for a living. Pearl’s calling required her “to look and act sweet on all men,” and Clark accepted her flirtations as simply a part of business until Ed Lewis appeared on the scene and a “green-eyed monster” reared its head. A railroad brakeman, Lewis started spending too much time with Pearl to suit Steve Clark and “the smiles and glances became too serious.”
Clark and Pearl quarreled over the matter several times. Finally Clark told her not to have anything more to do with Lewis, and Pearl promised to quit seeing the other man. Her tempestuous relationship with Clark calmed, and they sailed along smoothly for a few weeks.
But then on June 25, 1901, Clark found Lewis and Pearl talking together near the Iron Mountain Railroad depot in Poplar Bluff. Accosting them in anger, Clark scolded Pearl for not keeping her word and warned Lewis to leave Pearl alone. Pearl finally got Clark to calm down and return home with her, promising once again to be true to him. Back at the house, Clark warned Pearl that if she didn’t keep her word this time, he would kill her.
“But a prostitute’s word is no better than her morals,” said the Daily Republican. Later that same day, Pearl went to a wine room at a saloon in the south end of Poplar Bluff with a friend, Maggie Dawson, and they met Lewis there.
In the late afternoon, Clark found Lewis and Pearl together at the wine room and immediately flew into a rage. Confronting Lewis, he grabbed a large iron cuspidor and raised it over his head as if to strike the other man, but Lewis suddenly pulled out a revolver and forced Clark to back off.
Clark left in angry humiliation and went downtown to try to borrow a gun from one of his acquaintances. Failing this, he returned to the Rabbit House, secured a big butcher knife, and went back to town to sharpen it.
In the meantime, Pearl, realizing how distraught Clark was, left Lewis soon after the altercation at the wine room and returned home with Maggie. About 6:00 p.m., Pearl and another woman were standing on the back porch and Maggie and her male companion, Ed Bowen, were lying in a hammock stretched between the porch and a nearby tree. Another man, Jake Kern, was also present. One of the five noticed Clark approaching on the street in front of the house and said, “Here comes Steve.”
Moments later, Clark walked through the house, came onto the back porch, and went straight to Pearl, who was standing with a dipper of water in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Grasping her by the arm, Clark said, “Pearl, I told you I would kill you if you ever went with Lewis again. Now, I have to kill you, then I am going to kill myself.”
Laughing off the threat, Pearl asked, “Don’t you want to kiss me goodbye? Steve, you are not going to kill me. You would not kill anyone. Go away and behave yourself.”
Pearl’s flippant manner only excited Steve’s fury the more. Pulling the knife from his waistband, he struck her with it, cutting her hands first and then stabbing her in the side in the area of the heart.
“Oh, Ed, you are not going let him kill me, are you?” Pearl appealed to Bowen as she collapsed.
“But Bowen thought that safety lay in flight” and took off, according to the Daily Republican. Maggie lingered just a few moments longer before she, too, fled the scene.
After the witnesses were gone and Pearl lay dead or dying, Steve stabbed himself in the chest just above the heart and lay down to die beside his victim. Poplar Bluff police chief John Harding arrived on the scene shortly afterwards and found Pearl lying dead. Not far from her body her murderer lay moaning and praying for God to let him die. He said he’d killed Pearl, that he couldn’t live without her, and that he wanted to be buried with her.
But Clark’s wound was not life-threatening. Harding arrested him and took him to the county jail, where his wound was dressed. A murder charge was filed against Clark, and he was bound over for trial in the Butler County Circuit Court.
Clark testified in his own defense at the trial on October 18. He freely admitted stabbing Pearl but said he acted out of passion in the heat of the moment. Maggie Dawson and Ed Bowen were the principal witnesses for the prosecution. Refuting the defense’s contention that Clark acted out of passion on the spur of the moment, Maggie said that Clark did not retrieve the butcher knife as he passed through the house just prior to the crime, as he claimed, because it was already missing when she and Pearl came home. Both Maggie and Bowen denied that Pearl had struck Clark first, as the defendant also claimed.
Clark was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang. An appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court and two subsequent reprieves from the governor delayed the execution until February 6, 1903. Will Gatlin, a black man, was scheduled to be hanged in Poplar Bluff on that day, and Clark’s execution was set for the same day. Clark was dropped through the trap at 2:00 p.m., and Gatlin followed about an hour and fifteen minutes later.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

The Quiet, Effective Work of the Benevolent Society

On Saturday morning, September 10, 1898, Benjamin Jones, a 68-year-old man who lived near Randolph in Clay County, Missouri, volunteered to take his neighbors’ eleven-year-old daughter, Annie Montgomery, to the county fair in Liberty about ten miles away. The girl’s parents agreed to the arrangement, and Annie rode to Liberty with the old man in his big wagon.
During the morning, Jones took the girl shopping, and during the afternoon they went to the fair. As evening approached, they started back to Randolph, and during the return trip, the old codger sexually assaulted young Annie. Perhaps hoping the girl wouldn’t tell, Jones continued the journey after the assault and delivered her to her home.
But Annie broke into tears upon entering the house and told her parents the whole story. Her father immediately notified local constable David C. Roberts, who found Jones not far away, still on the road in his wagon. A posse of citizens who flocked to the scene talked of lynching the old man on the spot, but they finally let the officers deliver him to the county jail.
Jones was taken to Liberty and thrown in the clink on Sunday morning. As word of the previous day’s assault spread, “the indignation of the Clay county people knew no bounds,” according to the Kansas City Journal.
Despite the ominous mood in Liberty during the day, few people were on the streets Sunday night, and most of the citizens were asleep when the town’s electric lights were suddenly extinguished shortly after eleven o’clock and a masked mob of about a hundred men converged on the courthouse. They pounded open the jail door, rushed in, and dragged Jones out, begging for his life and with a rope already around his neck. They took him to the front porch of the courthouse and tossed the other end of the rope over an overhead railing. The leader of the mob asked the old man whether he had anything to say. Jones admitted the deed but said he was drunk at the time, as he kept pleading for his life.
“Swing him up,” the leader said, and the command was promptly obeyed. A single shot rang out almost as soon as he was suspended, and life was quickly extinct.
After the lynching, the gang leader ordered everybody to go home and keep their mouths shut, and the mob quickly dispersed. Jones’s body was cut down and taken to a local undertaking firm. An examination revealed that Jones had been shot in the neck.
According to the Journal, many of Liberty’s citizens were surprised to learn of the lynching upon awaking the next morning, but they largely approved the extralegal proceeding, many of them “freely expressing admiration for the quiet, effective work of the benevolent association.”
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

Tunas School Consolidation Dispute

Toward the end of 1972, the Dallas County School District drew up plans to annex the schools at Tunas, located in the northern part of the county, into the much larger school district at Buffalo, the county seat. Tunas was a small school district with only about 155 students in grades 1-12, and it had been struggling to survive on its own for some time.
There was just one problem. Nobody apparently bothered to consult the Tunas School Board or the community's citizens. When the Tunas School Board learned in early 1973 of the proposed annexation, they approached the Skyline School District about consolidating with that school district instead and, upon receiving a favorable nod from Skyline officials, scheduled a vote for February 13 on the question of annexation into the Skyline district. The Skyline Schools, the result of a 1957 reorganization of the schools at Cross Timbers, Preston, and Urbana, were (and still are) located about four miles north of Urbana in Hickory County but were still a couple of miles closer to Tunas than Buffalo was to Tunas.
Meanwhile, the Dallas County School Board scheduled a vote on the question of annexation of the Tunas district into the Buffalo district for February 15, and they obtained a court order restraining the Tunas School District from holding its February 13 election. However, the latter election went on as scheduled, and voters in the Tunas School District voted overwhelmingly (232-19) in favor of joining the Skyline District. As soon as the Tunas School Board certified the results, they met with the Skyline School Board, who voted to accept Tunas into the district. Then on February 15, citizens in the Buffalo School District complicated matters by voting 396-231 to annex Tunas into their district.
Proponents of the Buffalo annexation then obtained an amended court order seeking to prevent the Tunas School District from transferring school supplies and other assets to the Skyline district. It now fell to Judge Charles V. Barker to decide the legality of the Tunas-Skyline election. Even though he was the one who had issued the restraining orders, he ultimately upheld the Tunas-Skyline election. But that was not quite the end of the dispute.
As the time for a new school year to begin approached in August, Tunas students were to be counted as part of the Skyline district, but they were scheduled to remain at their old buildings in Tunas. Then on August 9 fire destroyed the Tunas Elementary School and damaged the high school building. Arson was suspected, but no one was arrested (at least not in the immediate wake of the fire). The fire forced an altering of plans; so Tunas Elementary School students were now shifted to the old Tunas High School building, while the Tunas High School kids would commute to Skyline.
But this was still not quite the end of the controversy. Five Tunas school election officials had been charged with contempt of court for ignoring the original restraining order. Greene County circuit judge James H. Keet heard the case in October. The defendants claimed the restraining order had not been delivered by proper authorities nor had it been delivered in time to prevent the election. The prosecution said otherwise, and conflicting testimony supporting one side and then the other was presented. Judge Keet eventually acquitted the defendants but only because he ruled that the bond of the Dallas County citizens who obtained the restraining order was defective.