A Staffleback Footnote

I've written before about the notorious Staffleback (aka Staffelbach) family of Galena, Kansas, both on this blog and in my Ozark Gunfights and Other Notorious Incidents book. I mentioned in the book that the Stafflebacks already had an unsavory reputation before they ever got involved in the murder of Frank Galbraith in Galena in the summer of 1897, the incident that made them notorious throughout the country. For instance, Johnny, oldest son of Michel and Nancy Staffleback, got into trouble for breaking some furniture and general going "on the warpath" in Joplin in July of 1878, and at the time Johnny, who was considered insane, already had a reputation for causing disturbances. I also mentioned in the book that Nancy "Old Lady" Staffleback and/or her boys were suspected of murdering an old man in Joplin around Christmas of 1895, about a year before the family moved to Galena.
But the Stafflebacks had several other run-ins with the law, both before and after the notorious Galbraith case, that I did not mention in the book.
Sometime after 1880, the Stafflebacks left Joplin and moved to Lawrence County, Missouri. In February of 1887, Nancy Staffleback was among a group of people who got baptized in Mt. Vernon, but judging from future events, the religion apparently didn't take very well. Just a few months later, Nancy sued her aged husband for divorce in Lawrence County Court, and a divorce decree was granted.
In early December of 1889, Nancy and her son, Michael, were arrested in Lawrence County for stealing clothes off of clothes lines in Mt. Vernon. Both Nancy and her son pleaded guilty. Nancy paid a ten-dollar fine, while Michael was sentenced to eight days in jail.
Then in the summer of 1894, Michael got arrested for burglary and larceny and tossed in the clink to await trial. He pled guilty to the larceny charge and was sentenced to two years in the state pen, while the burglary charge was dropped. He was escorted to Jeff City in early September 1894. He was released in early February 1896, after serving three-fourths of his term, and he immediately joined the rest of the Staffleback family, who'd gone back to Joplin and then moved across the state line to Galena during his incarceration.
According to the later testimony of Cora Staffleback, wife of another Staffleback brother (George), Mike Staffleback got involved in another crime very soon after his arrival in Galena, this one more heinous than the petty crime he'd been convicted of in Lawrence County. Cora said that Mike and Ed Staffleback (yet another brother) invited two prostitutes to stay at the Staffleback place in early 1896. Apparently the brothers considered the girls their own private whores, because they got jealous of the attention the girls were paying to some other men and ended up killing the girls and dropping their bodies in a deserted mine shaft.
The bodies of the girls were never discovered; so Mike Staffleback never paid for this crime, if indeed he committed it, but a year or so after this purported incident he was again arrested on a charge of larceny, this time in Cherokee County, Kansas. He was in jail at Columbus awaiting trial when Galbraith was killed. So, Mike avoided getting drawn into that case as well. He was sentenced to seven years in the Kansas State Pen on the larceny charge, however, at the same time his mother and brothers were convicted and sent up for murdering Galbraith.
Mike was released from the Lansing prison shortly after the turn of the 20th century, and he went back to Jasper County, Missouri, where he soon returned to a life of crime. In May 1908, he was again convicted of larceny and sentenced to two years in the state prison.
Released in November 1909 (about the same time his mother died in the Kansas Penitentiary), he once again returned to Jasper County and once again resumed his old ways. In early 1914, he served a brief sentence in the county jail on a charge of petty theft. He had just been released when he got arrested again in May of the same year on a charge of stealing chickens. He was considered an habitual offender and stealing chickens was his "long suit," according to a Webb City newspaper. I have yet to ascertain what the outcome of this case was, but suffice it to say, that Mike Staffleback left a long criminal trail throughout southwest Missouri and southeast Kansas in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Lynchings of Jeff Kessler and James Milligan

Samuel Timmons was a constable charged with enforcing the law in the north-central part of Gentry County, Missouri, when he got into a minor scrape with the law himself in early June of 1858. A township justice swore out a warrant for Timmons’s arrest and placed it in the hands of constable pro tem Jeff Kessler.
Near the middle of June, Kessler, taking nineteen-year-old James Milligan along with him as a deputy, went to Timmons’s farm near the Worth County border to serve the warrant. Timmons, who’d learned of his imminent arrest, was hiding out when Kessler arrived. Leaving Milligan at the house, Kessler went looking for Timmons and located him elsewhere on the property.
In the confrontation that followed, according to the 1882 History of Gentry and Worth Counties, Kessler shot Timmons in the back with a shotgun and left the body lying in the field. Returning to the house to pick up his deputy, Kessler rode away without even informing the dead man’s wife of the shooting.
The county history added that Timmons was considered a good citizen, while Kessler was known as “a man of bad character” who had committed other desperate deeds. Contemporaneous newspaper accounts confirm that the circumstances of the killing “made the act in the estimation of the people a cruel injustice.”
Several murders and other crimes had occurred in the Gentry-Worth border area, and the perpetrators had gone unpunished. In response, a group of men had recently met at nearby Oxford and resolved that there should be no delays in meting out justice to lawbreakers and that, if the courts failed to vigorously prosecute the criminals, the citizens would take the law into their own hands.
Jeff Kessler was about to be their first example.
When he and Milligan were arrested and brought before a justice of the peace on June 18, a mob gathered with the idea of lynching them immediately. The vigilantes were deterred only by a promise that the law would speedily deal with the prisoners.
Kessler and Milligan waived examination before the justice and were taken to the Gentry County seat at Albany to await trial. At a special session of the circuit court on June 24, a grand jury charged the two men with murder in the first degree.
The trial began the next day, June 25, before a large crowd. Kessler’s and Milligan’s cases were severed, and both pleaded not guilty. Their attorney told the judge the main two defense witnesses had been driven off and could not be located. He asked that Kessler’s trial be continued, and the judge granted the delay. He then granted a continuance in Milligan’s case as well and adjourned the court.
The judge and the attorneys slipped out through a window as the crowd of six or seven hundred spectators filed out of the courtroom. About twenty or thirty men lagged behind, though, and as soon as the room was nearly clear, they rushed the prisoners. Most of the deputies guarding the prisoners deserted the sheriff at the first sign of trouble, but the sheriff and his few remaining deputies had almost succeeded in securing the prisoners when a reinforcing mob of men burst into the courtroom from outside to augment their fellow vigilantes.
The mob, now numbering from 50 to 100, quickly wrested Kessler from the lawmen, while Milligan was spirited away to an upstairs room and not pursued. The vigilantes dragged Kessler from the courthouse amid the screams of his wife and three children.
The prisoner was taken to the edge of a woods about 150 yards from the courthouse, where a rope was placed around his neck and a preacher was exhorted to offer a final prayer for the condemned man. The other end of the rope was thrown over a limb of an elm tree, and the vigilantes pulled Kessler up about three feet before the rope broke and he fell to the ground. He was lifted back up, the rope was speedily retied, and, in the words of the St. Joseph Journal, “the unfortunate man was launched into eternity.”
In the wake of the lynching, one observer called the mob action a “terrible murder.” Kessler had declared until the very end that he was not guilty. He said he’d only gone to Timmons’s place because he’d been ordered to make an arrest and that he’d fired in self-defense when Timmons drew a gun on him.
After Kessler was hanged, Milligan was carefully guarded at the jail-less courthouse by volunteer citizens. Some of them tired of the job and abandoned their posts. On Monday, July 5, some citizens petitioned the county court to fund the expense of a guard, but the county judges declined, deciding instead to move the prisoner to a jail in a neighboring county.
Upon learning of the court’s decision, a mob formed and took Milligan from the small posse of guards who remained. The prisoner was granted his request to be baptized before he was hanged, and he was met at the baptismal stream by his father, William Milligan. The exchange of sad farewells between father and son was “deeply affecting.”
But apparently not deeply affecting enough to sway the vengeful mob.
The vigilantes started with the prisoner toward the elm tree where Kessler had been strung up. Provided with a dry suit of clothes to replace his wet garments, the “prisoner dressed to meet his doom.” He was then drawn up on the same limb that had served as Kessler’s makeshift gallows ten days earlier.
According to the 1882 county history, the mob that lynched Kessler and the one that lynched Milligan were composed largely of the same men. Nearly all of them came from northern Gentry and southern Worth counties, and some were prominent citizens.
So, it’s not surprising that, even though both lynchings were done in public view, little was ever done to make the vigilantes answer for their extralegal deeds.
This entry is condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.

The Lynching of Kidnapper Robert Pettigrew

Early Friday morning, May 12, 1905, Robert “Bob” Pettigrew showed up at the home of Fred Hess, about three miles below Belmont, Missouri, on the Mississippi River, armed with a rifle and a double-barrel shotgun. Hess was an ex-Mississippi County judge and a former state representative, while Pettigrew was a young black man who’d just been released a month earlier from the Missouri State Penitentiary after serving three years for assaulting his wife with intent to kill. Hess had been a witness against Pettigrew, and the ex-con felt Hess and the state owed him for the time he’d spent behind bars. Pettigrew figured that, even if Hess had to pay with his personal funds, the state would reimburse him.
Things didn’t quite work out that way.
Pettigrew accosted the 55-year-old Hess at the barn and demanded $600. Hess said he didn’t have that kind of money on the place; so Pettigrew told him he’d have to go to town and get it. He ordered Hess to hitch up his horse and buggy and also to get a saddle horse ready.
As soon as Hess got the horses ready, Pettigrew told him to fetch his wife, 28-year-old Emma Prince, who would serve as a hostage while Hess went into town for the money. Mrs. Hess came outside and got into the buggy as directed, and her husband climbed into the driver’s seat beside her. Pettigrew, whom Mrs. Hess knew as “Bob,” mounted the other horse and stayed right behind the buggy with his shotgun loaded and cocked as Hess drove toward Belmont.
At the edge of Belmont, Pettigrew ordered Hess to stop at the Negro Baptist Church. He ordered “Miss Prince,” as he called Hess’s wife, into the pastor’s three-room cabin, and sent Hess into town for the money. The kidnapper glanced at his pocket watch and told the judge he’d give him an hour and half. If Hess wasn’t back with the money by that time, Pettigrew warned, “there’ll be a dead woman here when you do come.”
As Hess hurried away, Pettigrew went into the pastor’s house and ordered Miss Prince into an adjoining room, where an elderly black lady was. Through the open door between the two rooms, Mrs. Hess could see Bob pacing the floor with one of his weapons pointed in her direction.
Meanwhile, Judge Hess reached Belmont but was able to round up only about $60. He sent the money back to Pettigrew by the pastor of the black church, the Reverend Perry Thurman, and someone also sent word to Charleston, Mississippi County seat, that Mrs. Hess had been kidnapped. Hess then raced toward Columbus, Kentucky, just across the Mississippi River, to come up with the rest of the $600.
Inside the parsonage, Pettigrew’s pacing grew more frantic as the allotted hour and a half ticked away. Just three minutes before the time was to expire, Rev. Thurman came running toward the house with a handful of money.
Meeting Thurman at the front door, Pettigrew took the money but gave it back as soon as he saw the puny amount. “You go tell Judge Hess I said $600…. I’ll give him half an hour more to get it here, and if it isn’t here then, there’ll be a dead white woman on the floor in yonder.”
After Thurman hurried away, Bob came to the door separating the two rooms and called Mrs. Hess to the threshold but did not enter her room. The two exchanged conversation, with Bob assuring Miss Prince he wasn’t going to hurt her as long as her husband brought the money. Then Mrs. Hess returned to her seat, and Pettigrew went back to walking the floor in the other room.
Meanwhile, Judge Hess quickly raised the $600 in Columbus, but he also spread the word of what the money was for. A posse of angry Kentuckians, led by the Columbus city marshal, followed him back to Belmont bent on capturing the kidnapper, but Hess cautioned them and the local Missourians who joined them to stay back until the money was delivered.
As the additional half hour was about to expire, Mrs. Hess saw men with guns surrounding two sides of the house and Parson Thurman again running toward the house with a larger wad of bills than before. Bob let the preacher in the door and took the money. Thurman was just explaining why Hess himself had not delivered it when Pettigrew also spotted the men surrounding the house.
Making a dash for freedom, he mounted his horse and galloped away. The men surrounding the house held their fire at first for fear of hitting Mrs. Hess, and Pettigrew made his getaway.
He was captured later that afternoon south of Belmont and taken back to town, but before he could be locked up, a mob took him from the arresting officers and strung him up on the public square. Some of the mob also reportedly fired into the body after Pettigrew was hanging.
Upon learning of the incident, Missouri governor Joseph Polk swiftly condemned it. Missouri attorney general Herbert Hadley added there was no excuse for the posse taking Pettigrew out and hanging him, especially since he was not accused of “the usual negro crime.”
However, very little was ever done to bring the vigilantes to justice. Some Missouri newspapers pointed out that most of the mob had come from Kentucky, and several even published indignant editorials justifying the vigilante action and castigating the governor for his tough stance against the mob.
The Jackson (MO) Herald, for instance, opined that the lynching was warranted and that the citizens who hanged Pettigrew “would have done a white man the same way.” Somehow, I’m not so sure about that.
Asked a few days later whether she thought Pettigrew should have been lynched, Mrs. Hess said, “Not for what he did to me.”
But none of the mob bothered to ask Miss Prince her opinion.
(Condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.)

Murder of the Hall Family and Hanging of Joseph Howell

On Saturday night, January 19, 1889, Minnie Hall’s home about five miles southwest of Brookfield, Missouri, was discovered on fire, and R. N. Vorce and other neighbors who rushed to the scene found the structure almost completely engulfed when they arrived. Vorce saw the lifeless bodies of Minnie Hall and her five-year-old daughter, Nettie, inside the burning structure, but only Nettie could be pulled from the blaze before the house collapsed. Although she was dead, the body was not burned beyond recognition, and it was positively identified as that of Nettie Hall. After the fire died down, four other bodies were retrieved from the smoldering rubble. One was almost certainly Minnie Hall, and the others were presumed to be Nettie’s three siblings.
Footprints in the snow of the person who’d set the fire led away from the Hall property toward Brookfield, and a posse followed the tracks to a hotel in Brookfield, where Joseph Howell was taken into custody on the early morning of the 20th. When accused of setting a fire, Howell responded that he hadn’t been out in the country, even though he was not told where the fire was. The suspect’s pant legs were wet, as if from tramping through snow-covered grass. The tread of his overshoes appeared to match the tracks that had been followed from the fire, and a search of his clothing turned up some matches.
The twenty-four-year-old Howell had come from Ohio to Missouri in the fall of 1886. He met Henry Smith in St. Louis, and they traveled several places together before coming to the Linn County area in the spring of 1887. Howell stayed at first in neighboring Chariton County with his aunt Sarah Brooks, who was Minnie’s mother, while Smith began working on R. N. Vorce’s farm less than a mile from Minnie. After staying with Mrs. Brooks a while, Howell came to Minnie’s house and stayed with her and her husband, Ansel, for about a week. He then lived with Ansel’s father, working as a farmhand throughout the summer of 1887. From there he went to a neighbor of the Halls and continued as a farmhand until he took a teaching job at Prairie Mound for the 1888-1889 school year.
Ansel had died in the meantime, and Howell started paying regular visits to the thirty-one-year-old widow and her kids about the time school began. He boarded at the school during the week but often spent the weekend with Minnie, whose house was midway between Prairie Mound and Brookfield. Howell claimed that he looked upon Minnie as a sister, but they quickly became something more than kissin’ cousins.
And now he was accused of killing her.
After daylight on Sunday morning, a coroner’s inquest was held at the scene of the crime. The charred bodies were closely examined, and it appeared their skulls had been split open with a sharp instrument. In the cellar beneath the burnt house a human fetus about six or seven months old was discovered. The fetus had been buried in the dirt floor of the cellar prior to the fire and had escaped serious defacement. A broken chamber pot, in which it was thought the fetus had been carried, was found a few feet away on the floor of the cellar. The only entrance to the cellar was from the exterior of the house, and the door had been taken off and laid aside. When investigators lifted it up, they saw snow on the ground where the door had lain, showing that it had been removed after it started snowing early Saturday evening. The coroner’s jury concluded that Howell had induced an abortion on Minnie, and, when it looked as though she would not survive the procedure, he had killed her and her children and burned their bodies to cover up the first crime.
Excitement ran high in Brookfield as word of the brutal crime spread, and Howell was taken to the Linn County jail at Linneus on Sunday afternoon for safekeeping.
The remains of Minnie Hall and her children were buried on Monday.
Howell was indicted for first-degree murder in the deaths of all five victims, but prosecutors tried him only for the murder of Nettie Hall, since her body was the one that could be definitely identified. His trial began at Linneus in late July of 1889.
The most damning state witness was Henry Smith, because his testimony clearly established motive. Smith said that, a few weeks before the murder, Howell asked him to accompany him to Minnie’s house. After they arrived, Smith overheard Howell and Minnie arguing. When Minnie told Howell that no one except him and her deceased husband had ever “meddled with” her (i.e. had sexual intercourse with her), Howell didn’t believe her and said there were “other parties running after” her. After Smith and Howell left Minnie’s, Howell confessed that Minnie was pregnant and that she claimed Howell was the father. Howell inquired whether Smith knew where he might find a doctor from whom he could procure a drug to induce an abortion.
The defense tried to set up an alibi, claiming Howell was already in Brookfield at the time of the tragedy, but Howell was found guilty and sentenced to hang. His appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, however, was sustained at the April 1890 term. Howell was then granted a change of venue to Grundy County, where his second trial in the spring of 1891 ended in a mistrial. At his third trial in October of 1891 Howell was again found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang in December 1891. After several more appeals and stays of execution, Howell was finally hanged on August 4, 1893, at Trenton.
This post is condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.