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.
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