At Ernest Clevenger’s murder trial in November of 1899 in Clay County, Missouri, defense lawyers argued that their client was insane. The events surrounding Clevenger’s crime lend a certain credence to the insanity plea, but it didn’t save their client from the gallows.
Clevenger came from Tennessee to Missouri in the early 1890s to live with relatives in southeast Clay County. Sometime prior to the fall of 1898, he started working for Jerome Clevenger, his father’s first cousin. The twenty-three-year-old Ernest took a liking to Jerome’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Jennie, and started escorting her to social functions. He soon declared his love for her, but the girl didn’t quite share his passion.
Jennie’s father didn’t like the match either. Jerome Clevenger thought his young kinsman was too disreputable for his daughter, and when he learned that the relationship between Ernest and Jennie had turned serious, he kicked the young man off his farm and told him not to come back.
Young Clevenger, though, wasn’t easily deterred. Despite Jerome Clevenger’s ultimatum, Ernest kept coming around trying to see Jennie. When he learned that another young man, George Allen, had started courting her, he became crazed with jealousy and made threats.
On Thursday, December 8, 1898, Clevenger spent the day drinking with a buddy, Charles West. In the afternoon, they showed up under the influence at Miltondale, about a mile north of the Clevenger School House. Clevenger, who was said to have a good disposition except when he was drinking, declared that he was looking for George Allen, because he had a score to settle with him.
A few hours later, Clevenger, riding double behind West on the latter’s horse, met Allen and Jennie in a buggy as they approached the Clevenger School, where a revival meeting was in session. Clevenger tried to flag them down, but Allen whipped up the team and sped away, continuing on to the schoolhouse.
Allen and his girlfriend entered and sat near the middle of the large meeting room next to Jennie’s fifteen-year-old sister, Della. Clevenger followed and took a seat just behind the group after the divine service had already begun. At the end of the service, as the congregation rose for the benediction, Clevenger stalked toward Jennie and her group. He pulled out a revolver and shot Allen in the back of the head. Allen collapsed, and Jennie grabbed him, trying to support him, just as Clevenger turned to fire at her. The weight of Allen’s body pulled her down, and the shot missed, hitting Della instead.
When Clevenger fled, several men gave chase before returning to the schoolhouse to find George Allen dead and Della gravely wounded with a bullet to the head. Clevenger was located the next morning at his grandfather’s house less than a mile away and taken to the county jail at Liberty. Later on the 9th, a coroner’s jury charged him with murder in the first degree. On December 10, he pled not guilty before a justice of the peace and was remanded to jail without bond. A grand jury officially indicted him at the February 1899 term of the Clay County Circuit Court, but the case was continued.
On April 6, Clevenger and three other prisoners made their escape from the Clay County Jail. Clevenger was recaptured on April 17 in neighboring Ray County and brought back to Liberty. The next day, Della Clevenger died of the wound he’d inflicted on her four months earlier, and talk of lynching the prisoner flared up.
Clevenger’s trial finally got underway in early November, and the jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder on the 8th. Two weeks later, the judge pronounced a death sentence by hanging and set the execution for January 5, 1900. Clevenger’s lawyers appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and the hanging was postponed.
On May 8, 1900, the high court affirmed the lower court’s decision in the Clevenger case and reset the execution for June 15. Clevenger was led to the gallows at 5:00 a.m. that morning. Asked if he had any final words to say, he declared “I ain’t worthy of the death I am dying” before being dropped through the trap.
This entry is condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.
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