Lynching of Emmet Divers

After seventeen-year-old newlywed Jennie Cain was found dead near Fulton, Missouri, in July of 1895, twenty-one-year-old Emmet Divers was quickly arrested for the crime. Evidence against him was overwhelming, and he readily confessed to the murder but denied the rape. After he was lynched, though, area newspapers, in defending the vigilantes, seemed set on convincing the public that Jennie had been outraged before she was killed, as though sexual assault on a white woman by a black man was greater justification for mob action than murder. In the eyes of many nineteenth century Americans, it was.
Jennie Cain, who’d married farmer John W. Cain about two months earlier, spent Monday night, July 22, at a neighbor’s house because her husband was working away from home. The next morning, Jennie returned to her own house about five miles west of Fulton. When her twenty-four-year-old husband came home later the same morning, he found his bride lying dead in the front room, horribly murdered. She was naked from the waist down, and her throat was severely slashed. Her head lay in a pool of her own blood, and a nearby bed had splotches of blood on the cover. “The condition of the bed,” said the Fulton Telegraph, “indicated that the struggle for her virtue had taken place there…. From indications it appears that the fiend accomplished his devilish purpose on the bed, and afterwards committed the murder.” The Telegraph also reported that a medical exam confirmed a sexual assault had taken place.
Cain immediately notified his neighbors of the tragedy, and one of them raced to Fulton to fetch Callaway County authorities. Shortly before noon, Sheriff W. H. Windsor and his deputies picked up the trail of the suspected perpetrator and tracked him to a house two miles south of the crime scene, where they found Emmet Divers covered with blood and placed him under arrest.
The lawmen took Divers back to the Cain home. Along the way, the officers searched Divers and found a bloody a knife in his possession, and when they got to the Cain place, they found a piece of a suspender buckle beneath the dead woman’s body that matched a broken suspender buckle Divers had on. In addition, according to the Mexico Weekly Ledger’s inventory of evidence, a piece of cloth that matched the suspect’s shirt was found clenched in Jennie’s hand, and a lock of her hair was found on Divers’s clothes.
Sheriff Windsor took Divers to Fulton and lodged him in jail Tuesday afternoon. That evening, as whisperings of mob action spread through the town, the sheriff whisked the prisoner away to Mexico, twenty-five miles to the north. Over the next three days, Divers was moved several more times and finally taken to St. Louis.
Interviewed in St. Louis, the sheriff said Divers had previously been charged with sexual offenses and that he came from “a bad family,” two of his brothers having been convicted of assaulting women. Windsor planned to take Divers back to Callaway County for his preliminary hearing in about three weeks, when he thought the excitement would be “somewhat subsided.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Divers admitted while in St. Louis that he’d killed Jennie Cain. Finding her home alone about 10:00 a.m. on the day of the crime, he told her to give him the ring she had on her finger, and when she refused and started resisting his efforts to take it, he knocked her down with his fist. When she started to rise, he tied her up, but she still kept fighting him. So, he cut her throat. After “persistent questioning,” he also reportedly confessed to sexually assaulting his victim.
Callaway County remained in a “white heat” throughout late July and early August over the assault and murder of Jennie Cain, and as the time for Divers’s preliminary hearing approached, about 500 to 600 vigilantes organized at Fulton to take the law into their own hands as soon as the prisoner was brought back.
Despite the open determination of the would-be lynchers, local authorities did very little to forestall the expected mob violence. When word leaked on August 14 that two special deputies had departed from eastern Callaway County for St. Louis to bring Divers back, a huge mob began patrolling the roads in and around Fulton, guarding every entrance to the county seat.
When the two deputies reached St. Louis on Wednesday afternoon the 14th, Divers told them he wanted to be hanged in St. Louis to avoid being mobbed, but they prepared to take him back anyway. Bidding his fellow inmates goodbye, Divers said, “You’ll never see me alive agin, for sure. When I get to Fulton I will be strung up. I killed that woman, but didn’t intend to. It’s a lie that I ravished her, but it’s no use talking, for when they get me up there at Fulton..., they will make me die hard.”
The deputies took their prisoner by train to New Florence, about thirty-five miles east of Fulton. Late that night, they secured a conveyance and started overland for Fulton. A couple of miles west of Calwood, the carriage was suddenly surrounded by a mob of about twenty-four masked men. They forced the deputies to hand over the prisoner, took him back to a bridge near Calwood, and hanged him about one o’clock Thursday morning, August 15.
When word of the lynching reached Fulton a couple of hours later, the mob that had been patrolling the town’s streets, two hundred strong, galloped to Calwood at full speed. When they saw the corpse swinging from the bridge and realized they wouldn’t have the pleasure of burning a man alive, as they’d planned to do with Divers, they cursed angrily. They accused the sheriff and other officers of conspiring to prevent a terrible scene in Fulton by tipping off the small crowd who had hanged Divers as to his whereabouts and by giving their unofficial blessing to the lynching.
Sometime after daylight on Thursday morning, a coroner’s jury went out to the bridge and concluded predictably that the victim had been hanged by parties unknown. The disappointed mob then took possession of the body, brought it to Fulton about noon, shot it full of bullets, and suspended it from a telephone pole near the courthouse.
The lynching of Emmet Divers came under criticism from the St. Louis press, but the local newspapers strongly defended the mob action, suggesting that Emmet Divers got what he deserved for raping and murdering a white woman.
This entry is condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.

Lynching of Bill Young

William “Bill” Young first got into serious trouble with the law in October of 1860 when he was a young married man of twenty-two living in northern Clark County, Missouri. He, John Baird, and two other young men killed a man named Whiteford, whom Baird had accused of stealing a mare from him. Baird was convicted of first-degree murder and hanged, while the other three were convicted of lesser crimes and got off with relatively short prison sentences. Young was paroled in 1864 after serving three years of an eight-year term for second degree murder.
Young returned to Clark County and took up residence in the Luray vicinity with his wife, Mary, and their son, John, who had been born shortly before Young went to prison. Several more children followed over the next decade, and Young became a prosperous farmer, although many people still considered him a dangerous man.
In January of 1877, Mary died, and from appearances, her husband was grief-stricken by her death. However, just a month later, a young, good-looking divorcee named Laura Sprouse moved in with Bill Young as his housekeeper. Whether Young’s housekeeper was also his paramour is not known for sure, but one thing is certain: Laura Sprouse would play an important role in Young’s life over the next couple of years.
On the morning of August 3, 1877, the Lewis Spencer family, consisting of the father and four children, was found slain at their residence about six miles north of Luray. An ax found at the house with pieces of hair matted in blood was thought to be the primary murder weapon. Spencer was known to keep large sums of money, and robbery was thought to be the motive for the killings.
A suspect was arrested a couple of months later, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. In October of 1878, over a year after the Spencer murders, a man named Daniel C. Slater arrived in Clark County, fresh from the Illinois State Penitentiary. Adopting the name Frank Lane, Slater claimed to be a detective, and he set about making a case against Bill Young.
Young had started corresponding with a woman named Lydia Bray, who lived in his native Ohio, and during the holiday season of 1878-1879, he traveled back to Ohio for a visit. While he was gone, Lane and a young man named Walter Brown paid Laura Sprouse a visit at the Young residence and succeeded in eliciting incriminating testimony from her against Bill Young in the Spencer murder case.
The fact that Brown was a former beau of Laura’s no doubt played a role in her willingness to talk about her employer. In fact, Laura later married Brown. Some observers at the time also speculated that Laura carried a torch for Young and felt betrayed by his interest in the Ohio woman. At any rate, Lane and Brown took Laura away from the Young farm in early January of 1879, and she appeared before a justice of the peace about a month later to swear out an affidavit charging Young with murdering the Spencer family. A warrant for Young’s arrest was placed in the hands of Frank Lane, and he and his posse took the suspect into custody in late February. Young was lodged in the Clark County jail at Kahoka.
When his trial got underway in early October, Laura Sprouse was the state’s star witness. She gave much incriminating testimony, including the fact that Young had supposedly confessed the Spencer murders to her.
The defense claimed Young’ prosecution was a frame-up instigated by Frank Lane, the so-called detective. Young’s lawyers said Lane was an ex-convict and scoundrel who was more interested in collecting the reward money than in seeing justice done and that he settled on Young as the prime suspect mainly because of Young’s prior murder conviction rather than because of actual evidence in the Spencer case. They said Laura Sprouse had been bribed to give her testimony.
The state produced witnesses to confirm parts of her story, but Young was found not guilty on October 25. Public reaction to the verdict was about equally divided among those who felt either that Young was innocent or that there was reasonable doubt of his guilt and those who felt sure he had killed the Spencers. Among the most adamant in the latter group was Frank Lane, who immediately began agitating for vigilante justice.
Meanwhile, Young celebrated his acquittal by getting married the next day, Sunday, October 26, in Clark County to his Ohio fiancee, Lydia Bray, who’d traveled to Missouri for his trial. The couple took a short honeymoon to Keokuk, Iowa, about twenty-five miles away, and while they were there, Young was warned of the vigilante excitement that was building against him back in Clark County.
He nevertheless returned on Wednesday morning, October 29. A mob led by Frank Lane surrounded the Young home about 11:00 a.m. After a standoff and a brief exchange of gunfire, Young was shot during a ceasefire when he appeared at an upstairs window. The mob rushed the house, took the wounded Young outside, and hanged him to a crossbeam of a gate as he continued to protest his innocence of the Spencer murders.
After the lynching, many people approved of the mob action, glad to be rid of a man whom they considered a dangerous character, while others, mostly friends of Young, considered the deed an outrage.
A coroner’s jury reached the innocuous conclusion that Young had come to his death by hanging “at the hands of a mob,” despite the fact Frank Lane had been cited by name in the evidence. Although Lane was widely seen as almost as big a scoundrel as Young and he continued to add to his notoriety after the lynching, he was never brought to justice for his part in the mob action.
This story is condensed from my book Yanked Into Eternity.

Daring to Curse a White Boy

Louis Wright and his fellow members of Richard and Pringle’s famous Georgia Minstrels arrived in New Madrid, Missouri, by train on the snowy morning of Saturday, February 15, 1902. In the afternoon, the black performers gave a street parade, and some of the local white boys taunted the “flashily dressed” minstrels with gibes as they marched through the downtown area. As Wright and one or two of the other performers walked back to the opera house after the parade, two young white men started throwing hard, slush-packed snowballs at them. When the young black men told them to quit, the local toughs responded by hurling insults as well as more snowballs. Growing angry, Wright turned and cursed the white boys. The town marshal showed up just in time to avert further trouble, advising the white boys to go home and the minstrels to stay off the streets.
That evening, a large crowd packed the opera house in New Madrid for the minstrel performance, and a number of boys and young men, including those who had clashed with the minstrels on the street earlier in the day, took seats at the front of the auditorium near the stage. As one of the black performers later recalled, the local youth were still angry that “a nigger had dared to curse a white boy,” and they wanted to find him, take him out, and whip him. The show had barely begun when some of the young white men started making wisecracks about the performers, and the minstrels promptly replied in kind. The banter seemed good-natured at first, but it soon turned ugly. The remarks, loud enough to be heard throughout the auditorium, became more and more insulting as the performance progressed.
Some of the older men in the audience tried to make peace, but just as the performance closed, a half-dozen young white men tried to charge the stage. As they were going through a narrow passageway that led up the stairs onto the stage, somebody pulled out a revolver and fired a shot. Another report said that the white men had already reached the stage and had begun to attack the minstrels with chairs before the first shot was fired.
Exactly who fired the first shot is unknown. The account of the affair that went out to the St. Louis Republic and other white newspapers across the country asserted that the first shot came from one of the black performers on the stage, but one of the minstrels claimed a couple of weeks later that none of the young black men even had a handgun.
After the first gunshot, the place erupted into chaos. Suddenly, “half a dozen pistols were being fired at random by the negroes and white men,” said the Republic. Panic ensued…, and men, women and children rushed pell-mell from the building, screaming and crying.”
In all, about twenty shots rang out. At least one minstrel and one white man received minor wounds. The minstrels escaped out a side door and took refuge in their railroad car, which was parked on a side track nearby.
Local law officers arrived and placed the minstrels under arrest. Taken to jail, they all denied firing any shots or knowing who did, and no weapon was found on any of them. They spent the night crammed into a damp cell with standing room only.
Outside, things died down for the night, but the next day groups of men collected on the corners discussing the shooting affray at the opera house the night before and plotting vigilante action. Meanwhile, throughout the day on Sunday, the prisoners were taken one by one from the jail to the courthouse across the yard for interrogation before a special jury, composed of thirty of the town’s “best citizens,” which had been called to investigate the shooting.
Under an intense “sweating,” one or more of the minstrels revealed that Louis Wright was the person who had cursed the white boys on Saturday afternoon. Most newspaper accounts said Wright was also identified as the man who fired from the stage, but the minstrels denied this.
However, the identification was good enough for the would-be lynchers. Late that night, Sunday, February 16, five men marched to the jail and took Louis Wright out under the ruse that they were part of the special jury and needed to question him some more. Joined by a mob of fellow vigilantes, the so-called “jury” took Wright to a big elm tree at the edge of town and strung him up.
Whether the only offense Louis Wright committed was daring to curse a white boy or he also fired random shots from the stage, one thing seems clear: Wright and his fellow minstrels, as the Independence (KS) Daily Reporter said three days after the incident, were “not the only ones to blame by any means” for the melee that led to his lynching. In turn-of-the-century America, young black men were often lynched if they killed a white person or sexually assaulted a white woman, but some, like Louis Wright, were lynched on even shakier pretexts.
This story is condensed from my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.

The Last Legal Hangings in Jasper County

The U. S. hasn't executed anybody for non-homicidal rape in over fifty years. In fact, I think it has been ruled unconstitutional. But such wasn't always the case, especially in Missouri and a few other states known for "rough justice." In fact, Missouri was the site of the last execution in America for rape without an accompanying murder when Ronald Wolfe got the gas chamber in Jefferson City in 1964. Prior to 1938, when executions in Missouri were still carried out by hanging in the counties where the criminals were convicted instead of by gas in Jefferson City, the death penalty for rape was even more common. The case of the Worden brothers serves as one example.
On Sunday evening, November 15, 1931, Norman Parks, George Mimms, and their high school girlfriends were parked northwest of Carthage when a strange car pulled up beside them. Three men got out carrying revolvers and ordered the young people out of their automobile.
One of the holdup men, thirty-one-year-old Pete Stevenson, escorted the two young men at gunpoint to a nearby chat pile, while his two accomplices, thirty-four-year-old Lew Worden and twenty-six-year-old Harry Worden, held the girls prisoner near the automobiles. The Worden brothers threatened to kill the girls if they didn’t do exactly as they were told. Lew then held one girl at gunpoint while Harry sexually assaulted the other.
After the attack, the girls, seeing no sign of their boyfriends, ran to a nearby farmhouse, and the farmer helped the girls get back to Carthage. The rape victim told her mother the awful news when she got home, and authorities were summoned.
Meanwhile, the highwaymen, an hour and a half after the first attack, held up a taxi cab near Carl Junction. They beat the driver and robbed him and two male passengers, but two young women in the vehicle were not molested.
Then, at ten o’clock the same evening, the desperadoes accosted another carload of young people northwest of Joplin. The young victims were Arthur Poundstone, Tom Wills, and their sixteen and seventeen-year-old female companions. All four were taken to an isolated spot near the present-day Joplin Regional Airport, where Harry Worden guarded the young men while Lew Worden and Pete Stevenson raped the two girls.
The Worden brothers, who’d previously lived in Joplin, were immediately suspected in the crimes because of their prior clashes with police. Shown a picture of Lew, the victims of the assault near Carthage identified him as one of the criminals. The license number of the bandit car was matched to a tag stolen from an automobile near Birch Tree, Missouri, 170 miles east of Carthage, and the Wordens were soon traced to nearby Mountain View. Lew Worden was taken into custody there and brought back to Carthage on November 25.
He admitted his and Harry’s participation in the holdups ten days earlier, but he denied they’d raped anyone. The next day, though, the four young people from the Poundstone vehicle identified Lew as one of their assailants, and he was charged with rape.
Harry Worden and Pete Stevenson were arrested in Illinois in early December and brought back to Missouri. Charged with sexual assault, Harry was transferred to Jasper County, while Stevenson was held in Carter County on a robbery charge.
Both Wordens pleaded not guilty at their initial appearances, but Lew changed his plea to guilty when his trial came up in Jasper County on January 27, 1932, throwing himself on the mercy of the court. However, Judge Harvey Davis was in no mood for clemency, and he sentenced Worden to hang on March 3 at Carthage.
The next day, Harry Worden’s trial began before Judge Grant Emerson. The victim of the Carthage sexual assault took the stand on the 29th and testified that she submitted to Harry Worden’s demands only because he and his brother threatened to kill her best friend if she didn’t do as they said. The girl’s testimony was confirmed in every detail by her companions.
Harry Worden was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but the verdict was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court and the execution date indefinitely postponed.
Pete Stevenson was finally brought to Carthage on February 18 and charged as the third assailant in the November 15 assaults.
Meanwhile, Lew Worden appealed to the Missouri governor for clemency, but the governor declared that the execution should proceed. Worden was hanged on the early morning of March 3, 1932, on a gallows just outside the county jail at Carthage. About 100 observers were allowed inside the stockade surrounding the gallows, while a crowd of about 500 thronged around the enclosure. Worden was buried in Joplin’s Forest Park Cemetery.
Pete Stevenson was granted a change of venue to Lawrence County. He pleaded guilty there in May and was sentenced to 99 years in the state penitentiary.
In December 1932, the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision in Harry Worden’s case and reset his execution for January 20, 1933. On January 18, the Missouri governor issued a stay of execution until February 10.
After studying the case further, the governor declined to intervene again, and Harry Worden was hanged in the early morning of February 10 inside the jail building at Carthage in a room on the second floor with about 50 witnesses in attendance. He was buried in Hill Crest Cemetery at Galena, Kansas.
Pete Stevenson had escaped the death penalty, but he died in prison at Jefferson City in May of 1934.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.