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.