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.