A Satisfactory Hanging

About ten o’clock in the morning of May 26, 1890, law officers in Sedalia, Missouri, received a report that an old man had tried to commit suicide in a local public park by consuming a quantity of strychnine. Responding to the intelligence, the officers discovered fifty-four-year-old Thomas Williamson lying on the floor of an equipment building at the park, and they took him to the local Salvation Army barracks, where medical aid was administered.
About 1:00 p.m. the same day, a man who lived two and a half miles southeast of Sedalia came to town and reported that one of his neighbors, Jeff Moore, had been found dead on his farm and that Williamson, who had recently been living with Moore, was suspected of the crime.
Williamson claimed he’d tried to kill himself because he was tired of living, but “tired of killing” might have been a more apt explanation because, as it turned out, he had a murderous record that stretched back almost twenty-five years.
Williamson had grown up in Tazewell County, Illinois, and he served in the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war, he returned to Tazewell County and was working on Charles Koch’s farm in mid-July 1866 when he killed Koch and took possession of the farm, claiming Koch had sold it to him and left the country. The crime was discovered about a month later, and Williamson was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, However, the Illinois governor granted a reprieve and later commuted Williamson’s sentence to twenty-one years in prison.
After serving slightly over half of his term, Williamson got out of prison in 1879 and drifted west. In 1887, he married Susan Reed Kirk in Vernon County, Missouri, and later moved to the Sedalia area, where Williamson made his living working as a hired hand for various farmers.
Williamson and his wife were living on a farm about six miles northwest of Sedalia in the fall of 1889 when his wife disappeared, but nobody thought much about it at the time, because the couple had few acquaintances in the area. And Williamson explained to anyone who inquired that Susan had died while visiting relatives in Illinois. After his wife’s disappearance, Williamson came to Sedalia for a while and then started working for Jeff Moore southeast of town in the spring of 1890.
When a neighbor named August Brenicke called at the Moore place on Friday, May 25, to collect a debt, Williamson told him that he didn’t know where Moore was. Brenicke and other neighbors grew suspicious the next day when they saw Williamson hauling dirt to the Moore farm with still no sign of Moore. On Monday morning they went to the farm and found Moore’s body buried in a cellar beneath his house and Williamson nowhere to be seen. One of the neighbors brought the intelligence to Sedalia, and the suicidal Williamson, still recovering at the Salvation Army, was placed under guard.
Charles Moore, the son of Jeff Moore, had been missing for a couple of weeks, and after the father’s body was found, it was feared that the son had been similarly dealt with. Searchers found the younger Moore’s body buried face down about 200 yards from the house where Jeff Moore had been found.
Williamson was charged with the death of both Moores. On May 28, the body of Williamson’s wife was found buried on the farm northwest of Sedalia, and he was also charged with murdering her.
On June 5, Williamson handed a written confession to Pettis County sheriff Ellis Smith taking full blame for the Moore murders. He said he’d killed Jeff with an ax during an argument and later killed Charles the same way when the son confronted him about the father’s disappearance. But he still maintained his innocence in the death of his wife, saying she had died from natural causes and he had simply buried her because he couldn’t afford a funeral.
Near the time Williamson gave his confession a letter arrived at the sheriff’s office from Tazewell County, Illinois, implicating the prisoner in the long-ago murder in that county. A reporter called at the jail to get Williamson’s reaction to the letter, and he confirmed that it was true.
Williamson went on trial for the Moore murders in February 1891. The defense introduced several witnesses, including Williamson’s brother, testifying to the defendant’s unsound mind, but he was nonetheless convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. After an unsuccessful appeal to the state supreme court, the execution was carried out at Sedalia on October 31. The condemned man, who’d admitted the evening before that he “ought to have been hung thirty years ago,” gave a brief speech admonishing young men not to follow his example before he was dropped through the trap at 10:02 a.m. The St. Louis Post Dispatch called the execution “one of the most satisfactory hangings that has ever occurred in the West.”
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.