A Tragedy of the Tenderloin District

During the spring and summer of 1901, Poplar Bluff, Missouri, witnessed what the local Daily Republican called a “tragedy of the tenderloin district.” Twenty-six-year-old Pearl Clark “conducted a house of prostitution in a two-story yellow frame house in the southeast corner of the city.” Citizens of Poplar Bluff called the place the “Rabbit House.”
Pearl, whose maiden name was Alice Bryan, had been married twice, once to a man named Giles, and some reports gave her name as Alice Giles. But she went by Pearl Clark, because she’d taken in professional gambler Steve Clark as her lover and common-law husband.
The thirty-five-year-old Clark “encouraged her loathsome profession by pimping for her resort” so he could avoid having to work for a living. Pearl’s calling required her “to look and act sweet on all men,” and Clark accepted her flirtations as simply a part of business until Ed Lewis appeared on the scene and a “green-eyed monster” reared its head. A railroad brakeman, Lewis started spending too much time with Pearl to suit Steve Clark and “the smiles and glances became too serious.”
Clark and Pearl quarreled over the matter several times. Finally Clark told her not to have anything more to do with Lewis, and Pearl promised to quit seeing the other man. Her tempestuous relationship with Clark calmed, and they sailed along smoothly for a few weeks.
But then on June 25, 1901, Clark found Lewis and Pearl talking together near the Iron Mountain Railroad depot in Poplar Bluff. Accosting them in anger, Clark scolded Pearl for not keeping her word and warned Lewis to leave Pearl alone. Pearl finally got Clark to calm down and return home with her, promising once again to be true to him. Back at the house, Clark warned Pearl that if she didn’t keep her word this time, he would kill her.
“But a prostitute’s word is no better than her morals,” said the Daily Republican. Later that same day, Pearl went to a wine room at a saloon in the south end of Poplar Bluff with a friend, Maggie Dawson, and they met Lewis there.
In the late afternoon, Clark found Lewis and Pearl together at the wine room and immediately flew into a rage. Confronting Lewis, he grabbed a large iron cuspidor and raised it over his head as if to strike the other man, but Lewis suddenly pulled out a revolver and forced Clark to back off.
Clark left in angry humiliation and went downtown to try to borrow a gun from one of his acquaintances. Failing this, he returned to the Rabbit House, secured a big butcher knife, and went back to town to sharpen it.
In the meantime, Pearl, realizing how distraught Clark was, left Lewis soon after the altercation at the wine room and returned home with Maggie. About 6:00 p.m., Pearl and another woman were standing on the back porch and Maggie and her male companion, Ed Bowen, were lying in a hammock stretched between the porch and a nearby tree. Another man, Jake Kern, was also present. One of the five noticed Clark approaching on the street in front of the house and said, “Here comes Steve.”
Moments later, Clark walked through the house, came onto the back porch, and went straight to Pearl, who was standing with a dipper of water in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Grasping her by the arm, Clark said, “Pearl, I told you I would kill you if you ever went with Lewis again. Now, I have to kill you, then I am going to kill myself.”
Laughing off the threat, Pearl asked, “Don’t you want to kiss me goodbye? Steve, you are not going to kill me. You would not kill anyone. Go away and behave yourself.”
Pearl’s flippant manner only excited Steve’s fury the more. Pulling the knife from his waistband, he struck her with it, cutting her hands first and then stabbing her in the side in the area of the heart.
“Oh, Ed, you are not going let him kill me, are you?” Pearl appealed to Bowen as she collapsed.
“But Bowen thought that safety lay in flight” and took off, according to the Daily Republican. Maggie lingered just a few moments longer before she, too, fled the scene.
After the witnesses were gone and Pearl lay dead or dying, Steve stabbed himself in the chest just above the heart and lay down to die beside his victim. Poplar Bluff police chief John Harding arrived on the scene shortly afterwards and found Pearl lying dead. Not far from her body her murderer lay moaning and praying for God to let him die. He said he’d killed Pearl, that he couldn’t live without her, and that he wanted to be buried with her.
But Clark’s wound was not life-threatening. Harding arrested him and took him to the county jail, where his wound was dressed. A murder charge was filed against Clark, and he was bound over for trial in the Butler County Circuit Court.
Clark testified in his own defense at the trial on October 18. He freely admitted stabbing Pearl but said he acted out of passion in the heat of the moment. Maggie Dawson and Ed Bowen were the principal witnesses for the prosecution. Refuting the defense’s contention that Clark acted out of passion on the spur of the moment, Maggie said that Clark did not retrieve the butcher knife as he passed through the house just prior to the crime, as he claimed, because it was already missing when she and Pearl came home. Both Maggie and Bowen denied that Pearl had struck Clark first, as the defendant also claimed.
Clark was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang. An appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court and two subsequent reprieves from the governor delayed the execution until February 6, 1903. Will Gatlin, a black man, was scheduled to be hanged in Poplar Bluff on that day, and Clark’s execution was set for the same day. Clark was dropped through the trap at 2:00 p.m., and Gatlin followed about an hour and fifteen minutes later.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

The Quiet, Effective Work of the Benevolent Society

On Saturday morning, September 10, 1898, Benjamin Jones, a 68-year-old man who lived near Randolph in Clay County, Missouri, volunteered to take his neighbors’ eleven-year-old daughter, Annie Montgomery, to the county fair in Liberty about ten miles away. The girl’s parents agreed to the arrangement, and Annie rode to Liberty with the old man in his big wagon.
During the morning, Jones took the girl shopping, and during the afternoon they went to the fair. As evening approached, they started back to Randolph, and during the return trip, the old codger sexually assaulted young Annie. Perhaps hoping the girl wouldn’t tell, Jones continued the journey after the assault and delivered her to her home.
But Annie broke into tears upon entering the house and told her parents the whole story. Her father immediately notified local constable David C. Roberts, who found Jones not far away, still on the road in his wagon. A posse of citizens who flocked to the scene talked of lynching the old man on the spot, but they finally let the officers deliver him to the county jail.
Jones was taken to Liberty and thrown in the clink on Sunday morning. As word of the previous day’s assault spread, “the indignation of the Clay county people knew no bounds,” according to the Kansas City Journal.
Despite the ominous mood in Liberty during the day, few people were on the streets Sunday night, and most of the citizens were asleep when the town’s electric lights were suddenly extinguished shortly after eleven o’clock and a masked mob of about a hundred men converged on the courthouse. They pounded open the jail door, rushed in, and dragged Jones out, begging for his life and with a rope already around his neck. They took him to the front porch of the courthouse and tossed the other end of the rope over an overhead railing. The leader of the mob asked the old man whether he had anything to say. Jones admitted the deed but said he was drunk at the time, as he kept pleading for his life.
“Swing him up,” the leader said, and the command was promptly obeyed. A single shot rang out almost as soon as he was suspended, and life was quickly extinct.
After the lynching, the gang leader ordered everybody to go home and keep their mouths shut, and the mob quickly dispersed. Jones’s body was cut down and taken to a local undertaking firm. An examination revealed that Jones had been shot in the neck.
According to the Journal, many of Liberty’s citizens were surprised to learn of the lynching upon awaking the next morning, but they largely approved the extralegal proceeding, many of them “freely expressing admiration for the quiet, effective work of the benevolent association.”
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

Tunas School Consolidation Dispute

Toward the end of 1972, the Dallas County School District drew up plans to annex the schools at Tunas, located in the northern part of the county, into the much larger school district at Buffalo, the county seat. Tunas was a small school district with only about 155 students in grades 1-12, and it had been struggling to survive on its own for some time.
There was just one problem. Nobody apparently bothered to consult the Tunas School Board or the community's citizens. When the Tunas School Board learned in early 1973 of the proposed annexation, they approached the Skyline School District about consolidating with that school district instead and, upon receiving a favorable nod from Skyline officials, scheduled a vote for February 13 on the question of annexation into the Skyline district. The Skyline Schools, the result of a 1957 reorganization of the schools at Cross Timbers, Preston, and Urbana, were (and still are) located about four miles north of Urbana in Hickory County but were still a couple of miles closer to Tunas than Buffalo was to Tunas.
Meanwhile, the Dallas County School Board scheduled a vote on the question of annexation of the Tunas district into the Buffalo district for February 15, and they obtained a court order restraining the Tunas School District from holding its February 13 election. However, the latter election went on as scheduled, and voters in the Tunas School District voted overwhelmingly (232-19) in favor of joining the Skyline District. As soon as the Tunas School Board certified the results, they met with the Skyline School Board, who voted to accept Tunas into the district. Then on February 15, citizens in the Buffalo School District complicated matters by voting 396-231 to annex Tunas into their district.
Proponents of the Buffalo annexation then obtained an amended court order seeking to prevent the Tunas School District from transferring school supplies and other assets to the Skyline district. It now fell to Judge Charles V. Barker to decide the legality of the Tunas-Skyline election. Even though he was the one who had issued the restraining orders, he ultimately upheld the Tunas-Skyline election. But that was not quite the end of the dispute.
As the time for a new school year to begin approached in August, Tunas students were to be counted as part of the Skyline district, but they were scheduled to remain at their old buildings in Tunas. Then on August 9 fire destroyed the Tunas Elementary School and damaged the high school building. Arson was suspected, but no one was arrested (at least not in the immediate wake of the fire). The fire forced an altering of plans; so Tunas Elementary School students were now shifted to the old Tunas High School building, while the Tunas High School kids would commute to Skyline.
But this was still not quite the end of the controversy. Five Tunas school election officials had been charged with contempt of court for ignoring the original restraining order. Greene County circuit judge James H. Keet heard the case in October. The defendants claimed the restraining order had not been delivered by proper authorities nor had it been delivered in time to prevent the election. The prosecution said otherwise, and conflicting testimony supporting one side and then the other was presented. Judge Keet eventually acquitted the defendants but only because he ruled that the bond of the Dallas County citizens who obtained the restraining order was defective.

The Murder of Silas Moody

On Sunday night, December 23, 1923, an unknown assassin shot Silas Moody, 34-year-old farmer, with a shotgun through the window pane of his home at Macomb in Wright County, Missouri, while the victim's little baby played at his feet. Moody's wife and mother-in-law were also in the room at the time. The blast virtually blew Moody's head off, and he lingered just an hour or two before dying. A Springfield newspaper called the crime "one of the most cold-blooded murders in the annals of the Ozarks."
Suspicion quickly settled on 35-year-old O. R. Millsap and 25-year-old Earnest "Benny" Johnson, neighbors who had been feuding with Moody recently. According to later evidence, the source of the dispute was that Moody had recently discovered a still on or near his property that Millsap and Johnson were running, and they were afraid he was going to turn them in. The two suspects were arrested on Christmas Day and released on $2,000 bond each pending their appearance for preliminary hearings.
After their preliminary hearings, Millsap and Johnson were held in the Wright County Jail at Hartville until early January of 1924, when they were formally indicted for murder by a grand jury. After that, they received changes of venue to Laclede County, where Millsap's trial began in early November of 1924. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Johnson got his case severed from Millsap's, and his trial began at Lebanon in May of 1925. The trial ended in a hung jury, but on retrial in September, he was convicted and also sentenced to life in prison.
Both Millsap and Johnson, however, were paroled by the Missouri governor in 1933, after serving only 8+ and 7+ years respectively.