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.
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