John Nelson's Murder of John Stull

By all accounts, John Stull was a compassionate person who was always willing to help out his neighbors. Little did he know that his kindness would end up getting him and his mother killed.
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, Stull lived with his elderly mother and his two young children in a crude house at Salt River Switch in Ralls County, Missouri. Stull’s wife had been dead several years, his mother was feeble, and his children were too young to work. Stull was the family’s sole support, and he was considered a hard-working man.
In the spring of 1893, John Nelson and his wife, Lavinia, moved to the Salt River Switch area and pitched their tent about three hundred and fifty feet south of the Stull home. A short time later, Nelson’s mother and stepfather, Samuel Minor, showed up in a covered wagon and parked it near Nelson’s tent. Minor and his wife lived in the wagon but cooked their meals on Nelson’s stove and ate from his table.
After a while, though, Nelson and his wife had a falling-out with the Minors and wouldn’t let them cook on their stove or eat at their table. Neglected by her son, Mrs. Minor fell ill, but rather than help her out, Nelson and his wife pulled the wagon, with the mother in it, away from their tent and left it in a swampy area nearby.
Neighbors, came to Mrs. Minor’s aid, and Stull agreed to shelter her at his house. He gave Mrs. Minor his best bed, and his mother, Mary Hughes, tended to the needs of their houseguest. Although Mrs. Minor was sick enough for a local doctor to pay a house call, Nelson and his wife never visited at all nor expressed any concerns about her welfare.
On Wednesday, August 2, 1893, Stull’s seven-year-old son, Willie, and Willie’s cousin wandered over to the Nelson tent, where Nelson enticed them into fighting each other. Stull’s daughter, fourteen-year-old Mary, went over to the Nelson place to bring the children home. When the girl arrived to summon her brother and cousin home, Nelson abused her, calling her vile names.
Informed of what had happened, Stull confronted Nelson on Thursday. Stull demanded to know why Nelson had mistreated the little boys and verbally abused his daughter. Nelson cursed Stull, and Stull told Nelson and his wife he didn’t want anything more to do with them and for them never to come to his place.
Although Nelson and Lavinia had shown no inclination to visit Stull’s home, Stull’s decree banning them from his place made them determined to go there in defiance. On Friday, the day after the argument, Nelson told one of his neighbors that Stull had prohibited him from coming into his yard but that he “was going in if he had to bore his way in.”
True to his word, Nelson showed up at the Stull house on Saturday morning, August 5, carrying a revolver, with Lavinia by his side. They walked into the house uninvited but stayed less than five minutes when they realized Stull was not home, scarcely staying long enough to check on Nelson’s sick mother.
Shortly before 6 p.m. the Nelsons went back to Stull’s place with Nelson still carrying the revolver. Lavinia picked up a piece of iron as she and her husband approached the Stull home. Stull, who’d just gotten home, was sitting on the doorstep and saw the couple walking toward his yard. He told them to stay out, but they stepped through an opening in the fence and kept coming.
Hearing the commotion, Stull’s mother stepped outside, and about that moment Lavinia Nelson struck Stull with the piece of iron she was holding. In return, Stull slapped her with his hand. Nelson then fired a shot at Stull, but it missed and struck Mary Hughes instead. She fell to the ground and died very shortly.
After the first shot, Nelson fired again, this time striking Stull in the abdomen. Nelson and his wife then turned and left, with Stull staggering after them. At the top of a nearby railroad grade, Stull fell on the track, and Nelson hallooed that he’d shot him. Two men who’d heard the shots hurried to the scene and arrested Nelson.
Stull died the next day, and Nelson was lodged in the Ralls County Jail at New London. When he was arrested, Nelson bragged to the sheriff that, if he had it all to do over, he’d shoot Stull again.
Nelson and his wife were jointly indicted for double murder with Nelson as the principal and Lavinia as an accessory. Lavinia later applied for and obtained a severance of her case from her husband’s.
Nelson’s case was continued until July of 1894, when he obtained a change of venue to neighboring Marion County. His trial at Palmyra in October 1894 for the first degree murder of John Stull ended in a hung jury after his attorneys claimed self-defense. A new trial took place in April 1895, and Nelson was convicted and sentenced to hang. The execution was stayed by an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Lavinia Nelson was acquitted at her trial in Ralls County, also during April of 1895. After her acquittal, Lavinia utterly deserted her husband, taking no interest in his case and refusing even to answer his letters.
In January 1896, the supreme court affirmed the lower court’s ruling in John Nelson’s case, and the execution was reset for February 28 at Palmyra. The condemned man was led to the gallows abut 11:00 a.m. late that morning and dropped through the trap in front of about fifty spectators who’d been invited inside the stockade surrounding the platform.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my most recent book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

A Devilish Temper and Cruel Disposition: The Story of Hade Brown

In early 1876, 18-year-old Susan Parrish of Randolph County, Missouri, left her parents’ home near Cairo to elope with James Hayden “Hade” Brown. Hade was the son of the notorious Bill Brown, who’d killed a man in 1865 and was later killed himself by his brother-in-law for abusing his wife (Hade’s mother). Sue’s parents, Dr. J. C. and Martha Parrish, bitterly opposed her marriage to Hade, who had already earned a mean and rowdy reputation of his own.
Susan was madly in love and wouldn’t listen to her parents, but soon after the wedding, according to the county history, Hade’s “devilish temper and cruel disposition was manifested toward his wife.” On July 21, 1877, while Hade was in neighboring Monroe County, Sue left home with her infant son and came to her parents’ house to plead with them for help in escaping her abusive husband. Despite their initial opposition to Sue’s marriage, the couple had counseled patience when Sue had previously appealed to them, but this time they yielded to their daughter’s entreaties. Dr. Parrish took her and the little boy in a wagon to stay with her older brother in Howard County.
On Monday the 23rd, Dr. Parrish made the return trip, accompanied by Sue’s twin sister, Sarah. As the doctor and his daughter neared their home, Hade rode up from the opposite direction wielding a double barrel shotgun and, after an angry confrontation, shot and seriously wounded Parrish, who was taken into a neighbor’s house. Hade fled but came back a few minutes later, just as Martha Parrish, who’d been summoned to the scene, arrived in a wagon to see about her wounded husband. Hade forced the driver to halt, ordered Mrs. Parrish out of the wagon, and shot and killed her.
Brown took off again and was not arrested until almost a year later, when he was recognized on the streets of Rochester, Minnesota, and brought back to Missouri. His murder trial finally got underway at Moberly in February 1879. Although Hade had killed her mother and shot her father, Susan was beside her husband supporting him throughout the trial. Hade’s lawyers put up a defense of emotional insanity, and the jury could not agree on a verdict, causing a mistrial.
Brown’s second trial began in December 1879 but was postponed twice, because of a suicide attempt by Brown and because one of the jurors got sick. The trial began for real in late January 1880. In early February, the jury came back with a guilty verdict, and the judge sentenced Brown to hang on March 26. An appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, however, stayed the execution. In early May, the high court affirmed the lower court’s verdict and set Brown’s new execution date for June 25, 1880.
Hade had been moved to Kansas City for safekeeping, and after the supreme court decision, a Kansas City Journal reporter visited him in his cell. Brown said he’d never gotten along with Dr. Parrish but had nothing against Mrs. Parrish. He claimed not to remember shooting her but agreed he must have done so. The only reason he could give for the crime was that whiskey had injured his brain.
Susan came to Kansas City to live so she could be near her husband. As time for his execution approached, Hade enlisted his wife to help him kill himself, and Sue made up her mind to join her husband in a suicide pact. On June 21, she visited Hade at the jail and slipped him some poison. Returning to her room at the home of Belle Fisher, she took her 3-year-old son to a neighbor’s house, came back and wrote out two suicide notes, and then lay down and shot herself in the head with a pistol. She died instantly. The suicide notes contained instructions for the rearing of her son and declared that she loved her husband more than life and wanted to die with him.
As officials approached Hade in his cell to inform him of his wife’s death, he desperately tried to swallow the poison Sue had handed him earlier, but they wrested it away from him after a terrific struggle. Hade was placed under a heavy guard and transferred from Kansas City to Huntsville on Thursday, June 24, 1880. About noon the next day, he was taken from the Randolph County Jail to the scaffold and hanged before a gaping crowd of almost 15,000.
After the body was cut down, it was placed in a double coffin and taken to the train depot. When the train carrying Sue’s body, which had been held in Kansas City, arrived, Hade’s body was placed on the same train. At Moberly, Sue’s body was placed in the same coffin as Hade’s, according to the couple’s wishes, and they were buried the next day at Swindell Cemetery in Monroe County.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

A Black and White Lynching

After prominent Lafayette County farmer George W. Johnson was killed in the wee hours of August 5, 1902, when he interrupted two chicken thieves on his farm south of Lexington, Missouri, Charles Salyers and Harry Gates were arrested on suspicion later the same morning. Fearing mob violence, Sheriff Oscar Thomas tried to move the prisoners to Kansas City that afternoon, but he and his posse were overtaken west of Lexington by a mob demanding the suspects be brought back to Lexington. The gang assured the sheriff they would do the prisoners no harm if they were brought back, and Thomas let himself be persuaded. Rumors of vigilantism continued for the next day or two, but by August 9, things had settled down to the point that the Lexington Intelligencer was convinced that the law would be allowed to take its course.
Well, not quite, as it turned out.
Both Gates, who was black, and Salyers, who was white, gave confessions after they were brought back to Lexington, and their stories largely agreed as far as their movements leading up to the killing of George Johnson. The two men had gotten together in Lexington on the night of August 4 to shoot craps, and when they parted that evening, they agreed to meet up a few hours later near Johnson’s place to steal some of his chickens. They sneaked into Johnson’s henhouse shortly after 2:00 a.m. and loaded more than a dozen chickens each into two gunny sacks. They had just made their escape through a fence when Johnson, alerted by an electric alarm system he’d recently installed in his henhouse, confronted them on the road that ran in front of his house.
Both men agreed that Johnson fired two shots at them when they failed to respond promptly to his order to halt and that one of the shots slightly wounded Gates. But what Gates and Salyers couldn’t agree on was whose idea it was to steal the chickens in the first place and who fired the fatal shots at Johnson. Each one blamed the other on both counts.
Salyers claimed at first that neither he nor Gates had a weapon when they went to the Johnson place but that, after Johnson fired at them with a pistol, Gates wrested it away from Johnson and shot him with it. Gates countered that Johnson fired at them with a shotgun and that Salyers returned fire with a pistol he had brought with him, killing Johnson. Gates said he didn’t even know his partner in crime had a weapon until he heard Salyers fire the shots that killed Johnson as he (Gates) was running away.
Salyers’s initial claim that Johnson had fired at him and Gates with a pistol cast doubt on his story, because the evidence showed that Johnson had used a shotgun, as Gates said. Salyers finally admitted the pistol that killed Johnson belonged to him, but he claimed he’d given it to Gates on the night of August 4. Still, few people believed Salyers’s story. “The statement made by Salyers is incorrect,” declared the Lexington News, “as it is definitely known by the officers that he fired the shot that killed Mr. Johnson.”
Gates’s lesser culpability, however, didn’t matter to the would-be lynchers of Lafayette County. He was a black chicken thief, and George Johnson was dead. That was good enough for them.
In the wee hours of August 12, exactly a week after Johnson’s death, a mob of about 200 masked men swarmed into Lexington from the south, shut off electricity to the downtown area, and surrounded the courthouse square. On foot except for two surreys they’d brought along in which to convey the prisoners, the vigilantes knocked down the door of the jail and overpowered Sheriff Thomas and his deputies. Part of the mob broke open Salyers’s upstairs cell and hauled him downstairs while another group went to work on Gates’s downstairs cell door. It soon yielded to the hammer, and Gates was herded outside to join his fellow prisoner.
The two men were loaded into the surreys and taken about two and half miles to Edenview Church, not far from the scene of the week-old crime. Positioned beneath an elm tree, the two were invited to say any last words, and they got into an argument, each accusing the other of having killed Johnson and now lying about it. Gates’s statement was “more consistent,” according to the Lexington Intelligencer, but his apparent honesty bought him no mercy.
Both men were swung up simultaneously to the same limb of the elm tree and left “hanging between heaven and earth,” as the mob dispersed. About 4:00 a.m., county officers went out the scene, cut the bodies down, and brought them back to Lexington. As was usual in early nineteenth century lynchings, very little effort was made to identify and prosecute the leaders of the mob.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

Silver Dollar City Grand Opening

I recall visiting Silver Dollar City in the early 1960s when it was just a reconstruction of a small nineteenth century village situated on the grounds of Marvel Cave Park, and admission was free. I don't recall the exact date or even the exact year, but it couldn't have been terribly long after the place opened because, as I say, there wasn't much to it at the time. The grand opening occurred on Sunday, May 1, 1960, and I'm guessing that this might have been a year or so after that.
Silver Dollar City was completed in April of 1960 by Mary Herschend and her two sons, Jack and Pete, who jointly owned and operated Marvel Cave. The village was represented as an "authentic reproduction of a little village that once occupied the very same spot."

The place was designed by architect Russell Peterson. He had also built Frontier City on the outskirts of Oklahoma City and was nationally known for his reconstruction of pioneer communities. When Silver Dollar City opened on the first of May, it consisted of a general store, a miner's shack, a candy store, a stage coach inn, and a print shop, along with authentic facades of a doctor's office, a gun shop, a barber shop, a courthouse, and a jail. Some of the structures were actual buildings moved log by log from their original locations in the Ozarks. An old country church and a rural schoolhouse were also in the process of being dismantled, moved timber by timber to the site, and reconstructed as part of Silver Dollar City. Plans called for a few of the buildings to be turned into businesses. For example, a Springfield restaurateur was opening up an eating place in the stage coach inn.
About 300 area motel and resort owners participated in a mass ribbon cutting to kick off opening day ceremonies, and an estimated 8,000 people visited Silver Dollar City throughout the day. At one point, cars waiting to enter the park were backed up for a mile in each direction along Highway 76. The place continued to draw "tremendous crowds" throughout the summer. One person who visited during July was Lucille Morris Upton, legendary Ozarks author and columnist for the Springfield Daily News. She was struck the welcoming and smiling faces of the folks who ran the reconstructed village, and she called it "the cutest attraction you can imagine." I wonder what she would think of Silver Dollar City if she could see it today?
The newspaper photo above is from the Springfield Leader and Press. It was published on the day of the grand opening and presumably taken a day or two before.

The Texas County Hotbed Murder

After thirty-six-year-old Gilbert Hall was arrested for murder in Texas County, Missouri, in February 1920, he maintained a total silence regarding the crime. He’d lived in the county only a few months, having moved in with his victim, fifty-eight-year-old Frank Elliott, on a forty-acre farm south of Cabool the previous fall, but little else was known about him. Once in custody, Hall started growing a beard and hiding his face whenever anyone tried to take a picture of him. A number of Hall’s letters were found in the shack he and Elliott had shared, but all of them were signed only with a capital “M” or “C.” All through the letters there was “a secrecy about names,” said the Houston Herald. There was “a mystery about Hall,” which he seemed to be trying to cover up in the letters.
As it turned out, there was good reason why the prisoner didn’t want to have his picture taken or to talk about his past, but at six feet, seven inches tall, Hall found it hard to conceal his identity for long. Authorities soon learned his real name was Samuel Bitler, that he’d raped and killed a woman in Kansas over ten years earlier, and that he’d escaped from the Kansas State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence, less than a year ago. In the fall of 1919, Bitler showed up in Texas County under the name Gilbert Hall and negotiated a deal to buy Frank Elliott’s farm south of Cabool. Elliott, however, was allowed to stay on at the farm through some sort of arrangement between the two men.
In early 1920, neighbors began to get suspicious when they repeatedly called at the farm and Hall (i.e. Bitler) kept telling them that Elliott had “gone south.” One neighbor noticed during one of his visits that Hall was making a hotbed even though it was still too early in the season for a hotbed.
During late January and early February 1920, Hall forged Elliott’s name on a number of checks and cashed them on Elliott’s account at the First National Bank in Cabool. On February 10, Hall showed back up at the bank and presented a couple of more checks that had been written on Elliott’s account and made out to Hall. Cashier Robert W. Clifton cashed the checks, but he’d begun to get suspicious because Elliott’s signature didn’t seem quite right and the cashier knew that Elliott had supposedly left Cabool.
After making the transaction, Clifton reported his suspicions to Texas County lawmen, and they found Hall in Cabool and detained him for questioning. While Hall was temporarily under arrest at Cabool, a search party went out to the Hall farm and found Elliott’s body buried in the hotbed behind the house. Confronted about Elliott’s death, Hall denied any knowledge of it. An inquest the next day revealed that the victim had been shot three times in the head with a .32 caliber pistol, and Hall had been carrying a .32 pistol when he was arrested. The suspect was taken to the Texas County Jail in Houston.
Further investigation at the Hall farm turned up the cryptic correspondence between “M” and “C.” M appeared to be a young woman, while C referred to Hall. In one of the letters, M cautioned C to “be careful,” and the couple appeared to be making plans to get married. Authorities determined that May Dale of Peoria, Illinois, was likely the mysterious Miss M, but she was apparently never arrested, as Hall did not implicate her in the crime in any way.
The search of the premises at the Hall farm also revealed blood stains on the mattress of the bed where the two men slept, and a pair of bloody overalls belonging to Elliott was found in the house. Investigators concluded that Elliott had been shot while lying in the bed and carried to his makeshift grave. Hall had apparently continued to sleep in the bloody deathbed even after the murder.
When Missouri authorities learned of Hall’s true identity and his escape from the Kansas prison, they chose not to send him back to Kansas but to go ahead and try him on the Elliott murder. At his trial at Houston in April, the jury could not agree on a first-degree murder charge and ended up compromising on second-degree murder and a life sentence. On April 26, 1920, Hall (i.e. Bitler) was transferred to the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City. He died in the prison hospital on December 4, 1929, from tuberculosis.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.