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.