The Tramp Became a Demon

About 6:00 p.m. on September 2, 1896, Alice Gammon, an eleven or twelve-year-old deaf girl, left the canning factory in Rhineland, Missouri, where she worked, and started on foot to her home a half mile away. Meanwhile, a “tramp mechanic” named Tom Larkin had arrived in Rhineland by rail early that morning with two companions, and they spent the day repairing gasoline stoves for whoever would hire them. Late in the afternoon, Larkin left his two companions in Rhineland and walked out into the surrounding countryside alone.
Shortly after leaving the factory, Alice noticed someone following her. As she neared her home, the path she was on took her into a thicket of woods, and halfway through it, the man who’d been following her made a rush toward her. Seizing Alice, he threw her to the ground and smothered her cries with her skirts. The girl struggled and fought, as the assailant, in the words of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “clutched her throat and pressed his sharp finger nails into the soft white flesh until the blood came.
“Failing in his design,” the St. Louis newspaper continued, “the tramp became a demon.” He pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed Alice, then withdrew the bloody blade and plunged it into her flesh again.
The attacker then released the girl and dashed into the woods.
Weak and bleeding from the attack, Alice staggered and crawled to her nearby home, where she told her eight-year-old sister what had happened, and the little girl summoned help.
After a doctor treated Alice, she revived enough to describe her assailant. Constable William Dixon found a man answering the description at the railroad depot about 300 yards from the scene of the assault. The suspect stoutly denied the attack, but his missing finger, which Alice had mentioned, was convincing evidence. In addition, the constable took the suspect to Alice’s house, and she positively identified him.
Since Rhineland was a small village with no jail, Dixon escorted the suspect to the town’s only hotel and placed him under guard in one of the rooms. The prisoner identified himself as Thomas Larkin from Chicago.
Larkin had scarcely been confined when word spread that the doctor attending Alice had said her wounds were likely fatal. The people of Rhineland began collecting near the hotel and plotting to take Larkin from his guards so they might visit a swift vengeance upon him. The deliberate German folks of Rhineland took several hours talking over the matter, while Larkin moaned and quaked in fear.
After midnight, the crowd, now swollen in numbers, began to grow impatient. About 3:00 a.m. on the morning of September 3 they started toward the hotel with a rope. Constable Dixon came out in front of the hotel to plead with them, and they finally disbanded. For the time being.
After daylight, though, more citizens from the surrounding countryside poured into town, and by mid-morning, Dixon realized he and his deputies could not hold off the horde for long. He sent for the Montgomery County sheriff, but before the sheriff could arrive, reports of indecent proposals Larkin had made toward other women began to circulate.
By the time the sheriff arrived in the late afternoon, the crowd at Rhineland had grown so large and so indignant that the lawman was unable to remove the prisoner as he had planned, but his presence helped deter the would-be lynchers from trying to act during the daytime.
About ten o’clock that night, though, word reached the mob that Alice Gammon was dying. Whether the report was valid and the girl did, in fact, later die is not clear, but the mere rumor of Alice’s impending death was sufficient to incite the horde to action.
Eight or ten masked men, one of them toting a long rope, advanced out of the crowd and started battering the front door. The sheriff, the constable, and a deputy were on the other side of the door, and when it yielded, the officers put up a stiff resistance, knocking one of the besiegers down. The other vigilantes, though, overpowered the lawmen and quickly located Larkin. They tossed the rope around his neck with a running noose and half-dragged, half-carried him outside as he struggled for his life. The mob took him to a spot about 200 yards east of the railway station and just north of the track near the woods where Alice Gammon had been attacked.
The other end of the rope was thrown over a limb of an oak tree at the edge of the woods, and the howling mob grasped the rope and drew Larkin up. They left him dangling beneath the limbs of the tree for passengers and crew to see as they passed on the nearby railroad tracks. When a freight train went through Rhineland after daylight on the morning of September 4, about seven hours after the lynching, Larkin’s body was still swinging from the limb, and a number of curious onlookers were standing nearby gawking at the grisly sight.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my book Show-Me Atrocities: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.
This month marks ten years that I've been doing this blog. Hope I'm still around in another ten years.