Murder at Schaupp's Store

I recall a murder that took place at a store/service station just north of Crystal Cave on Highway 65 about halfway between Springfield and Fair Grove when I was growing up at Fair Grove. There was a little buzz around Fair Grove about it at the time, and I think my dad might have even pointed out to me the place where it happened during a trip to Springfield not long after the incident. Up until a day or two ago, that's about all I could have told you about the crime, but I happened to find a news story about the event in a Springfield newspaper.
Come to find out, the incident happened on August 13, 1956, when I was nine years old. A young man came into the store with a high-powered rifle about ten o'clock that morning and shot two people: Leonard W. "Bill" Murrell, 61-year-old owner of the nearby Avalon Club, who was in the store as a customer; and thirty-eight-year-old Miss Myrtle Schaupp, who was operating the store at the time for her father, C. B. Schaupp. Shot in the head, Murrell was killed instantly, and Miss Schaupp had her right arm practically blown off by a shot just below the shoulder. She was admitted to the hospital in critical condition and had to have the arm amputated, but she survived.

The killer fled, but he was soon identified by eye witnesses, including the teenage granddaughter of the store owner, from police photographs as Robert Lee Popejoy. The girl said the killer just started shooting for no apparent reason, and officers could offer no motive for the crime, except that the suspect had a history of mental illness. He was tracked down at his father's farm north of Strafford on Highway 125 later the same day. Officers from several different law enforcement agencies surrounded the house and demanded his surrender. When he refused, they laid siege to the place. The young man still refused to surrender even after his father went up to the house and pleaded with him to give himself up. Late in the afternoon, authorities finally employed an armored car to get close enough to the house to fire a tear gas canister through a window. Popejoy emerged moments later and surrendered, laying down his Winchester rifle. Bullets recovered from the scene of the crime were later positively identified as having come from Popejoy's rifle.
Popejoy had been taken into custody several times on relatively minor charges, and authorities had recommended to the father that the young man be committed to a mental institution. His mother was already a resident of the state hospital at Nevada. Sheriff Glenn Hendrix said he'd told the father that something like this might happen if his son was not committed, and now it had. Asked about his mental condition as he was taken into custody, Robert Lee Popejoy told officers, "I'm not crazy, you are." He admitted being in the vicinity of Schaupp's store at the time of the crime, but he said he had no memory of having even gone inside.
At his trial in December, Popejoy was acquitted on the grounds of insanity, but he was ordered committed to a mental institution for the dangerously insane.

The Most Terrible Deed Ever Committed in Warren County: The Murder of Henry and Nettie Yeater

On Monday, August 31, 1903, rural mail carrier Otto Guggenmoos was running his route in Camp Branch Township northwest of Warrenton, Missouri, when he came to the mailbox of Henry and Nettie Yeater, an elderly couple who had lived in the vicinity for many years. Inside the mailbox Guggenmoos found a mysterious note that read, “Mr. and Mrs. H. W. Yeater have bin killed. Please report.” Not quite sure what to make of the note, Guggenmoos showed it to two or three people who lived in the neighborhood, but they told him it was probably some kind of joke.
The mail carrier wasn’t so sure, though, and when he got back to Warrenton late that afternoon, Guggenmoos showed the note to a US marshal who was personally acquainted with Henry Yeater. The marshal sent a deputy out to Camp Branch with instructions to round up some of Yeater’s neighbors and check on the old couple.
The small posse went to the Yeater home and discovered a ghastly sight. Henry Yeater was lying in bed with his throat cut, and at the foot of his bed, his wife, Henriette “Nettie” Yeater, lay on the floor with her throat slashed in three or four places and several small cuts on her face and arm.
Suspicion immediately settled on twenty-two-year-old William E. Church, the couple’s foster son. The note found in the mailbox seemed to match his handwriting, and he had not been seen since the previous afternoon, when neighbor Daniel Buescher saw him in a nearby field.
Mr. and Mrs. Yeater had no children of their own, but they had taken young Church out of the Moberly House of Refuge when he was about nine years old and raised him as their own. He had always been a wild boy and had been sent to reform school at Boonville when he was about fourteen for stealing a gold watch. Nettie Church, though, doted on the boy and believed he was innocent. She got him returned home after less than a year at the reformatory.
Now Church had apparently repaid his foster mother’s kindness by killing her.
A young man answering Church’s description had been seen boarding an eastbound train in southwestern Warren County a few hours before the bodies were discovered, but all trace of the suspect was lost after that.
Although a small amount of cash belonging to the Yeaters was missing, no reasonable motive for the murders could be offered, since Yeater had recently made out a will bequeathing all his property to Church upon his and his wife’s deaths. The Warrenton Herald called the crime “unquestionably the most terrible deed ever committed within the borders of Warren County.”
The train Church had caught arrived in St. Louis at mid-afternoon on Monday, August 31. He promptly bought a ticket for Chicago and spent the next few months traveling around the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes area.
During his ramblings, Church wrote a number of defiant letters to various people back in Warren County threatening to come back and kill several of his supposed enemies. On December 22, Church enlisted in the US Marine Corps at Cleveland under the name William Buescher, the same surname as the near neighbor back in Warren County. The new recruit was shipped to League Island Navy Yard in Philadelphia nine days later.
Church was tracked to League Island based on letters the young man calling himself William Bueshler wrote to a girl back in Warren County, and he was arrested in late March 1904 and lodged in the Philadelphia City Jail, where he made a full confession of his heinous crime, describing in chilling detail how he’d slit the throats of his elderly foster parents. He said he’d been thinking about killing the couple for four years, because he was convinced they weren’t going to leave him any money (although they had already done so at the time of his crime).
Brought back to Missouri, Church went on trial at Warrenton in late June 1904. His lawyer pursued an insanity defense, and several witnesses described the defendant’s strange and sometimes cruel behavior as a boy and young man. Prosecution witnesses, however, attributed Church’s behavior to pure meanness rather than insanity.
The trial concluded on June 30 with a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, and Church was sentenced to hang. After a series of unsuccessful appeals, the execution was finally set for January 10, 1907. On the evening before his date with death, Church talked freely of his crime. He said he regretted the deed and wasn’t sure why he did it, except that he’d argued with his foster parents continually in the weeks leading up to the crime and had argued with them again on the fateful night.
On the morning of the 10th, Church walked to the scaffold “with a steady step and did not show the least sign of weakening,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He dropped through the trap into eternity at 9:11 a.m.

This story is greatly condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

The Most Atrocious Crime in Dunklin County History: The Murder of the Tettaton Family

About 9:00 p.m., April 25, 1899, neighbors of Jane Tettaton living about a mile and a quarter north of Malden, Missouri, were aroused by the sight of Mrs. Tettaton’s home ablaze. Rushing to the scene, they found the home nearly consumed and smelled burning flesh. Five bodies were dragged out of the fiery embers. Although badly burned, they were identified by those familiar with the age and size of each family member as Jane Tettaton and her four children: George, Ben, Ida, and Ada.
Found lying in the yard not far from the burning house was James Henry Tettaton, stepson of Jane Tettaton and an older half-brother of her four children. The 29-year-old Tettaton had numerous knife wounds to his head and face, and he appeared unconscious. However, most people on the scene thought the superficial wounds were self-inflicted, because a bloody pocketknife belonging to Tettaton was found nearby, and most thought his blackout was a pretense. He was taken to a nearby house, where he soon revived enough to relate his story of what had happened.
He claimed the crime had been committed by two unknown men. He’d been talking to his stepmother shortly after eating supper with the family when the men entered the house with weapons drawn and demanded all the money he was carrying. When he refused, they started shooting and hit Jane at first fire. Tettaton said that he ran out of the house into the yard, where he was cut and beat into unconsciousness, and that he was unaware of what happened after that.
Tettaton had previously borne a good reputation, but few people believed his tale, because he told conflicting stories and was known to have previously been at odds with his stepmother over his father’s estate. After James’s mother died when he was a young child, his father, Washington Tettaton, remarried Jane Smith when James was not quite twelve. Wash died about 1897, and James, now an adult, was named administrator of his father’s estate. A dispute developed between James and Jane over his apportioning of the estate. She sued and won a settlement in circuit court.
One of the conflicting stories James Tettaton told involved a note found near the spot where he was lying that related to the settlement he owed Jane. Another inconsistency concerned a pistol found in the debris of the burned house, which, Tettaton acknowledged, belonged to him. He said he’d unloaded the weapon, but the cartridges were not in his vest pocket where he said he’d put them. In addition, a neighbor girl of Mrs. Tettaton told of a conversation she’d had with Jane on the day before she died during which Jane said she feared something might happen to her, and the girl’s mother said James Tettaton had recently paid a mysterious visit to Jane’s home late at night.
Tettaton was arrested on suspicion on the night of the murders, and a day or two later he was taken out of Dunklin County for safekeeping. He was brought back to the county seat at Kennett in late May and indicted on five charges of first-degree murder. Prosecutors elected to try Tettaton first on the charge of murdering his half-brother George, because the identity of the victim and the evidence of his death by gunfire prior to the house-burning were the clearest in his case. The trial was held during the October term of Dunklin County Circuit Court. On November 3, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the next day Tettaton was sentenced to hang on December 15, 1899. The defense’s immediate appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, however, acted as a stay of execution.
In early January 1890, Tettaton and another convicted killer named Gregory escaped from the Dunklin County Jail. They were recaptured in mid-January in Butler County and brought back to Kennett. A few months later, the two condemned men were taken to St. Louis for safekeeping.
In October 1900, the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the verdict in Tettaton’s case and reset the execution day for January 25, 1901. The Missouri governor later granted a stay, and the hanging was rescheduled for February 19. Both Tettaton and Gregory, who was also scheduled to die, were taken back to Kennett.
Just three days before the execution, Tettaton attempted suicide by cutting his wrist with a piece of broken mirror. Gregory, his cellmate, saw him slice his wrist but declined to alert anyone. Instead, he simply watched as Tettaton lay bleeding to death.
The dying man was discovered “very weak and almost unconscious” and a doctor was promptly summoned. When Tettaton regained full consciousness, he “seemed greatly chagrined” that his attempt to kill himself had failed, and a close guard was placed over him to prevent him from re-opening the wound.
About 1:30 in the afternoon of February 19, Tettaton was led to the scaffold by the sheriff and several deputies. Speaking to the large crowd that gathered outside the stockade, he admitted instigating the murders but claimed he hired two other men who actually did the bloody work. Tettaton was dropped through the trap at 2:10 p.m. in front of about 100 spectators who’d been allowed on the platform.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.

They Want Me to Say Yes: The Lynching of Henry Williams

About midnight May 23, 1898, someone slipped into Ann Browitt’s home a mile west of Macon, Missouri, and attacked Ann’s two older daughters. However, he was frightened off before he could complete his hellish work when Ann and a younger daughter awoke and lit a lamp. The younger daughter said she saw in the light of the lamp that the attacker’s skin was black. That was enough to help get Henry Williams lynched when a similar attack occurred in Macon a month later.
On the late night of Tuesday, June 28, a man entered John Koechel’s home at Macon and went into the bedroom of Koechel’s stepdaughters, Amelia and Ann Leubke. Grasping Amelia’s arm when she awoke, the intruder threatened, “If you holler, I’ll do you as I did the girls at the waterworks.” At this point, an older stepdaughter heard the commotion from an adjoining room and appeared on the scene to frighten the man away.
As he was fleeing, the intruder stole a sack of flour from the kitchen. Unbeknownst to the thief, the sack had a small leak in it, and after daylight the next morning, two local officers followed the trail of flour to the home of Henry Williams, a thirty-year-old married black man. Not only was the bag of flour found at the residence but so, too, were a number of other articles that were identified as having been stolen from various Macon area homes in recent months. In addition, a bloody coat found in the home was thought to have been the coat worn by the assailant of the Browitt girls.
Williams was arrested and tossed in the Macon County Jail. He vehemently denied assaulting either the Leubke girls or the Browitt girls, and he offered explanations for how he’d gotten the flour and the coat. But no one believed him, partly because of his reputation for prior bad acts. A few years earlier, he’d been arrested for attempting to criminally assault a young white woman in a room over a downtown Macon store, but he’d received just ninety days in jail because of the woman’s “bad reputation.”
As word of Williams’s arrest spread throughout the morning of the 29th, people began gathering on the streets of Macon. That afternoon, the prisoner repeated his denials to a local reporter who called on him at the jail. He said he did not attack Amelia Leubke and did not say to her that he would do to her as he did the girls at the waterworks, because he did not commit either break-in. Informed of the mob that was forming, he said, “They want me to say yes, but they can kill me before I’ll do it.”
And kill him is exactly what they did.
Around ten o’clock that night, knots of men formed near the courthouse, and they soon came together into one crowd, determined to carry out vigilante justice. A local minister made a speech imploring them to let the law take its course, but he was howled down.
The mob marched to the jail and demanded the sheriff turn over the prisoner. He refused, but the determined gang knocked down a fence surrounding the jail and made a rush on the officers guarding it. The sheriff and his deputies were quickly disarmed, and the front door of the jail battered in. The key to the jail corridor was located and the iron door unlocked. The would-be lynchers took Williams from his cell and herded him outside, where his appearance was greeted with wild hurrahs from the crowd.
The prisoner was taken south through the streets of Macon to a railroad bridge at the edge of town. The doomed man was positioned beneath the bridge, a rope was looped around his neck, and the other end was thrown up to some men on the bridge. The gang leader, described only as a tall man, signaled the men on the bridge to pull, and Williams’s body shot up. It was 12:30 a.m. on the 30th of June, 1898.
The lynch mob tied the rope to the bridge and marched off into the night, leaving Williams’s body dangling. It was still hanging there after daylight on the morning of the 30th, “furnishing an uncanny spectacle for the passengers on the Hannibal and St. Joe Railroad trains,” according to the local paper.
The body was finally cut down about 8:30 a.m., and a coroner’s jury reached the meaningless verdict that the deceased had come to his death “at the hands of some two or three hundred men whose names, identities and residences are to these jurors unknown.”
This despite the fact that the identity of the tall leader was “pretty well known” in Macon, according to a county history written twelve years later.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.