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.