First Legal Hanging in Greene County

The first legal hanging in Greene County, Missouri, took place on August 25, 1854, when Willis Washam was hanged from a gallows erected just north of Jordan Creek near present-day Benton Avenue. This was near the same location where two black men, Mart Danforth in 1859 and Bud Isbell in 1871, were later lynched.
Washam's trial was held during the July 1854 term of Greene County Circuit Court on a change of venue from Taney County. Washam had been charged with killing his stepson a year or so earlier. Details of the case, are sketchy, since the only extant accounts of the case (at least the only ones I've been able to find) were written years after the fact. Greene County Circuit Court records do contain a few details about the legal proceedings against Washam but few details of the crime itself.
According to the 1883 History of Greene County, Washam, who lived on Bee Creek, near present-day Branson, went down to the creek to fish one day with the stepson, who was about 14. After a while, they separated, and Washam returned to the house alone. The boy did not return, and he was found a few days later in the creek with a stone tied around his neck and signs of violence on his body. His wife accused Washam of having killed her son, and he was arrested and taken to Forsyth.
Washam managed to escape and struck out for Arkansas on his "famous horse, which he called 'Tom Benton'" with his and his wife's 8-year-old son. Washam worked for a while in Arkansas but returned after a few months when the young boy started pining for his mother. The wife appeared to welcome Washam back home and told him the charges against him had been dropped, but after he fell asleep, she sneaked off to Forsyth and turned him in. Washam awakened and started off again on Tom Benton, suspecting that his wife had betrayed him, when he was overtaken and re-arrested. The Taney County sheriff later claimed Washam had offered to give Tom Benton to him if the lawman would let the wanted man escape. Washam, on the other hand, claimed the sheriff had offered on his own to "look the other way" if Washam would turn over his horse to him, without Washam bringing up the subject. At any rate, Washam was brought back to Forsyth, where he took a change of venue and was transferred to the Greene County jail in Springfield.
According to the county history, Washam's attorney, Littleberry Hendricks, made a "hard fight" for his client but to no avail. After Washam was convicted, Hendricks moved for new trial. After the motion was turned down, he moved for an arrest of judgment, but that motion, too, was denied. He planned, at first, to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court but instead decided to try to get the judgment set aside at an upcoming adjourned term of the Greene County Circuit Court. At the hearing, two days before Washam's scheduled execution, the judge refused to take any action in the case, and the execution went off as scheduled on August 25.
An immense crowd gathered at the gallows to witness the event, people pouring into Springfield from as far away as Warsaw. Washam made a short speech before he was hanged in which he declared his innocence and said he could have gotten off if he'd been able to hire big-time lawyers.The county history claimed that during his speech, he said, "My old woman was sworn my life away, but I am ready to die."
Samuel Fulbright had assumed the duties of sheriff just a few days prior to the execution, and he was called upon to act as executioner. Several years later, Fulbright killed himself by poison, and a story circulated that a nagging guilt over the prospect that he had hanged an innocent man contributed to his suicide. The county history, however, discounted the story as silly. A story also arose when Mrs. Washam died several years later that she confessed on her deathbed that she herself had killed her son and cast the blame on her husband. The author of the county history said he had tried and failed to corroborate this story and that he was convinced that it, too, was a fabrication. He said he thought some unscrupulous attorney had made it up to use as an example of someone being wrongly executed in an attempt to get his own client acquitted.
The Washam case was recounted in the Springfield Leader in late April 1886 in the aftermath of the lynching George Graham near present-day Grant Beach Park. (By the way, the Graham case, which is a very fascinating case, is the subject of my next book, Bigamy and Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the Murder of Sarah Graham, to be released in October by Kent State University Press as part of its true crime series.) The 1886 newspaper account of the Washam case was very similar to what the county history had said three years earlier.
In early May, 1886, a week after the Leader account of the Washam case had been printed, a person styling himself "An Old Citizen" wrote in to say that neither the county history nor the recent Leader story was accurate in the details of the Washam case. The writer said he had been present at both the trial and the hanging and knew firsthand what he was talking about.
The letter writer said that the murdered lad's body was not found in the creek several days after it disappeared with a stone tied around his neck. Instead, the principal witness in the case, a neighbor named Wilson, testified that, on the day the body was found, he was attracted by the screaming of the dead boy's younger brother and that, when he came running, he found Mr. and Mrs. Washam, with their clothes saturated with water, standing on the bank arguing, each accusing the other of having hindered the rescue effort. The dead lad did not have a stone around his neck, and the only marks of violence were three bruises on one side of his neck and one bruise on the other side, as might have been caused by the grip of a person's fingers and thumb. The neighbor said that, after the boy was dragged from the water, an effort to resuscitate the victim was made but to no avail.
Washam's testimony was that he and his stepson went fishing and that, after he separated from the boy, he was attracted by the shouts of his younger son, who had tagged along also. Washam rushed back to where he'd left the boys and jumped into the water to try to save the older lad. While he was still wrestling to get the boy ashore, the mother showed up and jumped in also, but Washam claimed he got tangled up in her clothes, which caused him to have to let go of the boy in order to save himself. Washam was said to have previously made threats against his stepson, which, along with the bruises on the neck, gave rise to suspicion against him.
The "old citizen" also said that it was not true that Littleberry Hendricks had made a valiant effort to save his client. Hendricks did not even become Washam's counsel until after the defendant had been convicted and his original court-appointed lawyers had abandoned him. Hendricks had filed Washam's appeals only because he felt anyone was entitled to file such appeals, not because he was valiantly fighting for his client. Washam's hanging was scheduled for a Friday, and Hendricks appeared before the judge on Thursday in a last-minute attempt to get his appeal heard. The judge said he would hear the case early Friday morning but then, after Hendricks left, the judge ordered the sheriff to adjourn the court until Saturday, thus cutting off any chance for the appeal to actually be heard.
In addition, the "old citizen" said Washam did not blame his wife during his speech on the gallows but simply said that he was innocent and would have been acquitted if he'd been able to afford good attorneys.

Although the facts of this case are, as I say, very sketchy, the story of the "old citizen" seems to me to have more of a ring of truth to it than the county history account. And the idea that Washam was, indeed, innocent seems to have gained considerable credence in the late 1800s and early 1900s, although this might have simply been a case of romanticizing past events.