Killing of Sheriff Shenneman and Lynching of Charles Cobb

I know that Cowley County, Kansas, is a quite a ways from the the Missouri and Ozarks regions I normally write about, but it was the scene of one of the incidents in my recent book Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas. So, I'm going to write about it, since I don't have anything else in mind that I particularly want to write about at this time.

After killing a lawman in northern Kansas in early January 1883, nineteen-year-old Charley Cobb fled the area and headed south. He was tentatively located later the same month working on a farm in northwest Cowley County. Sheriff Albert T. Shenneman went out from Winfield to the farm on January 23 to positively identify the suspect and make his arrest if he proved to be the fugitive.

Posing as a doctor, Shenneman gained admittance to the house and identified Cobb. He then sprang on him in an attempt to disarm him, but Cobb shot the sheriff during the struggle. The seriously wounded Shenneman and the farmer finally managed to get Cobb’s pistol away, and a schoolmaster from a nearby school also hurried to the aid of the other two men. Cobb was placed under arrest and sent to the county jail at Winfield, while the sheriff lingered in pain at the farmhouse. He explained to a reporter that he hadn’t pulled his revolver on Cobb because he hated to wield a weapon against a mere boy, but Cobb had proved stronger and wirier than Shenneman had given him credit for.

The deputies escorting Cobb to jail learned as they approached Winfield that a mob was waiting to take their prisoner from them, and they hid him out until the mob dispersed and then delivered him to the jail in the wee hours of January 24. Interviewed in jail later that morning, the diminutive Cobb denied his identity, and he said he would not have shot the sheriff if Shenneman had identified himself as a law officer and demanded his surrender instead of jumping him as if to rob him. Later that day, the prisoner was taken to Sedgwick County Jail in Wichita for safekeeping.

Shenneman died on the night of January 25. The next day, a man from the suspect’s old neighborhood in northern Kansas arrived in Wichita and positively identified him as Charley Cobb, the same man who’d killed the lawman northeast of Topeka. Cobb claimed the witness was simply mistaken, because he had never seen the man before in his life.

On Saturday morning, January 27, Shenneman’s chief deputy and two sheriffs from surrounding counties started with Cobb in a carriage from Wichita to Winfield. Nearing Winfield, the officers again learned a mob was waiting to take Cobb from them, and the two sheriffs took him away from the town while the deputy went into Winfield and was confronted by the mob demanding to know the whereabouts of the prisoner. During the wee hours of January 26, one of the sheriffs escorted Cobb back to Wichita for safekeeping.

On Wednesday, January 31, the deputy brought Cobb back from Wichita to Winfield yet again, and the prisoner was successfully lodged in the Cowley County Jail early that evening. But he didn’t stay long.

About 2:30 a.m. on February 1, an organized squad of thirteen men wearing black masks descended on the jail and forced the acting sheriff to hand over the keys to the jail under a threat of having his head blown off. Three or four of the “black maskers,” as the local newspaper called them, went into the jail and came out herding the prisoner. He was taken to the west edge of Winfield to a railroad bridge over the Walnut River. A rope was looped over his neck and the other end tied to a beam of the bridge. The vigilantes positioned Cobb on the bridge and dropped him between the railings to his death. As soon as the mob withdrew into the night, a crowd of curious onlookers surged up to the bridge to gawk at the suspended man.

The body was cut down later on the morning of February 1, and a coroner’s jury held that day concluded that Cobb had come to his death at the hands of unknown parties.