Della Oxley: Female Horse Thief

During the puritanical Victorian era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a woman who stepped out of her expected domestic role as wife, mother, or obedient daughter stirred gossip. If she ventured out too far, she created scandal and sensational newspaper stories.

An unusual outbreak of horse stealing by young women in the southwest Missouri area during a twelve-year period from the early 1890s to the early 1900s provided just the kind shocking material that journalists of the time thrived on. Della Oxley was the first of three female horse thieves from the region who made headlines across the country.

Twenty-year-old Della first ran afoul of the law in 1890 when she and her husband, Perry Oxley, were charged with prostitution in Kansas. Then she wrote her name in the annals of horse thievery in 1891 after she and Perry drifted into southwest Missouri, where she got arrested in Jasper County for stealing a horse on the Fourth of July near Medoc.

Tried at Carthage on October 24, Della was convicted and sentenced to five years in the state prison at Jefferson City. When officers went to take her breakfast the next morning, she had escaped by sawing one of the cell bars in two and dropping to the ground below. It was thought someone from the outside had supplied her with the saw.

A note in which Della appeared to contemplate suicide was found in her cell after her escape, but a Carthage newspaper dismissed the letter as a ruse.

After her escape, Della made her way to Baxter Springs, Kansas. Arriving on Monday morning, October 26, she “proceeded to take in the town,” according to the Baxter Springs News. Among other activities, Della reportedly had her picture taken and mailed to a friend. She had cut her hair short before her escape, and when she arrived in Baxter, she was dressed in men’s clothes and “presented the appearance of a smart, smooth-faced young man,” according to the News.

An effort to upgrade her wardrobe led to Della’s recapture. She went to a clothing store and bought a pair of trousers and a cowboy hat, but in changing trousers she left a letter that was addressed to her in the old pair of trousers. The letter aroused the suspicions of the storekeeper, and he notified Baxter Springs law officers, who arrested Della about 11:00 o’clock that night. She admitted she was the escapee from Carthage, and Jasper County authorities came to Kansas and took charge of the prisoner. Bidding adieu to Mrs. Oxley, the News claimed she was a notorious burglar and thief who had “broken out of several different jails” and a Joplin paper dubbed her “the female horse thief.”
Upon her return to Carthage, Della was assigned to her old quarters, but she was securely chained to the floor. On November 4^th, officers discovered her shackles had been filed almost in two. A threat from the sheriff to put her in a dungeon induced her to give away the two accomplices who had helped her escape the first time and had supplied the file for her latest jailbreak attempt. Both young men were arrested and lodged in jail at Carthage.

On November 11, Della was shipped to Jefferson City to serve the five-year term she had been previously assessed. A correspondent to the Fort Worth Gazette gave readers an exaggerated and inaccurate description of Della at the time, starting with the fiction that she was thirty-six years old and was born “in a New England village.” In addition, Della had supposedly become “a hardened criminal” when she was only twelve years old. The Gazette correspondent continued his extravagant account: “She drifted to the West and organized a band of horse thieves and burglars, which had for its range the states of Kansas and Western Missouri. For the past ten years these robbers have been living off of the farmers of this section, and all the raids and burglaries were planned by the woman, Della Oxley.”

Della was, in truth, only twenty-one years old, not thirty-six, and ten years earlier she was not organizing a gang of horse thieves in Kansas and Missouri, since she was an eleven-year-old girl living in Indiana with her parents at the time.
Della was released from the Missouri State Penitentiary on August 13, 1895, under the state’s three-fourths law. The following January, Perry Oxley filed for a divorce, and later in 1896, Della was remarried in Illinois. She died in Taylorville, Illinois, in 1898 at the age of 28.

This story is condensed from my book Wicked Women of Missouri.