Murder of a Nightwatchman

About noon on Christmas Day of 1899, twenty-five-year-old Edgar Spencer was armed with a knife and causing a disturbance in John Adkins's saloon in Vandalia, Missouri, when thirty-five-year-old nightwatchman Benjamin Eddelman, who happened also to be in the saloon, drew his pistol and ordered Spencer out of the building. Although later evidence suggested that Eddelman's weapon was not even been loaded, Spencer acceded to the threat and let a couple of his acquaintances, who had interceded, escort him out of the saloon.
Spencer went to the local livery, where he expressed anger at having been put out of the saloon and made threats toward Eddelman. Vandalia mayor J. Smelser confronted the irate man, telling him he needed to settle down and that Eddelman had already gone home.
Not long afterwards, however, Smelser found Spencer and Eddelman in front of the saloon exchanging words. He again warned Spencer to settle down or else he would have to put him in jail. Eddelman told the mayor to go ahead and put Spencer in jail because he was tired of fooling with him and didn't want any more trouble from him. However, Smelser allowed two of Spencer's buddies to again escort the troublemaker away.
About two o'clock, though, Spencer showed up at the saloon yet again, and this time he was armed with a pistol. Adkins tried to put him back out, but Spencer walked into an interior room where Eddelman was standing at a counter near an ice chest. Spencer strode up to the nightwatchman, grabbed him by the throat, and shot him in the head, killing him almost instantly. The assailant backed out of the saloon and fled, but he was soon apprehended by the mayor and placed in the calaboose.
At his trial in Audrain County Circuit Court early the next year, Adkins was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to ten years in the state pen. His lawyers appealed the verdict, claiming that Spencer feared for his life because Eddelman had made threats against him. In October of 1900, however, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the verdict, saying that, even if Eddelman had made threats against Spencer, it made no difference unless the defendant was being threatened at the time of the shooting, and there was no evidence at all that such was the case. The high court admonished Spencer that he should be happy he got off with such a light sentence.
Spencer was then transported to the Missouri State Penitentiary in February 1901. Five years later, he found an official who was more sympathetic than the supreme court justices. Missouri governor A. M. Dockery commuted Spencer's sentence in 1906, after he had served only half of his ten-year sentence.