John Hunt's Murder of his Daughter

On the evening of August 29, 1896, sixty-four-year-old John Hunt of Columbia, Missouri, arrived home in a drunken frenzy and , according to initial reports of the incident, shot his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mattie, twice for no apparent reason. He then chased his fifty-one-year-old wife, Mary, out of the house, firing one or two errant shots at her. Then he promptly mounted a horse and rode away. One report of the affair said that Hunt entered the house, starting shooting, and both women went screaming from the home pursued by the drunken man. Mattie fell dead, and her mother fainted in the garden, where she was found a half hour later. A different report the next day said that, when Hunt arrived home, Mattie came out of the house to meet him and the old man immediately drew his revolver and started shooting without provocation. After receiving a single gunshot wound to the side, the girl fled shrieking from the scene. Hunt then entered the house and started shooting at his wife but missed. She fled the house and collapsed outside, while Hunt rushed back out of the house, mounted his horse, and galloped away. The first report suggested that Mattie's wounds were probably fatal, while the second one said that she was in a serious condition but that her wound was not necessarily fatal.

Shortly after the shooting, a posse organized and went in pursuit of the demented man, who according to the second report, had "borne a bad reputation for several years." 

Hunt was captured on the afternoon of August 30 and charged with felonious assault. After Mattie died from her wound or wounds on September 4, Hunt was "re-arrested" and charged with murder.

At the time of his trial in February of 1897, Hunt's son John armed himself and threatened violence against his mother if she testified against the father. However, the son was arrested, and the mother's testimony, which went on as scheduled, brought out additional facts about the shooting. Hunt and his wife had been arguing a lot in the days and weeks leading up to the crime over the fact that Hunt wanted to sell their place in Columbia and move to the countryside while Mary preferred to stay in town. There were other issues as well, and Hunt was especially abusive when he'd been drinking. He had threatened to kill both his wife and his daughter on more than one occasion. On the fateful evening, he came home from visiting an adult son in the country and immediately started arguing with his wife. Mattie soon came home from grocery shopping and found the couple still in a heated argument. When she told her mother, "I would not stand it," Hunt pulled out his revolver and shot her. 

Hunt's lawyers pleaded insanity, but he was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang in late March. His attorneys petitioned for a new trial, and when the motion was denied, they appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, automatically staying the execution. A newspaper report at the time said Hunt was 78 years old, but this is almost surely an error, since he was listed as 38 in the 1870 census and 46 in the 1880 census. Unless both of the census records were drastically wrong, Hunt could not have been anywhere near 78. More likely he was in his mid-sixties. 

In early December of 1897, the state supreme court upheld the lower court's verdict and reset the execution for January 13, 1898. A newspaper report at the time said that Hunt had been accused 40 years earlier of murdering his stepfather but that sufficient evidence could not be gathered for a conviction. However, shortly after this incident, Hunt had been sent to the state pen on a grand larceny charge, and when he got home he "made love to his cousin" and ended up eloping with her and marrying her over the protestations of her family. This was the same wife who later testified against him for killing their daughter, Mattie. 

Before Hunt's execution date, a sheriff's jury was convened in Boone County to consider the question of his sanity. Described as a "mental and physical wreck," he was declared insane, and an appeal for clemency was subsequently made to the governor. In early January 1898, the governor commuted the condemned man's sentence and ordered him committed to the insane asylum at Nevada.