About 11:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1902, several black men were drinking and supposedly involved in an altercation on West Fourth Street in Pittsburg, Kansas, where a "colored ball" was being held at the nearby Jenness Hall. When city policeman Milt Hinkle arrived on the scene and ordered the men to break up the melee, one of them, Joe Godley, greeted him with an insult. Hinkle undertook to arrest Godley, but he resisted and was aided by two of his brothers, Montgomery (aka Mumford) and Jess Godley. In the ensuing scuffle, Hinkle pulled his pistol and several shots were fired, although it's not clear how many, if any, Hinkle fired himself, because one of the Godley brothers managed to wrest the pistol away from Hinkle. The young black man then fired a shot with the officer's own gun that struck Hinkle in the head, killing him within minutes.
Two of the brothers, Montgomery and Jess, were quickly arrested and taken to the city jail, but Joe managed to escape. Within an hour, a mob formed and marched on the jail. A young lad named Doty, who claimed to be able to identify which man shot Hinkle, accompanied the mob. The vigilantes broke into the jail and overpowered the guards. They went first to that part of the jail where Jess Hinkle was being held, but Doty said he was not the man who had fired the fatal shot. Taken to the part of the jail where Mont Godley was being held, Doty identified Mont as the killer. The cell was promptly broken into, and Mont was taken out and strung up to a nearby trolley post about 1:00 a.m. on Christmas morning.
Hinkle had lived in Pittsburg almost twenty years and was serving his second stint as a city policeman at the time he was killed. Mont Godley's brother Will and an uncle, French Godley, were two of the three victims of the notorious lynchings in Pierce City, Missouri, in August 1901. Joe and Jess Godley had already left Pierce City and were living in Pittsburg at the time, and most of the black people who still lived in Pierce City also left as soon as the atrocity occurred, including Mont and the rest of his family. They joined Joe and Jess in Pittsburg.
Almost from the time Montgomery Godley was lynched in Pittsburg, there was some doubt as to whether he was the man who had actually shot Hinkle. Many people, including a number of law officers, thought Joe was the one who did the actual shooting, but several of those who agreed that the mob probably got the wrong man still tried to justify the lynching to a certain degree by saying that, even though Mont might not have been the actual shooter, he was equally guilty because of his scuffling with and resisting Officer Hinkle.
A manhunt for Joe Godley was quickly undertaken in the wake of his escape, and he was finally arrested in California in April of 1904 and brought back to Kansas. He was tried for murder in February of 1905 and promptly found not guilty. Was the quick verdict of acquittal at least partly an attempt to justify the mob action of two years earlier, an act of denial that the vigilantes had gotten the wrong man?
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