A Robber Lynched Near Minersville

About 8:30 p.m. on the evening of November 10, 1873, two men burst into the home of James A. Hunter four miles north of Minersville (now Oronogo) with revolvers drawn. They found twenty-six-year-old Catherine Hunter still up but had to rouse her husband from his bed. Putting their pistols to Hunter’s head, they demanded his money. The thirty-five-year-old Hunter handed over his pocketbook, which contained only about seventy-five cents.

One of the intruders stood guard over Hunter and his wife while the other ransacked the house in search of valuables. Hunter recognized the man guarding them as a fellow he'd seen in Minersville that very day, but he kept mum. Meanwhile, the other robber broke open two or three trunks, a washstand, and a table drawer, but the search proved fruitless, yielding only a pair of gold bracelets belonging to Mrs. Hunter. The desperadoes carried off their ill-gotten gain without further molesting the couple. 

The next morning, Hunter trekked into Minersville to report the crime. He swore out a warrant before Justice Isaac Fountain, describing the robbers. Hunter and Fountain began scouring the town for any sign of the crooks, and they soon spotted the man who'd stood guard over Hunter and his wife the night before. As they placed him under arrest, Hunter remarked, “Last night you had me; now I have you.”

The culprit identified himself as Alfred T. Onan. He and four companions were all taken into custody and guarded overnight at Minersville. The next morning, November 12, the five prisoners appeared before Justice Fountain, and all were discharged expect Onan, who was held in lieu of $1,000 bond to appear at the circuit court in Carthage on a robbery charge.

Onan lived on Shoal Creek in Newton County, but he was also known around Minersville, where he sometimes worked in the mines. He was about thirty years old, was stoutly built, weighed about 180 pounds, and had red complexion and a light mustache. He was supposedly a desperate man who had been through many “hard scrapes and close contests,” and, according to at least one report, he claimed to have ridden with notorious Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill during the Civil War. He might have been a desperate man, but records show he was not a Quantrill man.

The plan was for Onan to be escorted to Carthage later the same day after he was indicted by Justice Fountain, but the guards, who had been up all night watching the prisoners, fell asleep and let the train go by. Resorting to a back-up plan, they loaded Onan into a buggy about sundown and started for Carthage with him. The posse had proceeded only about a mile when they were waylaid by a party of about fifteen disguised and armed men. The mob demanded that Onan be turned over to them, and the guards offered no resistance. While part of the gang covered the guards, the others took Onan a short distance into the woods and hanged him from a blackjack oak tree.

As soon as the lynching had been accomplished, the vigilantes released the guards, and they returned to Minersville to report what had happened. The next day, November 13, Fountain headed to Carthage to report the travesty of justice. On his way, he rode by the scene of the lynching and saw Onan’s dead body still “dangling between heaven and earth.”

This blog entry is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Midnight Associations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo.

Disappearance of Mary Margaret Fullerton

The disappearance and presumed murder of Mary Margaret Fullerton in early 1868 was one of the strangest and most sensational criminal cases in southwest Missouri history. Yet, it is also one that many people have probably never heard about because the woman’s body was never found, because Judge Lynch meted out vigilante justice in secrecy, and because the whole affair was not widely reported.
In 1866, a teenage girl named Mary Williams and a young man named Daniel Hosey eloped from their Ohio home and came west. Mary's husband proved to a shyster. Adopting various aliases, he often traveled away from home conning people out of their money and sometimes even compelling Mary to accompany him disguised as a young boy. 
In the fall of 1867, Hosey came to Jasper County alone and settled in Sarcoxie. Going by the name Captain A. G. Hutton and representing himself as a single man, he made the acquaintance of Mary Margaret Fullerton, a thirty-six-year old widow with a pretty sixteen-year-old daughter named Mary. “Hutton” sent for his wife, telling her to don her male attire before she arrived, while he struck up a romance with Mary Fullerton. When his wife got to Sarcoxie, she passed herself off as a poor, sickly lad named Tommy Turley whom Hutton had befriended and taken as his traveling companion. Feeling sorry for the “boy,” Mrs. Fullerton took Tommy into her home. Then on December 15, 1867, Hutton and Mary Fullerton were married in the presence of his first wife, with “Tommy” helping the young bride-to-be prepare for her nuptials.
Hutton tried to finagle Mrs. Fullerton into signing over her estate to the daughter he had recently married, but she refused. Resorting to a more desperate plan, he announced that he needed to move the ailing “Tommy” to the lad’s relatives in Ohio, and he offered to give Mrs. Fullerton a hundred dollars and pay her expenses if she would accompany the sick boy and take care of him during the trip. Margaret balked at the proposition but finally relented.
Leaving his new bride at home, Hutton, his first wife in the persona of Tommy, and Mrs. Fullerton struck north in a wagon through Lawrence and Dade counties headed for Sedalia about the middle of February, 1868. That was the last anyone ever heard from Margaret Fullerton.
Hutton and his wife (i.e. Tommy) continued to Sedalia before returning home to Sarcoxie in early March. When Mary Fullerton asked where her mother was, the two were unable to give a satisfactory answer. Hutton now claimed that "Tommy" was actually his younger half-brother, but Mary also began to have doubts about Tommy's identity, especially after seeing him in possession of some female clothing belonging to Mrs. Fullerton.
After remaining at the Fullerton home for about two weeks, Hutton and Tommy once again struck out for Sedalia. Before reaching Sedalia, Hutton told his first wife to change into her female attire and to assume the identity of Mrs. Fullerton so that she could sign the widow’s name to a power of attorney. Hutton had the document drawn up at a lawyer’s office in Sedalia, and his wife executed it on March 29th by signing the name “M. M. Fullerton.” Mary then left for St. Louis, while Hutton returned to Sarcoxie in early April with his power of attorney in hand.
Almost as soon as he got back, he started selling off parts of Mrs. Fullerton’s estate, and when questioned about the propriety of his actions, he produced the power of attorney. In some cases, Hutton accepted considerably below-market value for the property, and his haste to liquidate the widow's assets increased suspicion against him. By the middle of April, the excitement against "Hutton" reached such a pitch that some of his neighbors took matters into their own hands. They first arrested him on suspicion and lodged him in Sarcoxie. When burglars tools were found among his effects, the vigilantes grew even more aroused, and on the night of April 27 they took him from the Sarcoxie home and strung him up to a tree about three miles east of town. 
About the time of the lynching, Gilbert Schooling, Sarcoxie postmaster, set out for St. Louis to try to trace a letter found among Hosey's belongings that was addressed to "William Lee" from a St. Louis address and signed "M. M. F.” Schooling assumed the initials referred to Mrs. Fullerton, but instead of finding the older woman, he found Mary Hosey pretending to be Mary Margaret Fullerton. Schooling had the young woman arrested and took her back to Jasper County. During the trip, she confessed the scam that she and her husband had pulled, but she said everything she had done was under duress from him. She said she thought her husband had killed Mrs. Fullerton the first night after they left Sarcoxie together, but she herself had nothing to do with the murder. She had slept through it and her husband had refused to talk about it when she woke up. She agreed to try to help locate Margaret Fullerton's body, but no sign of the body was found.
Schooling reached Jasper County with his prisoner in early May, and she was charged with accessory to murder. Her preliminary hearing was scheduled for early June, but before that date, she was granted a change of venue to Lawrence County. By the time the citizens around Sarcoxie learned of the venue change, Mary had already had her hearing in Mt. Vernon on June 1. She was released for lack of evidence, especially the lack of a body. Mary left the area the very next day, and on June 3, the date the hearing had originally been scheduled in Jasper County, a posse of men rode into Carthage from Sarcoxie only to learn that Tommy (i.e. Mary Hosey) had already been released.
This blog entry is a greatly condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Midnight Assassinations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo.

Jim Kunze's Murder of Constable Owen Booth

On the night of December 22, 1896, Owen Booth, constable of Clay Township in north-central Douglas County, Missouri, learned that 20-year-old James Kunze, who was wanted for burglarizing a store on nearby Dry Creek, was attending a dance at a residence near the small community of Bryant. Accompanied by Findley Township constable Perry Gentry, Booth went to the location about 10:30 p.m. to arrest the fugitive. Booth sent Gentry inside to make sure Kunze was there, and Gentry came back and said he was.
Booth called Kunze outside, telling him he was under arrest, and the wanted man soon sprang from the house and took off running. The constable gave chase and yelled for Kunze to halt, but the fugitive paid no mind. Booth then fired a couple of warning shots into the air above the fleeing man's head, but this, too, did not deter his flight. Finally, the constable took aim and fired at Kunze, but he missed his mark and, instead, hit an innocent bystander in the leg.
By this time, Kunze was nearing a fence, and his pursuer was close on his heels. The fleeing man was in the act of jumping the fence when Booth made a grab for him. Kunze whirled and fired, sending a pistol ball into the constable's head and killing him instantly. The murderer then made his escape, as several bystanders looked on without attempting to stop him. A posse was organized shortly afterward but could not locate Kunze, who was thought to be headed for Arkansas "through the jungles of Taney County."
Sure enough, Kunze was apprehended in Bentonville, Arkansas, less than a month later, and the Douglas County sheriff made preparations to go after him. As he was getting ready to leave, however, he telegraphed authorities in Bentonville and learned that Kunze had escaped.
A few months later, in May of 1897, the fugitive was taken into custody again in El Paso County, Colorado, where he was going by an assumed name. Douglas County officers traveled to Colorado and brought Kunze back.
He was tried during the September 1897 term of Douglas County Circuit Court and found guilty of second degree murder. Sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary, he was received there in mid-October and discharged in April 1905, after having served seven and a half years, three-fourths of his assessed term.

Madame Yale Comes to Missouri

About 1890, 38-year-old Maude Mayberg claimed she had found an elixir that she called Fruitcura which had transformed her from sickness to health after doctors had given up on helping her. Calling herself Madame Yale, she soon started marketing Fruitcura in newspapers and at personal appearances across the country. Her message also emphasized beauty in addition to wellness, as she claimed she had transformed herself from a "sallow, fat, exhausted woman" into one of the rare beauties of the period. In keeping with her emphasis on beauty, she introduced other skin care products such as "Blood Tonic," "Complexion Bleach," and "Blush of Youth." A forerunner to modern-day beauty gurus like Gwyneth Paltrow, Madame Yale preached her "Religion of Beauty" through a series of "Beauty Talks" all across the land. At a time when cosmetics were considered a "questionable moral choice" for women, Madame Yale claimed her products would "transfer women from the inside out" rather than just cover up imperfections with makeup.
In late 1894, Madame Yale was scheduled for an appearance at the Tootle Theatre in St. Joseph, Missouri, on December 1. In the lead-up to the event, it was promoted in local newspapers. The St. Joseph Herald proclaimed that Madame Yale would "tell women all about health and beauty. She herself is her own best advertisement. At 41 years of age, she is as beautiful as it is possible for a woman to be." Her "beautiful rounded neck...is as white as the down on a swan's breast. Her hair is golden, and there is a gleam of sunshine in the hazel of her eyes." The Herald made it clear that the lecture was for women only, as men were not to be admitted.
The day after the lecture, the Herald was even more effusive in its praise of Madame Yale, emphasizing, however, that her extraordinary beauty had not come naturally to her. Her beauty and charm had, instead, been largely obtained through years of treatment and hard study. "The question of beautifying the female has been made a life study by her and that she has been most successful can be readily seen by a glance at her features and figure, which have all the plumpness and freshness of a miss 18 years of age" even though Madame Yale was 42. The newspaper also praised Madame Yale for her "admirable stage presence." She was "graceful in all her movements" and was "a ready and pleasing speaker." From the drop of the curtain, Madame Yale had the undivided attention of the audience, said the Herald. She was thoroughly informed and never paused or stumbled in her delivery. During her lecture, Madame Yale claimed, among other things, that the aging process held no terror for her and that she expected to retain her current beauty even if she lived to be 75. In addition to hawking her beauty products, she also emphasized exercise and diet. Madame Yale demonstrated some of her recommended exercises and was a gem of "delicate grace."
Madame Yale continued to be well known into the early 1900s and made a fortune from her beauty products, estimated at about $500,000 or 15 million in today's dollars. Her career finally fell off after the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906 and two years later the government sued Madame Yale for "misbranding of drug preparations." One critic observed that her "marvelous preparations" had been shown to be "marvelous humbugs." Madame Yale gradually faded into obscurity, although her products continued to sell on a smaller scale for another twenty years or so.