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.