Aggie Myers: A Woman Condemned to Hang

About daylight on the morning of May 11, 1904, 22-year-old Agnes Myers staggered from her Kansas City home yelling to neighbors that her husband, Clarence, had been murdered. She later told police that Clarence had been killed by two black men who broke into their home earlier that day as the couple slept. One of the intruders attacked Clarence with a knife or razor when a loud noise caused him to spring up in bed, while the other one grabbed her and choked her into insensibility. When she awoke, she found Clarence dead, having bled to death from several slashes to the throat.

Police believed her story at first, but several suspicious circumstances made them to begin to think Agnes knew more about the crime than she was telling. Based on the number and variety of wounds to Clarence’s body, medical examiners thought Clarence had been attacked by two people, one with a blade and one with a blunt instrument, not just one person as she said. They also thought he had been killed earlier than the time at which Agnes said the attack took place. Investigators found a large amount of blood in a part of the house away from where she had said the attack initially took place,  and they also found a blood stained dustpan that had apparently been used to clean up some of the blood. Why would the intruders have taken time to try to clean up their bloody mess?

Mrs. Myers stuck to her story, but authorities continued to watch her closely and to pursue other clues. About the first of July a young man named Frank Hottman, who was known to have been a close friend of Aggie's and who had disappeared from Kansas City right after the crime, was arrested in Walla Walla, Washington, as a suspect in Clarence Myers’s killing. Upon learning of Hottman’s arrest, Agnes repeated her story that two black men had committed the crime, and she denied that she and Frank, who was two years younger than she was, were anything more than good friends who’d known each other all their lives. Despite her continued denials, Agnes was also arrested on suspicion, and a day or so later, Frank confessed that he and Agnes had been lovers for several years and that they planned the murder well in advance because they wanted to be free to marry each other. On the night of the crime, Frank said he went to the Myers home and met Agnes about two a.m. They sneaked into Clarence’s bedroom, but Clarence woke up, yelled at Frank, and grabbed at him. Frank struck Clarence with the large end of a sawed-off pool cue he was carrying, momentarily stunning him. Then while Frank held Clarence, Agnes slashed her husband’s throat several times with his own razor. Confronted with Frank’s confession, Agnes still insisted that she had nothing to do with killing her husband—that perhaps Frank had darkened his skin to disguise himself as a black person and then killed Clarence. The police weren’t convinced by her story.

Hottman was extradited to Missouri in mid-July. During a layover in Denver he tried to commit suicide but was unsuccessful and was brought on to Kansas City. Charged jointly with first-degree murder, Frank and Agnes pleaded not guilty. The cases were severed, and Frank’s trial got underway first. In January 1905, he was convicted and sentenced to hang. In June of the same year, Agnes was also convicted and sentenced to hang. Upon appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld both verdicts, but Missouri governor Joseph W. Folk granted several respites. In April 1907, he finally commuted both sentences to life imprisonment. Hottman died in the state prison hospital in 1923, while Aggie was paroled in early 1935 after serving almost 28 years in the penitentiary.