A Most Gruesome Murder

After the decomposing body of Louise Hagenbaugh was discovered on November 27, 1914, in her bed at the rooming house she kept on East Fifth Street in Joplin, it was thought at first that she might have died from asphyxiation, because the room was found to have a slow gas leak. However, other evidence pointed to robbery and murder. A dollar bill and an empty bag in which Mrs. Hagenbaugh, a wealthy divorcee, was known to have carried money were found on the floor near the bed, and a diamond ring with the stone missing was also discovered in the room. Upon closer inspection, investigators found fingerprints on the dead woman’s neck. A Joplin Globe reporter considered the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death “one of the most gruesome mysteries ever recorded in Joplin.”

A post-mortem examination revealed the deceased had indeed met a violent death. In addition to the bruising around her neck, three ribs had been broken, and it was theorized the murderer had crushed the ribs with his knee as he held her down and choked her. The coroner’s jury concluded that Mrs. Hagenbaugh had met death at the hands of some unknown person, but suspicion was already settling on William Webber.

A two-time ex-convict from Illinois, Webber, who also had a number of aliases, had come to Joplin a few weeks earlier and taken a room at Mrs. Hagenbaugh’s place. The woman had last been seen alive on the night of November 19, and Webber had flashed a wad of cash at a downtown saloon the next morning and then left Joplin.

Webber had originally come to Joplin to meet an old Illinois acquaintance named Thomas Whitsell, and the two men kept company during Webber’s brief stay in town. Whitsell, who also roomed at Mrs. Hagenbaugh’s, was arrested and held as a possible accomplice. Meanwhile, Webber, who’d already earned a reputation in Illinois four years earlier as “one of the most desperate criminals of the day,” was nowhere to be found.

Further investigation revealed that, after leaving Joplin on the 20th, Webber traveled to Illinois to meet a woman named Helen Siders. He’d come back to Joplin with the woman and her little girl a couple of days after the murder but then absconded again. It was learned that, in addition to having served one term in the Illinois State Penitentiary for burglary and another for armed robbery (the charge having been reduced from murder), Webber was wanted for robbing a post office at Springfield, Illinois, just a month or so before he came to Joplin. Now, with the latest charge against him, Webber became the focus of a nationwide manhunt.

Webber was finally tracked down and arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota, on February 20, 1915, when he was caught passing a string of bogus money orders under the assumed name of Roy Miller. They were the same money orders he’d stolen from the bank in Springfield, Illinois, prior to coming to Joplin. Federal authorities turned him over to Missouri, and Joplin police officers traveled to St. Paul to bring the accused killer back.

The party reached Joplin on the evening of February 26, and Webber was lodged in the city jail. The next day, he spoke with reporters, declaring that the person who killed Mrs. Hagenbaugh should be hanged but that he didn’t do it. He pointed to the fact that he had come back to Joplin with Mrs. Siders two days after Mrs. Hagenbaugh’s death as evidence that he didn’t kill her. “Would I have come back here knowing that I was facing a murder charge if I had actually committed the crime?” he asked rhetorically.

When Webber’s trial got underway in early May 1915, the prosecution called the Joplin chief of police and the Joplin chief of detectives as its star witnesses. Both men testified that Webber had admitted to them shortly after he was brought back from St. Paul that he might have been partly responsible for Mrs. Hagenbaugh’s death. According to their testimony, Webber told them that Mrs. Hagenbaugh was jealous because Webber was paying attention to another woman who lived in the Hagenbaugh rooming house, that they argued in a hallway when Webber started to go to the other woman’s room, and that he struck her and knocked her against a bannister or stove. He carried Mrs. Hagenbaugh to her room and placed her in bed but did not think she was seriously hurt. The state said the reason Webber came back to Joplin with Mrs. Siders was that he planned to dispose of Mrs. Hagenbaugh’s body, but when he learned that her building had been raided by police as a possible house of ill repute while he was gone and when he could not locate Thomas Whitsell, he again took flight.

The defense pursued the theory that Mrs. Hagenbaugh had indeed died of asphyxiation as the man who discovered the body first thought. They called an expert witness who testified that a person who died of asphyxiation could well have spots on the neck similar to bruises made by choking.

On May 7, the jury found Webber guilty of first degree murder and recommended life imprisonment. After Webber’s conviction, charges against Whitsell were dropped. Webber was transported to the state prison in Jefferson City in early June.

Webber’s lawyers appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but in July 1916, the justices confirmed the verdict of the lower court. In late August of the same year, Webber and three other inmates escaped from the state prison. Webber was recaptured in January 1917 near his old stomping grounds of Springfield, Illinois.

Despite the escape,  Missouri governor Sam Baker paroled Webber in October 1924 on the recommendation of the State Penal Board.

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