God Don’t Love a Liar

After fifteen-year-old Millie Atwood married Roy Plum at Cherokee, Kansas, in 1907, “domestic troubles” came quickly, and by the summer of 1908, the couple had already split. Millie’s mother and father had practically disowned her after the wedding and had moved away. Cast adrift by a faithless husband and unrelenting parents, Millie needed a lifeline. When J. G. Miller’s traveling carnival came to neighboring Weir about the first of July 1908 for a week-long stay, Millie seized the opportunity to make her own way. Traveling five miles to Weir, she hooked on with the carnival as a cook for the other employees.

As it turned out, joining the carnival proved to be the farthest thing from a lifeline for Millie Plum.

Among the carnival’s other employees was twenty-four-year-old William “Willie” Wilson. The young black man had left his Louisiana home in early 1908 to join Miller’s carnival. But working for the carnival was a lonely job. So, Wilson couldn’t help but notice when the pretty sixteen-year-old “girl-woman” joined the circus at Weir.

About the 5th of July, the carnival moved from Weir to Carl Junction, Missouri, for another week-long run. The engagement ended Saturday, July 11, and late that night Wilson, according to later evidence, slipped into the car where Millie slept with the intent of “doing business with her.” When she refused his advances and sprang up in bed, he slugged her or choked her into unconsciousness. Presuming she was dead, he looped a rope around her neck, and dragged her to the side door of the car. He then carried her toward an empty Frisco box car that sat on the tracks about two hundred yards away. Halfway there, he grew tired, and when he laid her down, he noticed that she was still breathing faintly. Using the rope around her neck, he dragged her the rest of the way to the box car. If she wasn’t dead at first, she was by the time he got through dragging her.

Wilson intended to put Millie’s body in the box car to hide it, but he was too exhausted to lift it into the car. He also heard stirring inside the box car and realized it wasn’t vacant. Abandoning his plan to hide the body, he quickly retreated to the carnival equipment car, where he had his sleeping quarters.

Millie’s body was discovered about 1:45 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 12, just an hour and a half after the attack. Fresh tracks of a man in sock feet were found leading back to the equipment car, and the size and shape of the footprints fit Wilson’s feet. Wilson denied any knowledge of the crime, but he was arrested and taken to the calaboose in Carl Junction for interrogation. Under grilling and prodding, Wilson broke down and gave what was described as a half confession-half denial. He admitted going into Millie’s car, but he said that she so resented his proposition that she came at him with a butcher knife. He knocked her down in self-defense and ran out of the car, but she sprang up, chased after him, and came at him with the knife again. He then knocked her unconscious and, thinking she was dead, carried and dragged her to the Frisco box car.

After his quasi-confession, Wilson was taken after daylight Sunday to the Jasper County Jail at Carthage on a murder charge. Here he was again interrogated, and late Sunday afternoon, he gave a fuller confession. Wilson admitted that Millie did not come at him with a butcher knife and did not strike or cut him. Authorities felt Wilson was now largely telling the truth.

Large crowds attended Wilson’s two-day trial for first-degree murder in mid-December 1905, and “sentiment was very strong against the Negro,” according to the Webb City Register. Arguing for the death penalty, the state relied on the officers to whom Wilson had allegedly confessed as its primary witnesses. Wilson, the only defense witness, took the stand to deny that he killed Millie Plum or that he had ever confessed.

Unconvinced by Wilson’s denial, the jury came back on December 18 with a guilty verdict and a sentence of death by hanging. A defense appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court automatically stayed the execution. The defense contended Wilson’s confession had been given under duress, but the high court, in its November 1909 ruling, allowed the confession and upheld the lower court’s verdict. The new execution date was set for January 12, 1910. Wilson received the news with the same careless, jovial attitude that had won him many friends among the prisoners at the Japser County jail during the year and a half he’d  been incarcerated.

A number of people lobbied for leniency on behalf of the condemned prisoner, and and the Missouri governor issued two stays before Wilson’s execution date was finally set for March 4, 1910. The condemned man spent his last evening chatting with his jail mates, praying, and singing until 2:00 a.m. on the morning of March 4, 1910. Sometime during the evening or night, Wilson reportedly made a final confession to two ministers who had been serving as his spiritual advisors. “The real facts of the case,” he said, “are that I am perfectly guilty.” He said he wanted to go to heaven and he knew “God don’t love a liar.” He asked that a copy of his confession be sent to his mother in Louisiana because he wanted her to know that he told the whole truth. Wilson was hanged outside the jail on the courthouse grounds in Carthage the next morning at shortly before 6:00 a.m.  He was buried in a potter’s field south of Carthage.

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