I've heard it said many times that murders involving friends or family members are much more common than murders in which the victim and perpetrator are strangers. My research tends to bear out this statistic. I recently wrote on this blog about a man who murdered his brother-in-law in Webster County in 1893. A similar incident happened just a few years later in nearby Springfield when a man killed his father-in-law in what the Springfield-Leader Democrat called "an explosion of rage."
On May 29, 1897, twenty-five-year-old John Smoote married Cynthia Keeling in Greene County when she was only seventeen. Cynthia's father, William Keeling, objected to the marriage, as he had always disliked Smoote, and the relationship between the two men continued to be anything but cordial after the marriage. The antipathy between the two finally came to head a little over a year later on June 27, 1898.
Cynthia and her husband lived in north Springfield near the junction of the Zoo Park and the Doling Park streetcar lines, and her father lived nearby. All three went to a barn together in the late afternoon of the 27th to milk a cow. As they started back to their respective homes, Keeling asked his daughter why she hadn't been to visit him recently. When she explained that she had been very busy, Keeling gave an angry reply, which caused her husband to confront the older man. The two argued until finally Keeling struck Smoote with the milk bucket he was carrying, spilling milk on both men. Smoote immediately drew a pocket knife and began stabbing Keeling, who soon fell to the ground. The younger man straddled Keeling and continued stabbing him after he was down, until he had delivered a total of eleven wounds.
A neighbor, Daniel Blount, heard the commotion and hurried to the scene on horseback in time to hear Cynthia yell to her husband, "Don't cut him anymore!" Blount also heard Smoote threaten to "cut your damned heart out," although the testimony conflicts on whether these words were directed at his father-in-law or at his wife when she tried to intervene. In either case, Smoote also threatened Blount in the same manner when Cynthia asked him to get off his horse and help out. In the face of Smoote's threat, Blount, instead of dismounting, turned around and left.
When Smoote's anger finally subsided, he tried to pick his father-in-law up and said, "Let's go home," but Keeling couldn't stand and fell back to the ground dead or dying. Later that evening, Smoote went to the sheriff's office, where he turned himself in and handed over the murder weapon. Two deputies, followed by the sheriff, went out to the scene of the crime and brought Keeling's body back to an undertaking establishment, where the coroner conducted an inquest the next morning. The jury concluded that Keeling came to his death by knife wounds inflicted by John Smoote.
At Smoote's preliminary examination in early July, Blount testified that he arrived on the scene in time to see Smoote strike Keeling with the last knife blow and that, when Smoote withdrew the knife, blood spurted as high as the assailant's head. Blount said he did not comply with Mrs. Smoote's request to get down and help because he was scared. Instead, he left to try to get additional help, but by the time he returned Keeling was already dead. Another neighbor, Miss Cordie Carter, also said she arrived on the scene while Smoote was still straddling his victim with the knife in an upraised fist as though getting ready to strike Keeling again. Miss Carter called for Smoote to get up and not stab Keeling again. He obeyed but, as he did so, he told her that he didn't think it was any of her business.
Smoote was held pending the action of a grand jury. On August 1, he was arraigned on a first-degree murder charge, to which he pleaded not guilty.
Blount and Miss Carter were again two of the primary prosecution witnesses at Smoote's trial in early September. They repeated essentially what they'd said at the preliminary hearing. Cynthia Smoote was the main witness for the defense. She said her husband and her father had never gotten along and had often argued. On the day of the murder, her father had called her husband "a damned liar," struck him with the milk pail, and seized him by the collar prior to her husband pulling out his knife. Other defense witnesses confirmed that Keeling was hostile toward Smoote and at least one or two said they thought Keeling was probably drunk on the day of the confrontation between him and his son-in-law. After a two-day trial, the jury came back with a verdict of second-degree murder and a sentence of three and a half years in the state prison. The jury had some difficulty in agreeing, because several jurors wanted a much longer sentence, but they finally relented in order to get any kind of conviction.
Smoote was transferred to the penitentiary in Jefferson City on September 19, 1998. He was discharged in late April of 1901 on the state's three-fourths law. He returned to Springfield, but Cynthia apparently divorced him either during his incarceration or sometime not very long after his release, because in 1910 he was living with a new wife, the couple's newborn baby, and the new wife's kids by a previous marriage.
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