A Courtroom Killing: One Lawyer Attacks Another

    On March 18, 1922, attorney Robert Stemmons appeared in court at Mount Vernon to seek a parole for one of his clients, Lavanus Jackson, who'd recently been sentenced to jail on an illegal liquor charge. J. B. Tillman, another Lawrence County attorney, had played a part in Jackson's arrest, and he was present in court as well. During arguments, Stemmons strongly criticized Tillman for the part he had taken in Jackson's arrest.
    After hearing the arguments, the judge denied Jackson's request for a parole. Tillman then asked for and was granted permission to explain his part in Jackson's arrest. After some preliminary remarks, the sixty-year-old Tillman remarked in reference to the thirty-year-old Stemmons that "young lawyers sometimes let their ambition get away with them and say too much" and that it was "a good thing for young lawyers to be called down."
    Strongly resenting the remarks, Stemmons, who was seated across the courtroom from Tillman, sprang from his chair, ran across the room, and struck Tillman. The two men went into a clinch and fell to the floor. While they were still struggling, Jackson came over and started kicking Tillman in the head. A deputy sheriff, aided by several other men, quickly separated the combatants, but Tillman did not rise after the fight had been broken up. Seriously injured, he was rushed to a local hospital, where he died the next day.
    Even before Tillman died, Stemmons, Jackson, and the latter's brother, who had taken some small part in the assault, were arrested. After Tillman died, all three were charged with first-degree murder. The cases against the three men were subsequently severed, and Stemmons was ultimately tried in January 1923 on a reduced charge of manslaughter. He was convicted and fined $500. However, Stemmons appealed the verdict, and the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in his favor in June 1924. The justices found that Tillman had died as a direct consequence of Jackson kicking him in the head and that Stemmons had not conspired with his client nor said anything whatsoever to encourage Jackson in the attack. Therefore, he could not be found guilty of any level of intentional homicide.
    Meanwhile, Lavanus Jackson was also found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was paroled after serving slightly over half of his sentence. Apparently all charges were dropped against his brother, or else he got off with a very light sentence.
    I want to thank my friend Tom Carver for calling this incident to my attention and for providing much of the information on which the story above is based.

Fair Grove Paddling Controversy

    During the school year 1960-1961, an incident happened at Fair Grove High School, where I was a freshman, that, in the words of school superintendent John Ewing "put Fair Grove on the map, but not in a good way." As I'm sure any of my classmates who might read this (or any of my schoolmates slightly older than me) can probably guess, I'm talking about the time that 27 high school boys were paddled (some said beaten) for disobeying a school rule en masse.
    Prior to the 60-61 school year, Fair Grove had an open campus policy for high school students, meaning they could leave the school at noon and go to the stores and cafes in downtown Fair Grove, a quarter-mile away, to buy snacks and lunch items. At the beginning of the new year, the school administration instituted a new rule closing the campus with the exception that we were still allowed to go to the service station at the foot of the hill directly across the street from campus. There was considerable grumbling about this new change when it was first announced, but few, if any, students chose to defy the rule at that time.
    However, it was one of those things that more or less built up over time. There was a lot of dissatisfaction among certain students and a lot of friction between them and teachers over a number of occurrences throughout the school year. Fair Grove had a poor basketball team, partly because a couple of its star players had been declared scholastically ineligible. Certain other players, along with their parents, thought they should be getting to play more than they were. Then in late January or early February, two cheerleaders got kicked off the cheerleading squad for riding home from an away game with their boyfriends instead of riding the bus as they were supposed to do.
    After a stretch of cold, winter weather, Wednesday, February 15, 1961, dawned clear and fair. A perfect day to skip school! Or at least to ditch school during the noon hour and go to Fair Grove. And that's exactly what about 40 students, among a student body of less than 200, did. They were mostly boys, although rumor has it that at least a couple of girls also skipped out. Only 27 boys were caught, and later that day, the 27 were given spankings by four teachers: principal Elbert Proctor, agriculture teacher Glen Cochran, shop teacher Gilbert Barclay, and Adren McKinley, who taught various subjects. The boys were taken one at a time into a room, with the teachers presumably alternating on which one administered the paddling. The paddles used were about one-half inch thick, four inches wide, and 24 inches long, and each boy received six licks. Some of the spankings were administered so hard that at least one of the paddles broke in two. The offending students were also suspended from school for three days.
    The punishments caused an immediate uproar, because they were viewed as overly harsh by many school patrons, mainly by the parents of the boys who received the spankings but also by good number of parents who had no children in high school or whose children were not spanked. For instance, Mrs. R. D. Talmadge, who had two kids who went to school at Fair Grove but were not involved in the spanking incident, spoke out against the severity of the discipline. "The boys were whipped pretty hard," she said. "It was not what I would call a 'spanking.' I do not think this is the proper way to correct our teenagers." Some of the parents whose sons had been spanked threatened to sue the school, and at least one or two took the initial step of contacting a lawyer.
    The controversy made front-page headlines in Springfield newspapers for the next two days. The school board called a special meeting Wednesday evening to meet with a handful of parents whose boys had been spanked. Apparently some sort of tentative understanding was reached, but this meeting involved only a few parents. On Thursday morning, the day after the spankings, superintendent Ewing, who was not at school the previous day, called an all-school assembly and addressed the student body. With the county superintendent of schools present as well, Ewing defended the paddlings as "proper, legal and necessary." He told the students that most of their fellow students supported the teachers and the administration. He complimented those who had abided by the rules on Wednesday and especially those few who had tried to talk their friends out of going to town. Van Ricketts, student body president, also addressed the assembly, saying that the student council supported the teachers.
    But neither the hastily called board meeting nor the school assembly did much to calm the storm that was still brewing at Fair Grove, and the school faculty requested an emergency meeting with the school board and school patrons for the purpose of receiving their assurances that they, the teachers, would be supported in meting out future discipline or else they were prepared to walk off the job. A few teachers had received anonymous, threatening calls. Superintendent Ewing didn't help matters when he told reporters that several of the boys involved in the spanking incident were "constant troublemakers" and that the school would be fine if the parents didn't "interfere." It was this bad publicity that many parents objected to almost as much as the spankings themselves. "It makes the students appear to be juvenile delinquents," said Mrs. Talmadge, "and this is not the truth."
    On Friday morning, a carload of boys who had been suspended drove to the school and parked on the grounds. School officials called Greene County deputies, but the boys were gone by the time the lawmen arrived. School was dismissed early Friday afternoon so that the faculty could meet in private before the special board meeting they had requested was scheduled to take place at 3:30 p.m.
    At the 3:30 meeting, all but two of the parents of the boys who had been spanked showed up, and those two had previously sent word that they did, indeed, support the board and the teachers. About 300 people in total attended the meeting, held in the elementary auditorium. Board president Boyd Holladay and his freshman son, Steve, who was one of the boys spanked, were the first to "parade' before the teachers and other board members and offer their assurances that they would support the school administration and teachers. Another board member, Burnie Huff, and his son Howard, another of the truants, also assured the assembly that "it wouldn't happen again." Emory Moore and his son, Jerry, also appeared before the group. Moore, who had been one of the parents most angered by the harsh punishments, admitted that he'd been "somewhat agitated" earlier. He wasn't upset by the fact that the boys had been disciplined, Moore said, but by the way they were punished. "We agree with the teachers and the school board that the boys needed to be punished, but not beat. The boys took their punishment and were more men than the teachers to take a whipping like that." Moore displayed a broken paddle and indicated that others had been found hidden in a bin near the room where the spankings took place. By the time the meeting was over, though, Moore said he and his son were ready to support the board and the teachers. "Maybe there'll be better harmony than we had before."
    Toward the end of the meeting, the school board unanimously passed a resolution expressing support for the administration and teachers and specifying that any student whose parents did not support the resolution would be expelled for the rest of the school year. Any student involved in the recent spanking episode who got into serious trouble again during the current school year would also be expelled.
    For those of you who are wondering, no, I was not one of the students who was spanked, because I didn't leave campus on that fateful day. I guess it was partly because I had never had the privilege of an open campus prior to that year anyway. At least I'd never taken advantage of the privilege. So, I didn't miss not having it. But Steve Holladay wasn't the only one of my classmates who did get in trouble. I think there were at least a couple of other freshmen besides Steve, but it was mostly upperclassmen.
    The photo below from a Springfield newspaper shows Mrs. Wade Kepley, Emory Moore, Mrs. Kepley's son Adrian, and George Shaffer III examining a paddle that broke into pieces as it was being used to administer spankings to 27 Fair Grove students.

The Murder of John Weathers

    On June 4, 1864, a young white man named Mason Brockman went fishing near Liberty Landing in Clay County with some acquaintances, and after a while, Brockman left the group and went to a nearby store to get some whiskey. While he was there, according to Brockman's later story, a slave named John Weathers passed by driving "a nifty ox team," and Brockman followed. Weathers stopped and offered Brockman a ride, which he accepted. After the two had gone a little ways further, two men jumped out from some brush and ordered Weathers to stop. When he didn't promptly obey, they started shooting. Brockman jumped out of the wagon and escaped to the brush, but Weathers was shot and killed.
    The next day a cousin of the black man's owner reported the murder to Union authorities at Liberty, and a detachment of soldiers went out and arrested several suspects in the case, including Brockman, Perry Mitchell, and Jack Pryor. Brockman gave a statement saying that Mitchell and Pryor, who were two of the men he'd gone fishing with, were the men who'd jumped out of the brush and ordered Weathers to stop. He saw Mitchell fire one shot at Weathers before he (Mitchell) jumped out of the wagon and escaped to the brush. He heard three or four more shots after that but wasn't sure whether Mitchell fired them all or Pryor also fired a weapon.
    A few days later, the case was turned over to civil authorities, but despite the eyewitness testimony, little, if anything else was apparently done to prosecute Mitchell and Pryor. The death of Weathers was apparently not deemed important enough to vigorously prosecute.

The Murder of William Humes

    Joplin, as many readers probably know, was a wild and wooly place during its early days. In fact, local historians have referred to its very earliest couple of years, when it was really just a booming mining camp, as the "reign of terror" because of the lawlessness that characterized the place. However, it is often hard to find information about the first few years of Joplin's history, because few local newspapers from the era survive. Although Joplin got its start as a mining camp in the late summer of 1870 and, within two or three years after that, one or more newspapers were publishing, only scattered dates survive prior to about 1879 or 1880. So, even someone like me, who has written fairly extensively about Joplin's history, may not know much about a lot of events that happened during the town's earliest days. An example of an event I had seen mentioned before but did not know much at all about until just recently is the murder of  William Humes by Lee Goodwin at the Joplin post office on the evening of May 1, 1878.

    Goodwin, a prominent Joplin grocer, was in the post office about 6 p.m. when William H. Humes, an engineer employed by Porter and Dorsey Mining and Surveying, walked in to pick up his mail. Goodwin immediately accosted Humes before he could call for his mail. "Defend yourself!" he exclaimed as he simultaneously drew a revolver and shot Humes in the left side. The victim collapsed and died within an hour, while Humes gave himself up to the police.

    This wasn't the first time Goodwin had tried to kill Humes. He'd made an attempt on Humes's life just a few days earlier and been arrested, but he was released on $500 bond after a preliminary hearing and was still out on bond at the time of the murder. "There seems to have been woman at the bottom of the trouble" between the two men, said a correspondent to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. A contrary report in a Springfield newspaper said the difficulty grew out of a game of cards, and it made no mention of a previous attempt on Humes's life.  

    At his preliminary examination on the murder charge held in Joplin on May 6, Goodwin was bound over for trial in the circuit court during the June term, and he was taken to Carthage that evening and lodged in the county jail. Upon examining the prisoner, a Carthage newspaper reporter described him as about 30 years old, with light hair, a very light mustache, a sharp, thin nose, and a noticeably receding hairline. "Altogether his physiognomy is bad." 

    Goodwin's trial for first degree murder at the June term ended in a hung jury, and he was again released on bond to await the new trial. In early November, he sold his interest in the grocery business and made arrangements with a young Joplin woman to meet him in Kansas City, The woman left for Kansas City on the morning of November 5, but before departing, she told a friend about the arrangements. The friend reported the matter to police, who promptly re-arrested Goodwin as he was preparing to leave for Kansas City as well.

    On December 21, 1878, Goodwin's second trial ended with a not guilty verdict after jury deliberations that lasted 24 hours. "The verdict will create astonishment," opined a correspondent to the Globe-Democrat, "for it was generally believed that he would hang." The correspondent explained the unexpected verdict by suggesting that the defense presented extenuating circumstances while the judge's instructions to the jury made no allowance for conviction on a lesser charge than first-degree murder.