About 4:30 Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1902, four shots rang out in an upstairs room of the Watson building at the corner of Walnut and Campbell streets in Springfield. Immediately afterward, nineteen-year-old William Pittman raced down the stairs and ran a half block north on Campbell to the Waddle Hotel, yelling for someone to summon a doctor. Pittman was seriously injured with a gunshot wound to the head, but he was conscious and talked freely to those on the scene. He said a young woman named Anna McMahan had shot him without provocation as he stood before a mirror and that she then turned the gun on herself. Investigators hurried to the Watson building and found the twenty-three-year-old Miss McMahan dead in her room, but the circumstantial evidence they discovered was at direct odds with the story Pittman had told.
The woman had been shot twice, once in the back of the head and once directly between the shoulder blades, making it virtually impossible for her have fired the shots herself. Also, the path of the bullet through Pittman’s head suggested a self-inflicted wound. Investigators theorized that Pittman had killed Miss McMahan and then turned the gun on himself in a failed suicide attempt. They thought Pittman had been infatuated with Anna, learned she'd been with another man during the weekend, and committed the crime in a jealous rage.
Pittman, who lived outside Springfield with his parents, had come to town on or about Monday, December 1, and taken a room at the Waddle Hotel, because he had been summoned to testify before a grand jury during the coming week. Pittman promptly made the acquaintance of Anna McMahan, who worked at the hotel as a dining room girl, and by Thursday she started entertaining him in her room at the Watson building. The pair spent much of their time together over the next couple of days until Pittman left on Saturday to return home for his brother’s birthday.
He came back late the next day and, according to the prosecution theory, discovered tell-tale signs of Anna’s betrayal. He immediately confronted her, and now he was under arrest for her murder.
The day after the shooting, a coroner’s jury, refusing to buy Pittman’s farfetched story, concluded that “Anna McMahan came to her death as the result of a pistol shot fired by William Pittman.” Pittman’s serious condition postponed his preliminary hearing until early 1903, when he was indicted for first-degree murder and bound over for trial in Greene County Criminal Court. At the trial in early April, Coroner Matthews was one of the main prosecution witnesses. He said that it was impossible for the young woman to have fired both shots he’d dug out of her body, that she had no powder burns around her wounds as she would have if she’d been shot at close range, and that the pistol had blood smears on it but Anna had no bloodstains on her hands.
When Pittman got a chance to tell his side of the story, it differed considerable from the tale he’d first told. He still said Anna had shot him first, but he now claimed he wrested the gun from her and shot her in retaliation. He admitted it happened during a jealous quarrel, but he said Anna was the jealous one, not him.
He claimed Anna had told him he was “the prettiest boy in the world” and had declared her love for him. She’d suggested they run away to get married, and she’d become very upset when he balked at the proposition. When he came back to Springfield on Sunday, he told her that he “wouldn’t marry you or any woman like you.”
“Then you will die right here,” Anna declared, as Pittman stood in front of the mirror, and before he could turn around, she fired. Seriously injured but still on his feet, he turned and grabbed the gun away from Anna, who was standing very close to him. Hurt and angry, he “fired just as fast as (he) could,” and then dropped the gun and ran down the stairs to the street.
The prosecution subjected Pittman to a grueling cross-examination, forcing him to deny statements that, according to other witnesses, he’d made in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The defense called two female co-workers of Miss McMahan to corroborate the defendant’s testimony that Anna was the aggressor in their relationship. The defense also offered to show that Anna McMahan’s reputation for chastity was not good, but the judge sustained the prosecution’s objection to such testimony. Whether Anna was, indeed, a woman of easy virtue is in doubt, because other evidence suggests that she had a good reputation.
The trial ended with the jury split 11-1 in favor of conviction. Not wanting to take a chance on a second trial after such a close call, Pittman threw himself on the mercy of the court and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Despite his pleas for leniency, the judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison.
Pittman found a more sympathetic listener in Missouri governor Alexander Dockery. The prisoner arrived in Jefferson City on May 6, 1903, to serve his fifty-year sentence, but he was pardoned on September 10, 1904, after only a year and a third.
This blog entry is condensed from my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.
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