“Dobb” Adams Goes on a Rampage

   By early 1928, Springfield resident Newell “Dobb” Adams had been in and out of jail, and he was well known to city policemen. But few people could have foreseen the violent rampage Adams would go on later that year. Perhaps only his twenty-three-year-old wife, Meada, who had been the object of her husband’s violent temper on several occasions.
   In mid-June, Adams beat his wife so badly she left him and went to stay with her sister Lona in Kansas City. No one would tell Adams where his estranged wife had gone, but he meant to find out. Tanked up on liquor, he summoned a Springfield taxi during the early afternoon of June 18, and a cabbie named Roy Wells drove him to the West Division residence of twenty-three-year-old Zella St. Clair, one of Meada’s best friends. Adams lied to Zella to get her to go with him, but as soon as she got in the car, Adams became abusive, demanding to know where his wife was. When Zella said she didn’t know, Adams pulled out a revolver and ordered Wells to drive out of town on North Grant.
   Five miles north of town, Adams forced Wells to stop, get out of the car, and walk up the road. Adams then dragged Zella from the vehicle and again demanded to know where his wife was. When Zella refused to say, Adams shot her in the stomach, gravely wounding her. Wells, hearing the gunshot and the woman’s screams, hurried to a nearby farmhouse to call authorities.
   Adams left the scene on foot but quickly hitched a ride back into Springfield. The crazed Adams then went to the home of his mother-in-law, Sarah Whalin, where he found Sarah and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Edith McCrary. Another sister of Meada, Edith was a pregnant newlywed.
   Appearing peaceful at first, Adams soon flew into a rage when the two women refused to tell him where Meada was. He pulled his revolver on Sarah, and when she still refused, he shot her twice in the stomach.
   The madman then made a dash toward Edith, attacking her with a knife and the butt of his revolver.
   When things calmed down, Adams ordered Edith to call a cab, and after it picked him up, she ran to a neighbor’s house for help. She fainted and woke up in an ambulance, as she and her mother were being rushed to a hospital.
   Meanwhile, Adams sought refuge on College Street at the home of a distant cousin. Acting on a tip, police located the fugitive at the College Street address about seven o’clock that evening. Adams shot and killed Officer Francis DeArmond and engaged Officers W. K. Webb and Tony Oliver in a furious shootout before surrendering.
   Taken to the Greene County Jail, Adams was whisked away in an automobile when a threatening mob began gathering around the jail. He was brought back the next day as emotions subsided.12
   Early on June 19, Meada Adams arrived in Springfield from Kansas City. Interviewed by reporters, she called her husband “the most brutal person” anyone could imagine and said she wished the mob had strung him up.
   That afternoon Mrs. Whalin died from her wounds, while Zella St. Clair remained in critical condition. Edith McCrary was expected to make a full recovery from the stab wounds and beating she’d taken at the hands of Adams.
   Charges of first-degree murder were filed against the prisoner in the deaths of both Officer DeArmond and Sarah Whalin, but the Whalin case was deferred, pending the outcome of the DeArmond case. At his preliminary hearing on June 20, Adams was bound over to the circuit court without bond to await trial.
   Adams was granted a change of venue to Polk County, and his trial got underway at Bolivar in mid-July. The two main witnesses for the state were Officer Oliver and Edith McCrary, the defendant’s young sister-in-law.
   Lawyers for Adams pursued an insanity defense, and they called Meada Adams to the stand as the star witness. Torn between love and hate for her husband, she said he had not been in his right mind the past nine months, and other witnesses testified that Adams had been depressed and suicidal lately. The prosecution countered that Adams well knew the difference between right and wrong.
   On July 19, the jury came back with a guilty verdict but could not agree on punishment. The judge then sentenced Adams to hang in late August. A defense appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court automatically delayed the execution.
   On August 11, while Adams awaited the outcome of his appeal, Zella St. Clair died from the wounds he had inflicted on her, and he was indicted on a third charge of first-degree murder.
   In late May 1929, the Missouri Supreme Court, ruling that the judge erred in imposing the death penalty after the jury couldn’t agree, overturned Adams’s verdict and remanded the case for retrial. The high court’s action caused such an uproar in Springfield that lawmen had to once again spirit the prisoner away to avoid mob violence.
   Adams’s reprieve proved brief. The state appealed the supreme court decision and won a rehearing in early June. In mid-August, the supreme court reversed itself and reset Adams’s execution for late September. Adams, however, found a way to cheat the hangman by taking a large dose of poison in his cell at the Greene County Jail on September 9. A doctor tried to save him but to no avail.
   After Dobb’s death, Meada fell in with a couple of other shady characters, and she and one of the men were found guilty of in early 1930 of armed robbery. Meada was sentenced to thirteen years in the state prison. She was given an early release in 1937.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

Snakes Alive! Springfield's Cobra Scare

   The cobra scare in Springfield during the late summer and fall of 1953 was a big enough deal that I vaguely recall it even though it happened about the time I turned seven years old. I don't really remember anything about it except that I recall my parents and other people in the Greene County community of Fair Grove, where I grew up, talking about it. I guess it was big enough news that it was the topic of conversation du jour.
   The first indication that anything was amiss came on the evening of August 22, 1953, when Wesley Rose killed a snake with a hoe after his dog chased the reptile out of some shrubbery in his front yard in the 1400 block of East Olive. The dead snake was taken to police headquarters, where officers, consulting with a junior high science teacher, tentatively identified it as a cobra. Rose said a neighbor of his had also recently killed a similar snake and that Reo Mowrer, owner of a pet and exotic animal shop located on St. Louis just a block south of Rose's house, had recently retrieved a snake after another neighbor had reported it on the loose.
   Mowrer, however, downplayed the situation, explaining that, even though he did have cobras in his shop, he didn't think the snake Rose had killed was a cobra. He explained that he hadn't had any cobras get loose for a long time, and he thought the snake Rose killed might have been a "local species" that just puffed up like a cobra when it got mad. Besides, he added, cobras couldn't last in the terrific drought the Ozarks were experiencing in the summer of 1953.
   Two days later, on August 24, the snake killed by Rose was positively identified as a cobra, and a Drury College professor who examined it said the snake, which had been defanged, was starting to regrow fangs and would have been deadly poisonous after a few more days. The snake killed previously by Rose's neighbor was also tentatively identified as a cobra.
   Although Mowrer still denied that the snakes that had been killed had come from his shop, he agreed to move his remaining cobras, and they were taken to a sparsely populated but undisclosed location out of the city limits but still in Greene County. Despite Mowrer's denials, most of his neighbors remained convinced that his shop was the source of the escaped snakes. Mowrer admitted that it was possible the snakes came from snake handlers, dealers, or other customers who frequented his store, but he said none of his inventory of snakes was missing.
   Within a few days after Mowrer moved the cobras, the new location was revealed to be a sales barn on West Highway 66, and neighbors of the barn started complaining to authorities that they didn't want the snakes in their area.
   If Mowrer thought moving his snakes would solve the problem, he was very wrong, and it wasn't just the complaints from folks on West Highway 66 that he had to worry about. Because on August 30, two more cobras were killed in the vicinity of Mowrer's pet shop. News of the latest cobra spottings intensified people's "jitters" almost to the point of hysteria. It surely didn't help when the Drury professor pointed out that, although there existed an antidote that could be administered promptly after a Cobra bite, very little was available in the United States.
   The next day, August 31, authorities inspected Mowrer's "snake shack" west of town and found the snakes "pretty well under control," but county prosecutor Douglas Greene nonetheless gave Mowrer an ultimatum to either move the snakes out of the county or else face charges.
   Another snake, discovered by a six-year-old girl, was killed on September 3 directly behind Mowrer's pet shop on St. Louis Street. Mowrer asked bystanders not to call police, but someone did. Then, when officers arrived, the pet shop owner reportedly said the dead reptile was "just a little old snake," but the officers were sure it looked just like the other cobras that had been killed in recent days.
   The snake scare continued to make front-page news on September 4 when Springfield police announced that they intended to launch a full-fledged "safari" through the streets of the city to track down and kill any other cobras that might be on the loose.
   An enterprising Springfield realtor sought to take advantage of the public snake hysteria, advertising at least one of its homes for sale as guaranteed to be "free from cobras."
   On the evening of September 8, another large snake was spotted on the loose in the vicinity of Mowrer's pet shop, but Mowrer, assuring onlookers it was a harmless bull snake, scooped it up and drove away with it before officers could be summoned. The next day he told authorities the snake was now out of the county, but he refused to say for sure whether it was a cobra or large bull snake, referring such questions to his attorney. Mowrer also tried to downplay the threat of cobras, saying they were not as dangerous as people were led to believe, as they very rarely tried to bite humans.
   Meanwhile, Springfield's "cobra census" made national news when it became the subject of a three-minute story broadcast on NBC radio on the evening of September 8, the same day as the latest snake spotting. A couple of days later, the Springfield snake scare made international news when a story about it appeared in a London newspaper.
   On September 9, yet another cobra was killed after being "gassed out" from beneath a house across St. Louis Street from Mowrer's pet shop. This was the sixth snake killed in the vicinity during the past couple of weeks that was confirmed as definitely being a cobra. Mowrer's troubles continued to grow when, on the same day, the Webster County Fair board refused his request to set up an exhibit on the fair grounds because of complaints from nervous fairgoers.
    On the night of September 10, police had to guard Mowrer's pet shop against arson after learning of threats to burn the place down. On September 11, another thorough search of the city, concentrated in the neighborhood of Mowrer's shop, turned up no additional cobras.
   After a lull of a couple of weeks, another cobra was killed on October 1 in the 1200 block of St. Louis, a little over a block away from Mowrer's pet store. It was announced at the time that this marked the 9th cobra killed in Springfield. This does not seem to jibe with the fact that the previous snake killed was identified as the 6th, but apparently two snakes that had been killed in late August or early September were not positively identified as cobras until the latter part of September.
   City officials announced at the time of the 9th cobra killing that they were considering employing Hindu snake-charming music to try to get shed of the snakes. "Anything to rid the city of the cobras," the city health director was quoted as saying. Over the next couple of days, officials auditioned the music and announced definite plans to give it a try. The "concert" took place on the morning of October 5, as officials piped the snake-charming music over a PA system set up near the site of the most recent cobra killing. While the music was playing, another cobra was, indeed, killed about four blocks away, but some people questioned whether the music played a part in flushing the serpent out. The men who killed the snake said they couldn't hear the music playing four blocks away, but it was suggested that maybe the cobra had better ears than they did.
   Springfield's experiment with snake charming again made headlines across the country, and the "cobra hunt" made the city the butt of jokes in some quarters, as folks not directly threatened by the reptilian menace began to see the humor in the situation. However, to most people in "the cobra capital of the United States, as Springfield was jokingly called, it was no laughing matter.
   In late October, a cobra was captured alive on East Olive and taken to Dickerson Zoo, where about 5,000 people came by to view it several days later.
   In mid-November a boa constrictor was killed in the neighborhood of Mowrer's pet shop, and the store owner again became the target of city authorities, who talked of passing an ordinance making it illegal to keep dangerous snakes inside the city limits. Mowrer, for his part, denied that the boa came from his shop, just as he had with the cobras. He said he'd sold several of the boas in Springfield and that one of those snakes might have gotten away from its owner. Never mind that the boa was found not far from Mowrer's shop.
   The Dickerson Zoo cobra died in captivity in late December, and in early January 1954, Springfield did, indeed, pass an ordinance banning dangerous snakes from the city. Mowrer was given 20 days to get all of his highly poisonous or otherwise dangerous snakes removed from the city. Springfield's snake scare gradually died down after this, as no new sightings of cobras or boas were reported. It was presumed that the cold winter weather had killed off any snakes that remained at large after the October snake hunt.
   Life Magazine and Newsweek were among the national magazines that did stories about Springfield and its cobra scare, but Springfield tried to make the best of its nationwide notoriety as the cobra capital of the country, even enhancing the picture of a snake that adorned its city seal to make it look like a cobra.
   Mowrer died in the early 1970s, having never admitted fault in the escape of the snakes, and it was assumed the whole truth about the cobra scare would never be learned. In 1988, however, a Springfield man named Carl Burnett came forward to solve the 35-year-old mystery of where the cobras had come from and how they'd gotten loose. He said he was 14 years old at the time and that he turned them loose as a prank to get back at Mowrer because he felt the shopkeeper had cheated him on the purchase of a tropical fish. He simply opened a crate containing the snakes that sat behind the pet shop. He said he didn't realize at the time how dangerous the snakes were, or he never would have set them free. Burnett had agreed to share his story only after an attorney assured him that he was unlikely to face charges after such a long time, and he was, in fact, not charged with any crime. People were just glad to finally know the details of what had happened 35 years earlier.

A Murder at Percy’s Cave

   On Monday evening, August 14, 1922, several young adults drove out from Springfield in three cars to Percy’s Cave (now Fantastic Caverns). The caravan included Ernest Cameron and his wife, Eva; John Yancy and his wife, Aline; and George Aurentz and his girlfriend. Yancy was an uncle of Ernest Cameron, and Aurentz was a brother of Eva Cameron. They were all on friendly terms, or so it seemed. But strained relations lay beneath the surface.
   Upon arrival at the cave property, all the group except Yancy walked down a hill to a pavilion, where a dance was in progress. Yancy, 37, stayed in his car with a bottle of liquor. Some of the others had also been drinking, or soon would be. It was about 9:00 p.m.
   At the pavilion, 33-year-old Aurentz handed over a pistol he was carrying to the son of the property owner, J. W. Crow. Aurentz and the others then started dancing on a platform beneath the pavilion. Exactly what happened after this was disputed, but we can generally reconstruct the most likely scenario. Not long after the group arrived, 25-year-old Ernest Cameron, accompanied by his wife, brought some food back to Yancy at the cars, where Ernest and Eva got into an argument. They temporarily resolved the matter and returned to the pavilion. After a while, Eva, 32, danced with a man named John Hedgpath, and he and Eva’s husband got into a quarrel.
   Hedgpath left, but Cameron took up the matter with Eva. The dispute grew so heated that Eva struck at Ernest, and he retaliated by hitting her and, by some accounts, knocking her down. She appealed to her brother for help, but George told Eva he didn’t want to interfere.
   Eva and Ernest, still arguing, started back toward the cars. They hadn’t gone far when Eva started cursing her husband and throwing rocks at him.
   Eva then retreated to the pavilion, and Cameron ambled that way, too. Eva again complained to her brother of Ernest’s mistreatment of her. George remarked that he was going to kill Cameron if he didn’t stop fighting with his sister. Aline Yancy, overhearing the threat, went to the parking lot and told her husband he needed to get Ernest away from the dance before a serious fight happened between him and George. But it was too late.
   After Aline left the pavilion, the dance quickly ended, and Ernest started back toward the cars, shoving his wife along. As the couple neared the cars, according to Eva, her husband struck her in the face with a pop bottle. She stumbled back down the hill and saw her brother, who had retrieved his pistol from Crow, leaving the dance. Eva again called to George for help, and he hurried past her to where Cameron was standing near Yancy’s car.
   Stopping a few feet in front of Cameron, Aurentz cursed and threatened to shoot the other man. Yancy yelled from his car for George not to shoot, but he drew his pistol and fired three shots in quick succession. Cameron stumbled back, collapsed, and died almost instantly. Eva Cameron rushed up and yelled to her brother, “Oh, George, you’ve killed him! You’ve killed him in cold-blooded murder.”
   Warning the bystanders to stand back, Aurentz retreated into the woods, as Yancy swore revenge.
   After hiding out overnight, Aurentz turned himself and was lodged in the Greene County Jail. A coroner’s jury concluded that Cameron died from a gunshot wound inflicted by George Aurentz, and Aurentz was indicted for murder in early September.
   Aurentz’s trial got underway in early December 1922. John and Aline Yancy were two of the main witnesses for the prosecution, testifying that Aurentz had come up to Cameron, threatened to shoot him, and then immediately opened fire. One of the main defense witnesses was Eva Cameron, Aurentz’s brother. She told of her husband’s mistreatment of her, she said Ernest had a gun and that George was only defending himself, and she denied saying George had killed Ernest in cold blood. The prosecution claimed Eva was not a credible witness because she was not even present when the shots were fired but instead came rushing up afterwards. The defense, in turn, went after the state’s witnesses, especially John Yancy, claiming he was a man of low character and was out to get their client.
   Testifying in his own defense, Aurentz said Cameron had made threats against him and was abusive to both his sister and his mother.
   Although Aurentz had been charged with first degree murder, the judge gave instructions allowing for a lesser degree of guilt, and the jury deliberated only two hours before returning a verdict of second degree murder. Sentence was set at twenty-five years in prison.The defense appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and in June 1924, the high court overruled the lower court’s decision largely on the grounds that Eva Cameron’s statement that George had killed her husband in cold blood should not have been admitted. Since she was not at the immediate scene when the shooting started and did not witness the confrontation leading up to it, her initial reaction was no more than an uninformed opinion.
The case was, therefore, remanded to Greene County for retrial.
   Aurentz was again convicted of second degree murder at his new trial in January 1925, but this time he was sentenced to only twenty years in prison. The case was again appealed, and Aurentz remained free on bond until the supreme court affirmed the verdict of the Greene County court in May 1926. He was then transported to the state prison in Jefferson City. 
   Aurentz didn’t exactly do hard time, though. He was “given much freedom from the start,” according to one newspaper, and he was paroled in 1930 after serving a little over four years.
   This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

One of the Most Cold Blooded Crimes in Greene County

   In 1908, Eugene Tucker, 35, took up farming in the Joshua Ellis neighborhood north of West Nichols Street in Springfield. Tucker and Ellis, 63, scarcely spoke to each other until January 1909, when a horse and cow belonging to Tucker got into a corn field on the adjoining Ellis farm and damaged some of Ellis’s fodder. Ellis and his son George impounded the animals until Tucker paid for the damages, as Missouri law provided. The transaction, though, left Tucker bitter.
   On February 22, two of Tucker’s cows got into the same corn field, and George Ellis went to Tucker’s nearby home to inform him. Not finding Tucker at home, he explained the situation to Tucker’s brother-in-law Arthur Kittrell. The two men argued, and Kittrell assaulted George with a stick of firewood.
   Seriously wounded, George managed to go home and help his father herd the Tucker cows into their barn. The two then came to Springfield to swear out a warrant against Kittrell. George remained in town for treatment, while his father started home, accompanied by a constable and his deputy. As the three men passed the Tucker house northeast of the Ellis home, Joshua Ellis pointed it out to the lawmen, but they stayed with the old man until he turned south down the lane toward his own house.
   The officers started back the way they'd come and met Tucker on the road shortly after four o’clock. Tucker, who had just learned about the impoundment of his stock, was visibly angry. When the lawmen inquired about Arthur Kittrell’s whereabouts, Tucker denied even knowing such a person. He finally admitted he did know him and promised to deliver him to authorities in Springfield the next day. But he continued cursing and threatening Joshua Ellis. The lawmen advised Tucker that Ellis said he could have his cows back if he came after them, and they returned to Springfield, apparently thinking everything was settled.
   Not quite!
   Between 5:00 and 5:30, Tucker showed up at the Ellis farm, accompanied by 17-year-old Charlie Dubel, his wife’s stepbrother. Ellis demanded payment before giving Tucker’s cows back, and Tucker refused. He and Dubel then left, but Tucker warned he’d be back.
   Tucker and Dubel returned about six o’clock and found Joshua Ellis, his wife, and their granddaughter Mary on the premises. Tucker called Ellis outside, and the two men walked toward the barn, where the cows were impounded. Elizabeth Ellis, 58, followed close behind, while Mary came outside and stood on the porch. The two men were still talking when Tucker suddenly pulled out a revolver and fired two shots. Old Man Ellis stooped downward, staggered back, and fell to the ground. Tucker then fired several more shots, but Mary didn’t know how many. The next thing she knew her grandmother came onto the porch and collapsed in the doorway.
   Forcing Mary to give him the barn keys, Tucker got his cows out and herded them toward his place. Joshua Ellis died in about half an hour, and his wife died fifteen minutes later. Neither was able to give a statement.
   Meanwhile, Luke Wallace met Tucker and Dubel on the road as they were driving the cows home minutes after the shooting. As Wallace approached, Tucker drew his revolver and demanded to know whether Wallace was “the other son of a bitch.” Wallace asked what was the matter, and Tucker said he’d already killed two SOBs and planned to kill the other one (i.e. George Ellis). Wallace asked what two people he was talking about, and Tucker said, “The old man and the old woman.”
   Later that evening Tucker went to Springfield and turned himself in. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
   The prosecution tried Tucker for the murder of Elizabeth Ellis first, and the trial got underway in late April. The main state witness was Mary Ellis. She said she was standing on the porch at the Ellis home and saw Tucker shoot her grandfather and grandmother, who were both unarmed. Luke Wallace was related the conversation in which Tucker admitting killing “the old woman and the old man.”
   Testifying in his own defense, Tucker claimed to have shot Joshua Ellis in self-defense. He said the old man was mad and that he’d been told Ellis had a quarrelsome reputation. He added that Ellis had his hand on his hip as though ready to reach for a weapon and that he opened fire when the old man made a threatening move. He said he shot the woman accidentally as he was shooting at her husband.
   The jury found Tucker guilty and sentenced him to death. The case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, automatically staying the execution.
   The defense argued that a second-degree murder charge should have been considered, since Tucker acted in the heat of passion, but the high court ruled that the heat of passion defense did not apply in Elizabeth Ellis’s case, since she did nothing to arouse Tucker’s passion. The court also rejected Tucker’s claim that he’d shot the woman by accident, citing the eyewitness testimony of Mary Ellis and the testimony of neighbors who heard two distinct sets of gunshots, indicating Elizabeth was not shot while Tucker was firing at her husband. The execution was reset for January 1911.
   However, several influential individuals had taken an interest in Tucker’s case, partly because of his good behavior since his confinement, and they appealed to the Missouri governor. During the time the appeal was being heard, two inmates escaped from the Greene County Jail and offered to open Tucker’s cell, but he declined the opportunity. This crystallized sentiment in his favor, and the governor ended up commuting his sentence to life imprisonment.
   Tucker was taken to Jefferson City in March 1911 and paroled in March 1918 after serving only seven years.
   This is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynching, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.