“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.