The Criminal Assault of Elaine Hale

   Eighteen-year-old Elaine Hale of Springfield had dated twenty-one-year-old Bobby Dale Shay of Bolivar a few times previously, and he'd never tried to molest her. The night of Saturday, April 26, 1958, was different, though.
   On that night, she and a friend went on a double date with Shay and Carl Sidney Roberts, a twenty-three-year-old friend of his from Bolivar. The foursome went to a drive-in movie, and after the show, Roberts, who was driving, took his date home. Instead of then taking Elaine home, however, he drove south of town on Fremont to the Lake Springfield vicinity and pulled off the road in a secluded area. According to Miss Hale's later story, when Shay got some beer from the glove compartment and he and Roberts started drinking, she got anxious and asked to be taken home, but Shay threatened to "rough her up" if she didn't shut up. She started screaming, and Roberts punched and choked her to make her be quiet. He then held her down while Shay raped her, and then Shay held her while Roberts also criminally assaulted her. Elaine tried to resist, scratching Shay and biting Roberts, but to no avail.
   After the assault, the young men dropped Elaine off in the wee hours of April 27 near her home on East Trafficway, and she immediately reported what had happened to her father, who promptly notified police. The officers took Elaine, who was bleeding from the mouth, to a doctor, who confirmed that she'd been sexually assaulted, and she identified her attackers. They were located and taken into custody at a cafe on Kearney Street a short time later. Shay had scratches on his hands and arms and abrasions on his face, while Roberts had a mark on his wrist. In addition, Elaine's socks were found in the car stuffed behind the back seat, where she said she'd put them.
   Charges of forcible rape were filed against the two men on Monday the 28th. At their preliminary hearing on May 12, Elaine, the main prosecution witness, identified the defendants as her attackers and testified to the facts in the case much as she had related them in the immediate aftermath of the incident. The defense grilled her on cross-examination, trying to find discrepancies in her story, and she was finally led crying and screaming from the courtroom. At the conclusion of the hearing, the defendants were bound over for trial in the circuit court and, at the urging of prosecutor Lyndon Sturgis, held without bond. Sturgis announced that he would seek the death penalty for both defendants in the case.
   Defense attorney Bob Yocum sought a change of venue for his clients, saying they could not get a fair trial in Greene County because of all the publicity surrounding the case, and the motion was granted, with the trial being moved to Christian County. The defense was granted a separation, and Shay's trial got underway in December. At the start of the trial, Sturgis announced that he was no longer seeking the death penalty. Elaine Hale again testified as the main state witness, repeating the story she'd told previously. For the defense, Shay took the stand to tell his side of the story. He denied raping Miss Hale but admitted having consensual sex with her, and he claimed Roberts had nothing to do with the incident.
   Shay was found guilty and sentenced to 35 years in the state prison. A motion for a new trial was denied.
   At Roberts's trial in June 1959, defense attorneys attacked Miss Hale's character. They got her to admit that she'd first met Bobby Shay when he picked her up on the streets of Springfield and that she'd allowed herself to be picked up at least one or two other times. She also admitted that she and Shay had been kissing in the back seat before the alleged rape. As for their client, the attorneys said, Roberts had not even had intercourse with Miss Hale, much less raped her.
   In closing arguments, the state said that not only did the evidence, such as Elaine's bloody mouth, indicate a forcible attack but that it came down to a matter of logic and reason. Who were you going to believe? It took courage for Miss Hale even to testify, and why would she testify to anything but the truth? The defendant, on the other hand, was highly motivated to lie in order to try to save his own skin. After the jury was already in deliberation, the judge granted a defense motion for a mistrial because the prosecution had drawn attention the fact that Roberts's wife had declined to testify in her husband's defense and because Miss Hale was allowed to sit on the front row sobbing and wiping her eyes in full view of the jury.
   After the hung jury, charges against Roberts were dropped. Then, in October 1960, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the verdict in the Shay case on a technicality and ordered a new trial. Prosecutors subsequently dropped charges against Shay, too, because Miss Hale, the complaining witness, had moved to California and did not want to have to go through the ordeal of another trial.
   So much for the death penalty that was originally sought by the prosecution. Instead of dying in the gas chamber, Shay served less than two years behind bars for the alleged rape of Elaine Hale, and Roberts got off scot free.
   Note: This is a case that I considered writing about when I was researching my most recent book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo., but I ultimately decided not to include it in the book, at least partly because of the rather anticlimactic ending to the story.

   

Robert Fay Adams Slays His Wife

   When twenty-one-year-old Adela Adams and her nineteen-year-old sister, Donna, left their Springfield home for school on the morning of February 3, 1970, their father, Robert Fay Adams, was lying on the couch, and their mother, Willa Lee Adams, was getting ready for work. It was the last time the girls would see their mom alive.
   When Adela and Donna came home that afternoon, their father said Willa had left after he fell asleep on the couch, taking some personal items with her, and he didn’t know where she’d gone. The girls knew their parents had been having marital problems, but some things about their mother’s disappearance just didn’t add up. For instance, Willa hadn’t shown up for work, and that just wasn’t like their mother. The longer she stayed gone, the more concerned the young women became.
   Later in February, Adams went to Florida, and when he came back, he told his daughters he’d met their mother there and she was coming home in early March. When she didn’t show up at the appointed time and their father left for Kansas City, the girls finally went to the police.
   A check in Kansas City revealed that Adams had never arrived there. In mid-March, he was located in a Pensacola (Florida) hospital. He’d been admitted the night before when a young woman sought help for him after he took an overdose of medicine. Just twenty-two, the woman had run away from Springfield with the older man about ten days earlier.
   Adams’s stomach was pumped, and when he regained consciousness on March 18, he admitted he must have killed his wife but claimed not to remember how. All he remembered, he said, was seeing her lifeless, bloody body on the floor of their bedroom with a revolver beside the body. He’d loaded the body into a vehicle, cleaned up the mess in the house, and buried the body with a bulldozer at a gravel bar southeast of Forsyth in the Kissee Mills area. He also disposed of the gun in the same general area.
   Willa’s body was found on March 19 buried in a ditch that ran beside a gravel bar along the banks of Beaver Creek. A post mortem determined that she had been shot in the head, and a first-degree murder charge was filed against Adams, who was brought back from Florida on March 21. Acting on a tip from Adams, divers retrieved the suspected murder weapon from Bull Shoals Lake near the Highway 86 overpass.
   At Adams’s preliminary examination, the state introduced the admission Adams had made about burying his wife’s body. To establish motive, the prosecution also called Patricia Weidmann, a Springfield woman, to testify that Adams suspected his wife was cheating on him. The witness said she’d accompanied Adams on the night before the murder as he followed Willa and saw her meet another man at a Springfield motel.
   Arraigned in Greene County on May 1, Adams pleaded not guilty by reason of mental defect. The trial finally got underway in February 1971. Testifying for the prosecution, the defendant’s daughters both said they’d seen their father’s revolver in his closet right before their mother disappeared but that it was gone after she disappeared. Both also testified about their parents’ marital problems, and Adela added that her mother had told her on the morning of her disappearance that she was irritated because the girls’ father had followed her the night before.
   Although called by the state, Mrs. Weidmann was treated as an adverse witness because she kept offering testimony painting Willa Lee as promiscuous and even suggested that Donna might not be Robert Fay Adams’s biological child.
   The defense claimed Adams killed his wife during a heated argument that ensued after she confronted him on the morning of February 3 about following her the night before. During the quarrel, Willa Lee threw up the fact that he’d raised a child that wasn’t even his, told him who Donna’s real father was, and called Adams a “damn fool.” Willa Lee went for her husband’s gun, but Adams got it and shot her in a fit of anger. He couldn’t remember actually pulling the trigger, though.
   Adams took the stand to deny killing Willa, claiming he’d never hurt his wife in his life. Also, two mental health experts testified that Adams had a hysterical personality that might lead to a mental breakdown when confronted with his wife’s infidelities. This might very well cause him to have no memory of killing his wife.
   During rebuttal, the prosecution, seeking to refute the idea that the murder was not premeditated, called a woman to the stand who said Adams had discussed with her in 1969 possible ways of killing his wife.
   On February 20, the jury came back with a verdict of murder in the second degree and a sentencing recommendation of forty years in prison. Adams was released on $25,000 bond while the defense appealed his case to the Missouri Supreme Court. He absconded during the first half of 1973, while the case was still awaiting a hearing.
   Adams was recaptured in November 1973 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as he returned from Germany, where he and a new wife had been to visit her parents. Adams was brought back to Missouri and taken directly to Jefferson City to begin serving his prison term.
   Because of his reported good behavior at the state prison, Adams was transferred to a minimum-security facility in Fordland prior to 1981 It was thought he’d probably be released on parole in a few years, and he was being considered for a work-release program. In mid-March 1981, he was even granted a furlough to visit friends in Columbia.
   Big mistake! He was last seen in Columbia on March 14, and he didn’t show up on the 17th when he was scheduled to be back at Fordland. Nobody knew where he’d gone, and nobody in Missouri ever saw him again.
   This blog entry is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

May Kennedy McCord

   I recently read that a new book featuring the collected writings of May Kennedy McCord will soon be released by the University of Arkansas Press. For those unfamiliar with her, McCord was a famous folklorist, writer, radio personality, singer, and promoter of the Ozarks who for many years had a regular column in Springfield newspapers called "Hillbilly Heartbeats" and later a radio show by the same name on KWTO-AM. She was affectionately known as the "Queen of the Ozarks" or the "Queen of the Hillbillies."
   May was born in 1880 in Carthage, Missouri, to J. Thomas and Delia (Fike) Kennedy. When May was a young child, the family moved to Stone County, where she grew up. She married traveling salesman Charles C. McCord in 1903, and the couple had three kids. The family moved to Springfield in 1918. In July 1924, when May was 43 years old, her first piece of writing in print, a poem entitled "Alarming," appeared in a very small local publication, appropriately called Midget Magazine, edited by Thomas Nickel, who was also publisher of the school newspaper for Southwest Missouri State Teachers College (now MSU). The poem appeared under May's maiden name, May Kennedy, because her husband, thinking she was already too busy with her music, her church work, and her involvement in various organizations such as the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union), did not want her to launch a writing career as well. However, he soon relented, and she quickly had an article accepted in Sample Case magazine, a publication of the United Commercial Travelers, a national organization to which her husband belonged. Subsequently, she published several other articles in the same magazine, and she soon started writing a column called "Hillbilly Heartbeats" for Ozark Life, published by Otto Ernest Rayburn, noted author, editor, and promoter of all things Ozarkian. Ozark Life was the official publication of The Ozarkians, an organization for regional writers based in Eureka Springs. May was an active member of the group.
   In October 1932, May's "Hillbilly Heartbeats" column began appearing in the Springfield Sunday News and Leader, and she continued writing the column for Springfield newspapers for almost eleven years. In addition to May's own writings and musings about the folklore and folkways of the Ozarks, the column often carried the work of other area writers. This column was something of a forerunner of "The Wastebasket" column edited by Lucille Morris Upton and others (see my March 13, 2012, blog entry about Lucille Morris Upton). Actually, I think McCord's "Hillbilly Heartbeats" column and "The Wastebasket" column (under another predecessor of Upton's) ran simultaneously in Springfield newspapers for a while, but the two were more or less combined under the name "The Wastebasket" after McCord quit writing her column in mid-1942. Upton came along as editor of the combined column about three years later.
   The reason May quit her column was so that she could take a job in St. Louis at radio station KWK as a musician (e. g. guitar player), folksinger, storyteller, and on-air personality. May would stay in St. Louis during the week and come back home to Springfield on weekends. May's husband died not long after she took the St. Louis job, and in 1945 she moved back to Springfield, where she took a job with KWTO doing a program called "Hillbilly Heartbeats," the same title as her former newspaper column. It was during her time with KWTO that May became widely known as the "Queen of the Ozarks" or "Queen of the Hillbillies," although one or both monikers might have occasionally been used to describe her prior to this time. May continued doing this show at least through the mid-1950s, because I remember that it was still on when I was a kid. I rarely listened to it, but I think my parents occasionally did.
   Mrs. McCord was named Missouri's Mother of the Year in 1950. She was cited not just for her accomplishments as a writer and radio personality but also for her work with church and charitable organizations.

   When May died in 1979 at the age of 99, she was already a legend in the Ozarks.

The Bizarre History of a Long-Unsolved Murder

   On Sunday morning, August 2, 1964, a fisherman reported a bloodstained vehicle abandoned at the Water Valley Mill northeast of Springfield. Hurrying to the scene, deputies found a bloody 1961 Ford with bullet holes in it. A short distance away, they found a man lying in a ditch near death. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, suffering from five gunshot wounds. Identified as thirty-four-year-old John Franklin “Johnny” Vaughn, he’d been shot at least five times with a small-caliber weapon. He’d also apparently been beaten.
   The Ford, which belonged to Vaughn, had blood smears inside and outside. It appeared there had been a struggle and that Vaughn had stumbled and crawled a considerable distance after being shot. Lawmen theorized that robbery was not the motive for the crime, since Vaughn’s billfold still contained several dollars and about $300 in cash was found in the car’s trunk.
   Officers interviewed several acquaintances of Vaughn, who ran a grocery store in Springfield and had formerly taught school at Reeds Spring and other area towns. However, the investigation mostly hit dead ends.
   Vaughn died of his wounds early Monday morning, August 3. Over the next two years, investigators chased several leads. By 1966, though, the case had gone cold, and little was heard about it for two more years.
   Then, on Sunday evening, December 8, 1968, a man registered at a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, and then went across the street to a Baptist church. He told the pastor he had something he wanted to confess. He said his name was Donald D. Campbell of Central Point, Oregon, and that he’d killed a man in Springfield, Missouri, four years earlier. Since he’d been saved, Campbell said, the crime had been weighing on him and he needed to get it off his chest.
   The pastor called authorities and made arrangements for Campbell to be taken into custody but not until after the evening service, at which Campbell confessed his crime to the congregation and received the sympathy of many in attendance.
   Campbell signed a written confession while still in Corpus Christi. Although his home was in Oregon, he was a drifter, and he’d been passing through Missouri the evening before the killing when he stopped and booked a hotel. A man named Johnny picked him up at a bus station in Springfield and drove him out into the country. They were outside the car when Johnny made homosexual advances toward Campbell, and the two men got into a heated argument. The suspect said he lost his temper, pulled out a .22 caliber pistol, and started firing.
   After the murder, Campbell went back to Oregon and became a Christian. Described as “clean-cut and well-dressed,” he’d been doing volunteer work, but his conscience continued to bother him. He’d left Oregon in late November 1968, telling his mother that he’d done “a very bad thing” and was “going East to clear it up.” He came through Springfield on November 29 and tried to turn himself in but authorities didn’t take him seriously and he went on to Texas.
   Charged with first-degree murder, Campbell was brought back to Springfield on December 13. He was arraigned in magistrate court three days later and bound over to circuit court in late December. The trial got underway in May 1969. The prosecution relied heavily on the several confessions Campbell had made, while his attorney pursued an insanity defense. Campbell’s mother, one of the main defense witnesses, said her son’s behavior was erratic and tempestuous even as a child.
   Campbell testified in his own defense, repeating the story he’d previously told that he shot Vaughn after he’d made homosexual advances toward him. “I didn’t want to kill a man,” Campbell declared. “It didn’t seem like me doing it; yet I know I did.”
   Largely rejecting the defense’s insanity plea, the jury came back on May 21 with a guilty verdict. However, the conviction was for second-degree murder, not first-degree, and the jury assessed a punishment of twenty-five years in the state penitentiary.
   After a couple of years in prison, Campbell tried to recant his confession and get a new trial, based partly on a contention that he was on drugs at the time of his trial. At the hearing, he said he’d confessed only to get help with his drug problem and that he’d kept up the pretense throughout the legal proceedings because he liked the publicity. He said he’d learned the details of the crime from a newspaper story.
   Several prosecution witnesses refuted Campbell’s claim that he was on drugs during his trial, and the judge denied his claim, ordering him back to prison. Campbell then appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but in November 1974 the justices upheld his conviction and the judge’s refusal to grant him a new trial. They pointed out that Campbell’s claim that he had continued to lie about killing Vaughn because he delighted in the publicity did not mesh with his failure to seek a new trial in the immediate aftermath of his conviction. If he really enjoyed the publicity, why did he not prolong it by seeking a new trial when first convicted?
   In August 1976, Campbell escaped from a prison farm but was recaptured the next day. Charged with prison escape, he was convicted and given a two-year sentence in addition to the twenty-five-year sentence he was already serving.
   In late 1976, Campbell was transferred to the Kansas State Penitentiary. He was paroled in 1978, but he was returned to the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1980 on a parole violation. He was paroled again in 1984, and he was discharged altogether in 1987.
   This story is condensed from a chapter in my most recent book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.

The Double Murder of Victor Spinetto and Virgil Usrey

   About noon on Sunday, December 15, 1957. two men from the nearby Cavalry Mission walked into Victor Spinetto’s Springfield grocery store in the 300 block of Boonville and found the storekeeper clinging to life and another man, later identified as 67-year-old Virgil Usrey, already dead from multiple wounds they’d sustained during a bloody assault.
   Police were called, and investigators quickly arrived. The 75-year-old Spinetto kept his store open seven days a week, while Usrey, who ran a liquor store next door, was usually closed on Sundays but had stopped by to visit his friend. Police tentatively concluded that the bloody attack was the work of just one knife-wielding madman.
   Found on the floor near the bodies was part of a broken pellet gun. Police thought the gun might have been used as an additional weapon during the attack, since the victims had been bludgeoned with some blunt instrument as well as cut with a knife. Officers did not know whether the motive for the crime was robbery, a personal grudge, or just the bloodlust of a maniac. Spinetto died 14 hours after the attack.
   The first real lead in the case came in early January 1958 when police discovered pellet gun parts on a flatbed railroad car that had been sitting idle on a side track near the Frisco depot about two blocks west of Spinetto’s store since December 9. Tests determined that the newly discovered parts matched the part found earlier at Spinetto’s store. Then on January 13, investigators found a butcher knife beneath an ice dock of the Springfield Ice and Refrigeration Company. The dock was about a block west of Spinetto’s store between the store and the spur track where the pellet gun parts had been found. The knife was identified as having belonged to Spinetto, and it was believed to have been the primary murder weapon. Despite the promising lead, police were no closer to solving the crime unless they could identify who had disposed of the knife.
   They decided to lay a trap.
   Authorities announced to the media on January 14 that the next day the police were going to conduct a thorough search for the murder weapon, combing the entire area between the store and the spur track where the pellet gun parts had been found. If lawmen found the knife used in the heinous crime, the announcement said, it likely would lead them to the killer. What the general public and the perpetrator of the crime did not know was that the knife had already been found. A similar but phony second knife had been planted in its place, and officers already had the area staked out when the announcement was made.
   The killer fell for the ruse. On the night of the 14th, five officers lying in wait spotted a man approaching the ice dock through an alley about 10:30 p.m. He paused near where the knife had been found, and the officers converged on him and took him into custody without incident.
   Identified as twenty-year-old Herman Joseph Flood, Jr. of Ash Grove, the suspect said he’d been in Springfield on the fateful day to visit his grandmother and was on his way to the depot to go back home when he committed the crime. He said he killed the two men when Spinetto resisted his attempt to rob the store.
   Information gleaned within twenty-four hours after Flood’s arrest showed that he had one previous arrest for theft, and he had been considered mentally disturbed for years. He had been questioned in the Spinetto-Usrey case right after the killings but was not considered a definite suspect at that time.
   Later in January, Flood was arraigned on a first-degree murder charge in the death of Victor Spinetto, and still later in the month, a second murder charge was added in the death of Usrey. He was then bound over for trial in circuit court.
   In mid-February 1958, Flood signed a written confession, and in April he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. During the sentencing phase of the trial, Flood’s attorneys painted “a sordid picture of a child who was disfigured by malnutrition and disease, beaten ‘from pillar to post,’ and unwanted by any member of society.” They recommended leniency, and even law enforcement authorities agreed that Flood’s was a pitiful case deserving of special consideration. Therefore, the judge gave Flood two sentences of life imprisonment to run concurrently rather than imposing the death penalty.
   Flood was received at the state prison in Jefferson City on April 16, 1958. He was paroled in 1975 and discharged altogether in August 1981. He died in Moberly, Missouri, in 2010.
   This post is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo.