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.
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