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.
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