"Big George" Herrelson

   One of the chapters of my book Midnight Assassinations and Other Evildoings: A Criminal History of Jasper County, Mo. is about the murder of Joplin watchmaker R. T. Thompson in late October 1929 during a robbery attempt gone bad. George Herrelson; his wife, Bertha; Bertha's brother, Earl Osborn; and two other men were arrested in connection with the crime two years later, in October 1931. The Herrelson couple and Osborn were ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder in the case, and they received sentences of life imprisonment, while the other two men, who were younger and who testified against the other defendants, were given lighter sentences for second-degree murder convictions.
   The two younger men testified that Osborn was the trigger man in the murder and that Herrelson was the leader of the gang. They said that Herrelson and Osborn had been involved in a number of previous robberies. So, I knew, or at least suspected, that Herrelson and Osborn had been involved in other crimes, but only recently did I uncover some of the details of those crimes.
   Residents of Cherokee County, Kansas, George and Bertha Herrelson were, from all appearances, fairly upstanding members of society during the early to mid-1920s. They had two popular and pretty teenage daughters, one of whom was selected a school queen at Galena. But somewhere along the line, "Big George," as he was sometimes called, got sidetracked, and his life took a criminal turn.
   Herrelson's illegal shenanigans first came to public attention in the spring of 1928, when he allegedly set fire to his own house in an apparent attempt to collect the insurance. Charged with arson, he was acquitted at trial in the spring of 1929. By this time, though, or shortly after, he had become involved in other criminal activities.
   The murder of Thompson, as previously mentioned, took place in October 1929.
   Then, in late December of 1929, a gang of men robbed a prominent, elderly businessman named William Cottengin and his daughter at Cottengin's home in Hartville, Missouri. The gang pulled up outside the home, and when the daughter came to the door, they forced her at gunpoint back into the house. They forced the old man and his daughter to lie on the floor and bound and gagged both of them. With their victims incapacitated, they chiseled open a safe Cottengin kept in his home and took about $700 from it. They then jumped back into their car and sped out of town.
   As with the Thompson murder, there were no suspects in the Cottengin case at first, but in early January 1930, just days after the Hartville caper, a jewelry store in Herrelson's hometown of Galena was robbed, and he was arrested in connection with the heist. Then, in March 1930, before the Galena case could be prosecuted, several men were arrested in northwest Oklahoma as alleged members of a robbery ring that had been operating in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri for several months, and one or more of the captives named Herrelson and Osborn as fellow members of the gang. Herrelson was also fingered as the leader of the group who had robbed Cottengin.
   The Missouri governor filled out a requisition to have Herrelson returned to Missouri to face charges in the strongarm robbery of Cottengin, and Kansas authorities, who already had the defendant in custody for the jewelry store robbery, honored the request. Herrelson was taken back to Hartville to face assault and robbery charges and was lodged in the Wright County jail. However, he somehow got free of the charge or perhaps was released on bond, because he was back home in Cherokee County when he and his wife were arrested in October 1931 on charges of murdering Thompson. And that was the end of "Big George" Herrelson's criminal career.