About seven a.m. on the morning of August 27, 1970, fifty-year-old Violet Brewer, clerk at a Quick Shop at 3328 N. Glenstone in Springfield, was shot to death during a holdup as she was opening the store for business. Twenty-two-year old Donald Joe Hall was arrested as a suspect in the case in mid-September on a tip from Warren Martin, who told police that Hall had given him a .32 caliber pistol to dispose of shortly after the Brewer murder. Martin, who was under arrest on suspicion of armed robbery, said he’d thrown the weapon into Lake Springfield, and it was recovered a few days after Martin’s confession. Hall had a criminal record dating back to 1965 when he was a seventeen-year-old kid, and, at the time of his arrest as a suspect in the Brewer case, he'd been out on probation for the past ten months after pleading guilty to a charge of displaying a dangerous weapon because he'd pointed a gun at a policeman who was trying to question him for careless driving.
Hall’s probation was now revoked, and he was charged with first-degree murder. At Hall's trial, Martin, a former cellmate of Hall’s at the state prison, testified that Hall told him, after he gave him the pistol to dispose of, that he’d “had to shoot a gal” with it during a holdup when the woman reached for a phone to call police and that Hall admitted it was the murder and holdup that had been in the news so much lately. Forensic experts linked the weapon taken from Lake Springfield to the bullet removed from Mrs. Brewer’s head. However, Hall took the stand in his own defense to deny killing Brewer. He admitted giving the pistol to Martin but said he’d done so before the murder. Although one is left to wonder why Martin would point police toward a murder weapon if he’d committed the murder himself, Hall planted enough doubt in the minds of jurors to win an acquittal.
Hall still faced five years in the penitentiary, though, on the charge of displaying a deadly weapon, and when he got out of prison in 1973 after serving only about half of the sentence, he promptly resumed his criminal career, culminating in the murder of Springfield jeweler William Roscoe White in December 1992, a crime for which Hall was convicted and sentenced to death (later changed to life imprisonment).
This story is condensed from my book Lynchings, Murders, and Other Nefarious Deeds: A Criminal History of Greene County, Mo. https://amzn.to/3Mi39sE
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