Triple Murder at Grandin

   About 1:15 p.m. on Wednesday, January 17, 1973, Robert Kitterman walked into the Bank of Grandin (MO), where he was president, and told Ralph Stanley, the bank's bookkeeper, that he had dynamite wired to his chest and not to turn on any lights or electric switches or make any phone calls because they might trigger an explosion. Kitterman explained that his wife and daughter were being held for ransom by kidnappers and that the villains had rigged the dynamite to his chest. Stanley did not see any dynamite, but he noticed that Kitterman's shirt seemed tighter than usual. He could tell that something was likely under the shirt, and he could also tell that Kitterman was nervous.
   Stanley helped Kitterman gather up over $10,000 and place it in a money satchel. As Kitterman was leaving the bank with the ransom money, he met L. W. Kingen, superintendent of the nearby Elsinore Schools, and told him the same thing he'd told Stanley--that his wife and daughter were being held by extortionists. After Kingen and others alerted authorities, lawmen tried to intercept Kitterman before he once again made contact with the kidnappers but to no avail.
   About 2;30 p.m., just over an hour after Kitterman had walked into the bank, his car and his 17-year-old daughter's car were both spotted in a secluded area near an abandoned farm a few miles south of Grandin just across the county line in northern Ripley County. Nearby were the dead bodies of Kitterman; his wife, Bertha; and the 17-year-old daughter, Roberta. All three bodies were bound, and each had been shot once in the head at close range with a small-caliber weapon. Although Kitterman's body was rigged with wire, no dynamite was found. And investigators doubted the idea that Kitterman had been rigged with dynamite so that it could be set off remotely via a radio signal, but that was apparently what Kitterman had believed. A bullet believed to have passed through the daughter's body, a couple of spent cartridges, and a tire track were the only forensic clues found at the scene. The only other clue to the identity of the murderers was the fact that, while at the bank, Kitterman had referred to the abductors as "they," leading lawmen to believe that there was more than one perpetrator. Investigators theorized that the abduction happened at the Kitterman home just a mile or so south of Grandin when both Kitterman and his daughter, a high school senior, came home for lunch. The villains then likely drove the family or forced the family to drive to the scene where they were later found dead, and the wife and daughter were held captive there while Kitterman was sent into town to get the cash.

                               

   A breakthrough in the investigation came a couple of days later when police received an anonymous phone call from a man who said he'd seen 33-year-old ex-con Dallas Ray Delay set off a small explosive device in a Poplar Bluff garage a few days before the Grandin crime and brag that he was going to use it to rob a bank. Additional investigation further incriminated Delay, who was already wanted on a couple of other warrants, and it revealed his sidekicks to be 21-year-old Lloyd Dwaine Cowin and 22-year-old Jerry Rector. The suspects, all three of whom lived in the Van Buren area, were arrested in Poplar Bluff on Friday the 19th, two days after the crime.
   Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, all three defendants obtained changes of venue from Ripley County after they were bound over for trial. Delay pleaded guilty in Cole County in April 1973 and received three consecutive life sentences. Rector pleaded guilty in Jefferson County in late June and received three concurrent life terms. Cowin initially pleaded not guilty in Greene County Court but changed his plea to guilty in September and was sentenced to three concurrent life terms. All three perpetrators were also later either found guilty of or pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Double Murder at Birch Tree

   About eleven o'clock on the night of July 13, 1932, 19-year-old Earl Phelps came hurrying into Birch Tree (MO) and hailed the first people he saw. He told them that he'd awakened from his sleep at the Phelps place outside town and found three intruders beating his father and stepmother to death. He tried to intervene and one of the villains knocked him down, he said, but he managed to get up and make his escape. A number of citizens rushed to the scene and found the man and the woman had both been badly beaten with a hammer and stabbed with a butcher knife. The woman died before they could get medical help for her, and Earl's father, Felix Phelps, died the next day at the hospital.
   That same day, July 14, as officials questioned Earl Phelps about the crime, their suspicions began to rest on him. He continued to stick to his story of intruders for some hours before he finally confessed to a Springfield newspaperman who'd come to Birch Tree to report on the crime. Young Phelps admitted that he and three of his acquaintances had killed the couple when they attempted to rob them of $2,000 and the couple resisted. The reporter convinced Phelps to repeat his confession to the county prosecutor.
   When the three young men whom Earl had implicated quickly proved alibis, authorities grilled young Phelps even harder, and he finally broke down and admitted that he alone had killed his father and stepmother. He insisted that the motive for the crime was the $2,000 his father and stepmother had recently gotten as a windfall. (One report said the stepmother had inherited it, and another said the couple found the money during a trip to Springfield.) Law officers, however, thought the real motive was Earl's hatred for his stepmother.
   When young Phelps's preliminary hearing came up in early August, he waived examination and was held for trial in the Shannon County Jail at Eminence without bond. Phelps escaped on the evening of September 6 by hitting a jailer in the side of the head with a shovel. A posse went out looking for him that night and couldn't find him, but the fugitive turned himself in the next day. At his trial on September 12, he pleaded guilty to double murder, and three days later, he was sentenced to two life terms in the Missouri State Prison. He was still in the penitentiary in 1940, but I'm not sure what happened to him after that, except that he died in 1968, according to a family historian.

  

Civil War Rape

   As I mentioned in my Bushwhacker Belles book, during the run-up to the Civil War and during the war's early stages, Southern leaders in Missouri used the threat of Federal soldiers raping Missouri women as one way of arousing sentiment against Union occupation of the state. In reality, rape was relatively rare in Missouri (and elsewhere) during the Civil War, and the rape of white women by Union soldiers was even rarer, since some of the few rapes that did occur were either committed by men other than Union soldiers or were committed against black women (i.e. slaves or servants). By my cursory calculation, Union Provost Marshals Papers mention only ten separate rapes, attempted rapes, or accusations of rape in Missouri during the entire four-year course of the war. Of course, this does not account for rapes that went unreported, as many almost certainly did; still, ten is a pretty low number, especially considering how prevalent murder, robbery, and other crimes were during the war and how disordered society in general was. 

   What historian Michael Fellman called "symbolic rape" (acts such as invading women's homes when no male protector was present, using obscene language in the presence of women, etc.) was much more common than actual rape. It's probably safe to say that, even if rapes were not carried out against Missouri women on a large scale, the threat of rape was an ever-present danger. And the actual rape of white women in Missouri by Federal soldiers was certainly not unheard of. See, for instance, my account of the rape of a woman in Taney County by a Union soldier in 1863. (https://ozarks-history.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-civil-war-rape.html.)
   The rape of white women by men other than Federal soldiers was also not particularly common, but such crimes did, of course, occur. An example was a rape that happened in Bates County, Missouri, in the fall of 1862. In early October, 26-year-old Alexander Belcher and 23-year-old Ryan Tongut, both of Bates County, were charged with sexually assaulting 28-year-old Eliza (aka Louisa) Hedrick. Married and the mother of two or three kids, Eliza was also a resident of Bates County.
   Belcher and Tongut were arrested and taken to the camp of Confederate colonel Warner Lewis at Pleasant Gap in southeast Bates County, where they were given a drumhead court martial, convicted of rape, and sentenced to death on October 9. Rather than carry out the sentence himself, however, Lewis detailed a squad the next day to take the two men to Union authorities at Calhoun with paperwork outlining their crime and stating the verdict of the hasty trial he'd conducted. Although that extemporaneous proceeding had found the pair guilty and sentenced them to death, Lewis recommended that the two men, both of whom were unaffiliated with either the Confederate or the Union army, be turned over to civil authorities for trial.
   Alas, the pair never reached Calhoun. The squad transporting the convicts laid over at Deepwater on the evening of October 10, and during the changing of the guard that night, Belcher and Tongut, who had "worked their fists out of the chains which confined them," sprang up, knocked out the candle lighting the cell, "bursted open the door and made good their escape." A detail was sent out to look for the fugitives, but they were apparently never recaptured.

   Sources: Union Provost Marshals' Papers and US census records

Charity State Bank Burglary and Explosion

   Charity, Missouri, located just off Highway 38 in southern Dallas County, is a place I'm somewhat familiar with, since it's not too far out of my old stomping grounds around Fair Grove. Yet, I don't think I've ever actually been to Charity. I've been along the stretch of Highway 38 that passes by Charity, but the town proper lies slightly to the east of 38. I say town proper, but the town really doesn't amount to much. A church or two, a couple of businesses, and a few residences. That's about it, except for the elementary school, which I think is still going as part of the Dallas County R-1 (Buffalo) School District. Even when I was a teenager and young man running around Fair Grove, Charity was not much more than a wide place in the road, just as it is today, but that has not always been so. At one time in the early 1900s, it was a going little community with a high school. (The high school consolidated somewhere around the late 1940s with Elkland and Buffalo, and Elkland, in turn, consolidated with Buffalo, Fair Grove, and Marshfield in the late 1950s.) Charity even had a bank during the early 1920s, and the bank's short-lived history forms one of the more interesting and colorful parts of the town's past.
   In October 1919, Reuben "R. E." Melton, a former mail carrier and postmaster at Ozark, Missouri, moved from Christian County to Charity to help organize and start the Charity State Bank. The bank opened about the first of November 1919 with John Graves as president and Melton as cashier. About June of 1921, Melton resigned his position with the bank after less than two years, and in early July, he and his family returned to Christian County and took up residence in Ozark.
   In the wee hours of the morning of Monday, August 1, just a month or two after Melton's resignation, one or more bandits broke into the bank and blew up the safe. Initial reports said the burglars used so much explosive that the door of the safe blew through the front of the building, the rest of the safe blew through the rear of the building, and the explosion set the building on fire. The blaze was so intense that it caused the bricks partially encasing a vault to crumble, allowing all the banks papers inside to catch fire and be destroyed. Townspeople were awakened by the explosion, and a bucket brigade was quickly organized to fight the fire. However, the flames were so hot and had gained such headway, that nothing could be done to save the structure. Burned to the ground, the building was such a total loss that it could not be determined how much money, if any, the crooks had obtained, although the bank was capitalized at only about $10,000. Authorities initially had no clue as to who the robbers might be.
   When Melton received a phone call at Ozark on Monday morning informing him of the crime, he and another Christian County man headed to Charity to investigate. But was Melton returning to the scene of his own crime?
   In late September, Melton and a young man named Jesse Stevers, whom Melton employed in a garage he owned at Charity, were arrested on suspicion of having committed the bank job after incriminating evidence was reportedly discovered at the garage. Both denied all involvement in the crime, and both were released on bond. Melton said he would have no trouble establishing an alibi, because he was attending church in Ozark on the night the bank was blown up almost 50 miles away. Dallas County investigators said they had turned up no evidence that Melton's resignation from the bank was anything but voluntary, but a contrary report suggested that some residents of the Charity area had ill feelings toward the cashier, which partially accounted for his quitting. Ralph Cavin, Melton successor as cashier of the bank, was later arrested as a third suspect in the crime.
   Melton's case was moved to Hickory County on a change of venue, and he was found not guilty in November 1922. Many of his friends in Christian County, where he enjoyed a good reputation, said they had felt confident all along that he was not guilty. The cases of both Stevers and Cavin were moved to Webster County on venue changes, and the charges against them ended up being dropped for lack of evidence. So, as far as I've been able to learn, no one was ever convicted of blowing up the Charity State Bank. The process of liquidating the bank began almost immediately after the crime, and no other bank took its place in the small Dallas County community.