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.