About 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday morning, September 22, 1886, the crew of an eastbound passenger train on the Frisco Railroad about four or five miles east of Cuba, Missouri, spotted a body stretched across the tracks in front of them, but too late to stop. The train passed over the body, severing the head, one foot, and one hand before coming to a stop. Investigation revealed that the victim was already dead when the train passed over him and that he had been murdered. Articles of the man's clothing were found nearby, including a hat. A deep gash in his head that appeared to have been inflicted by a hatchet or similar instrument matched the location of a slit or cut in the hat that had apparently been made by the same instrument.
About 5 a.m., while investigation into the dead man's identity was still ongoing, a fire was discovered at the home of Malcolm Logan about a mile north of the murder scene on the old St. Louis to Springfield wagon road. Hurrying to the scene, neighbors found the house completely engulfed in flames. They could see the body of a woman inside the house, but the blaze was too intense for them to reach it. After the flames died down, the woman's body and those of four children were dragged from the embers. The woman was identified as 39-year-old Ann Logan. The children were identified as Ann's six-year-old son, her six-year-old adopted daughter, her two-year-old daughter, and her infant child ten months of age. Ann and her husband, Malcolm, also had an adopted son who'd spent the night with neighbors and was among those who discovered the fire. Found among the remains of the fire near where Ann Logan's body had been discovered was a hatchet.
After the victim found on the Frisco tracks was identified later that morning as Malcolm Logan, it was theorized that the same person who killed him had also killed his family. It was thought that the murderer had somehow lured Logan away from his home, killed him with the hatchet, and then returned to his house and killed the rest of the Logan family with the same weapon, before discarding it and the setting the house on fire.
Suspicion soon settled on 26-year-old Patrick Wallace, whose father lived near the railroad tracks where Logan's body was found. A witness came forward to say that he had seen Wallace with Malcolm Logan shortly before dark on the evening of September 21. When Wallace was arrested in St. Louis on Thursday, September 23, he claimed he'd been in St. Louis continuously since Monday, but the hotel register did not bear this out. It showed he'd spent Monday night in St. Louis but had been away on Tuesday, the night of the murder, and had come back on Wednesday. In addition, a witness came forward who had seen Wallace on a train bound for Cuba on Tuesday when he claimed he was in St. Louis.
Authorities thought robbery was the motive for the crime. Logan was known, or at least rumored, to have a lot of money, and Wallace, a ne'er do-well with "an uncontrollable thirst for drink, was well acquainted with this fact.
Wallace was brought back to Crawford County and lodged in the county jail at Steelville. Rumors of mob violence began to circulate almost immediately, and on the night of September 30, a mob took Wallace out of jail and strung him up until he was almost unconscious in an effort to get a confession out of him. He finally admitted he had come to Cuba on the evening of the murder, but he still insisted on his innocence, trying instead to cast suspicion on a young black man of his acquaintance named Sam Vaughn. Wallace said the reason he'd lied about his movements before was that Vaughn had paid him not to say anything about seeing him (Vaughn) on the night in question. The vigilantes did not believe Wallace's story, but they were not entirely sure of his guilt either, and a local judge and the county sheriff finally convinced them to cease and desist.
Just a few days later, though, on the late night of October 4, a smaller but more determined mob came back to Steelville and broke the prisoner out of his cell. They took him about two miles north of Steelville and hung him to a railroad trestle over the Meramec River shortly after midnight on the 5th.
A coroner's jury later on the 5th ruled, not surprisingly, that Wallace had come to his death "by hanging at the hand of parties to the jury unknown."
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