Lizze Reed's Resort

   I recently read in the Joplin Globe that Len Rich, a Webb City marshal who was killed on August 10, 1902, at a place in Webb City called "Lizzie Reed's resort," was getting an additional marker installed 120 years later at his gravesite in Mount Hope Cemetery to memorialize the fact that he was killed in the line of duty. More about that incident later, but it turns out that Rich's murder was not the first notorious incident that happened at or in connection with Lizzie's place.
   A two-story structure located on Main Street (now Broadway), Lizzie's resort was a house of ill repute that catered to the rowdy young men populating the mining town of Webb City. Not all places that earned the moniker "house of ill repute" in the late 1880s and early 1900s were what many people today might think of as houses of prostitution. Many were merely boarding houses where some or all of the female tenants had questionable reputations but were not necessarily prostitutes in the professional sense of the word. It's not altogether clear exactly where Lizzie's place fell on this continuum of ill fame, but hers was apparently pretty close to an actual house of prostitution.
   In the early morning of July 27, 1900, about a year and a half before the marshal was killed at Lizzie's resort, "a young girl of questionable character" named Lillie Garrison (aka Pearl Smith), who boarded with Lizzie, killed herself by "putting a bullet through her brain" at a nearby restaurant. Not yet sixteen, Lillie was described as a small, neatly dressed, "rather good looking" girl at the time of her death. She had come to Webb City from Carthage about six months earlier, and her parents still lived at Carthage. She was reportedly despondent over an ill-fated romance with a Webb City boy and had informed Lizzie and others of her intent to kill herself. Lizzie had tried to get her to go home to Carthage and had given her some money to make the trip, but instead she had "gone to hell," as she phrased it in her suicide note.
   About noon on Saturday, February 8, 1902, a shot rang out from an upstairs room at the Commercial Hotel in Webb City followed immediately by a woman's scream. Diners on the first floor and other occupants of the hotel, rushing to the room to investigate, found a young man named Wheeler Snarr, lying dead on the bed with a bullet through his head and a young woman named Nettie Kelly, whose room it was, standing over him with a Bulldog pistol in her hand. To the first person to arrive on the scene, Nettie exclaimed, "My God! I shot him, and he said the gun was not loaded."
   Nettie had come to Webb City a couple of months earlier and taken a room at Lizzie's resort. Just three or four days before the shooting, she and some other girls at Lizzie's place had been arrested (presumably for prostitution), and Snarr, who managed a gambling room above Parker's saloon in Webb City, had paid Nettie's fine. She then moved to the Commercial, where Snarr stayed, and took a room just one or two doors from his room. Snarr had apparently stayed all night with Nettie on the night before the shooting, as his clothes were hanging on a bedside chair and his own bed appeared not to have been slept in.
   One of the people who hurried to Nettie's room to investigate the shooting was Constable Len Rich. Nettie explained to him and the others that Snarr had told her on more than one occasion that the gun was not loaded and she had even seen him remove the bullets from the weapon. She had picked up his gun and playfully pulled the trigger several times until the hammer had come down on a chamber that, unknown to her, still contained a bullet.
   Rich nonetheless placed her under arrest to await an inquiry. Very soon after the shooting, a coroner's jury convened at the scene. Lacking evidence to the contrary, the jury was convinced by Nettie's denials and what appeared to be her genuine shock, and they ruled that Snarr had died by accidental gunshot wound.
   Late on the night of Saturday, August 9, 1902, brothers Joe and Jim Gideon, 21 and 23 years of age respectively, were creating a disturbance at Lizzie Reed's place in the upstairs room of one of her girls. Lizzie tried to get them to leave or to settle down, but they refused to do either. Finally, Lizzie summoned authorities.
   When Marshal Rich and two other officers arrived shortly after midnight to try to arrest the unruly pair, they were immediately met by gunfire, and Rich fell dead. The other two officers returned fire, and in the melee that followed, Joe Gideon was shot and killed, one of the other officers was knocked down with a club, and Gideon's brother was shot and wounded and placed under arrest. It was reported at the time that the brothers had been feuding with some of the Webb City officers in recent weeks and had deliberately created the disturbance to try to lure the lawmen to the Lizzie's place so they could waylay them.
   In the aftermath of Marshal Rich's killing, Lizzie Reed was taken into custody. In reporting her arrest, one area newspaper said she had been "running a bad house...under the protection of the police and paying a license to the city and giving the policemen free beer." The reporter wondered whether Webb City officials would now protect her or send her to jail.
   How much time, if any, Lizzie spent in jail is unclear, but the newspaper charges were at least partially substantiated at Jim Gideon's trial in the fall of 1902. The defense claimed that when Marshal Rich went to Lizzie's place on the fateful night, he was not acting in an official capacity but rather was going there to protect Lizzie and her establishment. One of the officers who accompanied Rich when he was shot even testified that Lizzie turned to the Gideon brothers when the officers arrived and said, "Here is the law that protects me." The testifying officer also said he did not see Jim Gideon with a pistol on the night of the tragedy, and Gideon was acquitted of murdering Marshal Rich.