A Murder in Oregon County

The charred body of Oscar Bushart, a 27-year-old real estate dealer, was found in the backseat of an automobile on Friday, July 13, 1934, in a lonely spot northeast of Thayer (MO), the apparent victim of a torch slaying. 

The coroner examined the body and concluded that Bushart had likely been beaten before he was burned. The car in which the man was found belonged to his father-in-law, 37-year-old R. E. Edwards, also a real estate dealer. Bushart had not been seen since Thursday night and had apparently been dead several hours before he was found early Friday afternoon.

Edwards told reporters he had "no idea" what the motive for the killing might be. Edwards said neither he nor his stepson, who worked in Edwards's agency, had any enemies that he knew about in their real estate dealings. Edwards said that if Bushart had received any threats, he didn't know about them, and he suggested robbery as a possible motive.

Edwards, who'd been married to Bushart's mother since Bushart was a youngster, said he'd practically raised him and that he'd never had any trouble with him. He didn't know why anybody would be after Bushart. 

Edwards talked a good game, but, come to find out, he himself was behind the murder. 

Joe Luck Braden, a 35-year-old Thayer man, was suspected of being involved in the murder from the beginning because he was known to have argued with Bushart shortly before the latter's death. Three months later, authorities linked Braden and Edwards together in the crime after it was learned they'd been prison mates together in Arkansas. 

Both Braden and Edwards were arrested on suspicion. Braden admitted the killing, and Edwards admitted paying him to do the dirty deed. Braden said he'd beaten Bushart to death and then poured gasoline over the body and burned it. He was promised $500 by Edwards but was paid only a small fraction of that amount. Edwards's motive was a $4,000 life insurance policy he had taken out on Bushart. 

A day or two later, Edwards also implicated a third man, saying that Ike Dawson had helped Braden do the actual killing. In addition, Edwards's wife gave police information about two other murders that her husband had previously committed. 

He was charged only for the Bushart murder, however, as were his two co-defendants. Dawson pleaded guilty in early April 1935 to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In June 1935, Braden also pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and Edwards was found guilty of the same charge by a jury, which recommended a life sentence. The judge sentenced both to life in prison. 

Edwards was paroled in 1957 after serving 22 years of his supposedly life sentence. No word on what happened to his two co-defendants after they went to prison.

Joplin Bawdy Houses

Two of the past three weeks I've written about bawdy houses and prostitution in Springfield, but Joplin puts Springfield to shame when it comes to a track record of prostitution. I suppose "put to shame" is a poor way to say that prostitution in Joplin has always been more prevalent than in Springfield because a lot of arbiters of morality, I'm sure, would say that Joplin, not Springfield, has the shameful record. Nonetheless, I thought I'd take a look at Joplin prostitution this week.

From the time Joplin was first founded in 1873 (very likely even before it was officially founded, when it was nothing but a mining camp) prostitution was prevalent in Joplin. Prostitution was not legal, but city officials tended to look the other way. For many years, the only real effort to control the vice was a fine system that served more or less as a de facto licensing system. Periodically, usually toward the end of each month, police would come around to the various houses of ill repute and collect fines from the madam and the working girls. 

Prostitution continued almost unabated throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, although there were occasional attempts, largely unsuccessful, to crack down on the bawdy houses. Prohibition put a damper on prostitution and other vices in Joplin just as it did almost everywhere else, but it didn't stop it altogether. 

For instance, I recently ran across a September 1928 story in the Joplin Globe about the city health commissioner's campaign to try to rid the city of prostitution. The commissioner especially didn't like the fact that bawdy houses were allowed to operate in Joplin under the guise of rooming houses. He thought the city ought to claim down on the licensing of the rooming houses, but members of the city council were cool to his proposition. They seemed to think there was little they could do legally to deny licenses under the current ordinances.

The commissioner responded that they ought to change the ordinances and that police ought to repeatedly raid every rooming house suspected of being a front for prostitution until the prostitutes were forced either to stop business or leave town. He even made a motion to that effect, but "the motion was apparently forgotten during the discussion that followed." 

More on 1940s Springfield Prostitution

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about bawdy houses in Springfield (MO) during the early 1940s and about the police chief's crackdown on them in 1944. Since then, I ran across an interesting article that sheds additional light on the extent of prostitution in the city in the early 1940s and how prostitutes operated.

In November 1941. a reporter for the Springfield Leader and Press named Tom Tyro decided to look into those very questions. His investigation revealed that Springfield boasted about 150 "regular prostitutes" who worked in 22 houses concentrated in the same small area in downtown Springfield (no doubt the area around College and Campbell streets that I mentioned two weeks ago), although a few worked out of houses scattered in other parts of the town. 

To get a better idea of the living conditions of the prostitutes and how their operation worked, the reporter called on a few of the girls. The first one he visited had her room at the top of a stairs in a boarding house. In the hallway outside the girl's room was a little bell on a table and a sign above the table that read "Ring for landlady." 

Tyro observed that the hallway was not very clean, but, after being let into the girl's room, he found it to be clean with shiny, polished floors and with the bed freshly painted and made up. The girl herself was "scrupulously clean." 

Tyro ended up talking to twenty different young prostitutes, and he learned that they made about $15 to $30 a week on average. "All of them were clean. None of them drank. Some smoked. All of them were well versed in the ways of their profession, all of them knew how to guard themselves and their clients, all of them made a practice of being examined by a physician at least once a month."

One of the landladies explained that the reason the girls didn't drink was that she didn't permit them to do so because they couldn't handle the men as well when they were "tight." Also, if she allowed drinking, the girls would start "hanging around taprooms," and she wouldn't have any girls left. 

Most of the time the girls and their landlords were able to handle their clients and keep rowdiness to a minimum, but occasionally police had to be called. The police did answer such calls, and that was the extent of "police protection" that the prostitutes and landladies received. The girls told Tyro that the police rarely bothered them because they knew the girls were clean and that they tried to hold down rowdiness. 

The doctor who examined and treated most of the girls was city health commissioner Dr. W. E. Handley. One of the girls mentioned him by name and said that he was doing "a wonderful job" keeping the regular prostitutes in Springfield clean. She complained, however, about the "taproom girls," who, she thought, "spread twice as much disease in a week as we do in a year." Why didn't Dr. Handley examine them, she wanted to know. 

Handley told the reporter that he'd like to do something about the "barflies" but that the law didn't give him any authority over them. Another doctor commended Dr. Handley for his work. Handley had "stuck his neck out in examining these girls." As a city official, he wasn't even supposed to know that the houses of prostitution existed. However, the unidentified doctor thought that most of the medical profession was behind Dr. Handley. "We all know that the taproom girls are far worse than the initiated prostitutes, but I don't think there is any way that the situation can be remedied under the present ordinances." 

Those ordinances, though, as we learned two weeks ago, were about to change. In 1944, the chief of police would claim down on prostitution in Springfield.

Called Her a Strumpet

Things used to make newspaper headlines that nowadays wouldn't even be considered newsworthy, or that would be considered nobody's business except the parties involved. Some of those items, though, were quite interesting. Take the July 27, 1897, story in the Springfield (MO) News-Democrat headlined "Called Her a Strumpet," for example.

It seems Mary Cable had filed for divorce from her husband, G. T. Cable, on the grounds that he "was possessed of an ungovernable temper" and that she had "endured its outbursts throughout their married life." Mary further asserted that her husband had called her all sorts of vile names and wrongfully accused her of infidelity. Allegedly, Cable had repeatedly waved his fist in front of Mary's face and called her a "good for nothing strumpet."

He also refused to let Mary use the money that she had made from selling chickens, eggs, and other produce that she had raised herself. In addition, any time Mary would visit friends or relatives, her husband would accuse her when she came home of having "associated with lewd and immoral men." 

One of Mary's specific complaints was that on July 17, just ten days before the article appeared in the paper, Cable had come out to where she was milking a cow, gotten angry for no reason, and abused and kicked her. 

Cable was reportedly a well-known citizen in the Springfield area, and the couple had been married for over twenty years and had seven children together. Mary asked for custody of the youngest one, who was three years old, and for an even split of the family's personal property, which was valued at $3,700.