Crime on the Increase?

The record of crime in this country is without parallel. There is scarcely a newspaper from the most quiet retreats of the country to the most crowded and bustling thoroughfare of the city but is filled with sensational accounts of bloodshed and murder. No age, sex or condition are excepted. The bludgeon of the assassin falls alike on the innocent babe and the infirm octogenarian--the gentle and confiding maiden, wife or mother and the man of strong muscle and manhood.

...In Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Louisville, Cincinnati and almost every other city of the United States...assassins are on the warpath. The daily papers have each day reports of "Horrible Outrages," "Horrible Tragedies" and "Brutal Murders" until the heart sickens....

We are almost ready to believe that ninety-nine men out of a hundred are prepared to take human life. And whilst crime is so rampant in the land, its punishment is inadequate and uncertain. It is hard to convict a man with money and friends of the crime of murder, no matter how plain the proof. The courts furnish so many dodges such as emotional insanity, so that it is impossible to convict the most cold-blooded assassin.

No, the above opinion is not mine, and it's not even recent. It's from the Iron County (MO) Register in June of 1873. I've been saying for a long time that the rate of crime per capita is not that much worse nowadays than it was 100 or 150 years ago, and this editorial is just one more suggestion that I might be right. The one thing that is different I think, is that today's crimes sometimes involve multiple victims, whereas 100 years ago, it was rare for a killer to take the lives of more than one or two people at the same time.  

The immediate impetus for the Register's righteous indignation was an attempted murder that had recently happened in St. Louis. A man named Joseph Fore had tried to kill his wife, not out of rage or because he was drunk, but out of coldblooded, diabolical malice. 

It seems Fore had been acquitted of killing his brother-in-law a year earlier on the grounds of insanity. His wife stood by him during the trial, and, after his acquittal, she tried to reclaim him and their marriage. They moved to Kansas to start fresh, but Fore neglected his wife and spent most of his time in a saloon near their farm. Finally, she returned to St Louis, and he followed her. They met, and she told him she would go back to him and not carry through with the divorce she was seeking if he would promise to reform and give up intoxicating drinks. 

Instead, he took off for Mississippi, and Mrs. Fore took a job to support herself, since her husband would not. When he came back to St. Louis, he went to her place of employment, apparently angered by her independence, and struck her three times in the head with a hatchet. She fell to the ground insensible and bathed in blood. She was alive at the time of the Register's editorial, but her condition was critical. Fore was locked in the Four Corners Jail, where he was again "attempting the insanity dodge."  

The Death of Earl Anderson: Murder or Suicide?

On the evening of September 15, 1932, neighbors of 54-year-old Earl Williamson, a retired naval officer who lived on a farm near Silva in Wayne County, Missouri, heard the sound of a shotgun blast come from the direction of his home and immediately afterward heard a woman screaming. 

When neighbor Sheldon Ward arrived to investigate, he found Williamson lying on the ground in the back yard in critical condition from a shotgun wound. A shotgun and a hatchet were on the ground some distance away. Williamsson's 34-year-old wife, a "comely Ozarks woman," was in hysterics, saying that Earl had shot himself, and the injured man told neighbors that, yes, he alone was to blame. 

On the way to the hospital, however, Williamson told a local undertaker who was riding in the vehicle with him that "Sonny Boy," Williamson's nickname for his wife, did it but that he didn't want anyone to blame her. In addition, investigating authorities concluded that, taking into consideration the trajectory of the shot that wounded Williamson and the location of the shotgun, it would have been  impossible for him to have shot himself. 

After Williamson died the next day, a coroner's jury ruled that the death was not a suicide but rather a murder, and his wife, Edna, was indicted for first degree murder. 

A few weeks after Edna's arrest, an investigation into the background of Mr. and Mrs. Williamson determined that it was highly unlikely that they were legally married. Edna had produced a marriage certificate showing the couple had been married in West Virginia in 1930, but no record could be found of such a marriage in West Virginia records. In addition, the names of the minister and the witnesses listed on the certificate seemed to be made up, as no one by those names could be located. 

 

At Edna's trial at Greenville in February of 1933, the undertaker who accompanied Williamson to the hospital repeated his claim that the dying man said his wife had shot him, and the undertaker's assistant backed up the story. Edna, however, took the stand in her own defense to vehemently deny the charge against her. She said she was inside the house when she heard the shotgun blast, went to the door and hurried out to her husband when she saw him lying on the ground, and picked up the shotgun and heaved it as far as she could.  A neighbor of the Williamsons took the stand to bolster Edna's story, saying that Earl had told him when he first arrived on the scene that he shot himself. 

After a brief trial and a short deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty. Upon hearing the verdict, Mrs. Williamson jumped up and shouted, "Glory to God!"