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!"
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