A Series of Eternal Triangles--Part 3

The climactic act in the three-part tragedy of early 20th century love triangles in the southwest Missouri/southeast Kansas area took place in 1928 in Baxter Springs, Kansas.

Lee Nutt was acquitted of murder for killing his wife's lover in Joplin in 1908, and John Cole was first found guilty and then acquitted on retrial for the 1917 killing in rural Granby of two men who were paying attention to his estranged wife. After Nutt's acquittal, he moved to Granby, where Cole lived, and the two men became close friends. Sometime in the 1920s, Cole, who was now single, started boarding with Nutt and his second wife. He went with them when they moved to Neosho in 1927 and again when they relocated to Baxter Springs a few months later. Both men went to work in the mines there.

In September 1928, Nutt told Cole he could no longer stay with him because he thought Cole was paying too much attention to Mrs. Nutt. A couple of months later, Nutt's wife left him and took their kids to Oklahoma, but Nutt came after her a week or so later, and the couple reconciled and returned home to Baxter Springs.

Another month later, on December 11, 1928, Nutt and his nineteen-year-old son, D. W. Nutt, came home from work and found John Cole and Mrs. Nutt there alone together. The three men started fist fighting and struggling with each other. Cole broke away from the elder Nutt, who had only one good arm, but his son clung to Cole as the latter bolted from the house and started down the street.

Lee Nutt caught up with other two men half a block away, brandished a .41 caliber revolver, and fired three shots at Cole at close range, two of which took effect. Cole died almost instantly, and Nutt promptly turned himself in, readily admitting that he'd killed Cole.

The younger Nutt, who was still holding Cole when his father started shooting, was also arrested, and both were charged with first-degree murder. Tried in Cherokee County Circuit Court in January 1929, the father again pleaded the "unwritten law" and was again acquitted, as he had been over twenty years earlier. The charges against his son were later dropped.

Thus, the three-part drama involving Lee Nutt and John Cole, both of whom had previously killed as a result of separate love triangles, ended in a bit of bitter irony when one of the friends killed the other in a squabble arising out their own private love triangle.

A Series of Eternal Triangles--Part 2

Last week I wrote about Lee Nutt's killing of his cousin, Jake Nicely, in 1908 in Joplin, after Nicely and Nutt's wife had run away together a few months earlier. Nutt was acquitted, and he moved to Granby, where he made the acquaintance of John Cole, who is the primary player in the next chapter of the three-part drama of love triangles.

Cole had been separated from his wife, Eva, for several months when he went to the house of her sister, Mrs. George Corkel, on the evening of July 26, 1917, where Eva was visiting, to try to effect some sort of reconciliation with her. Cole was talking to his wife when two young men named George Kincannon and Ralph Lucas came to the Corkel residence to take Eva and her sister Lulu McCaslin, who was also visiting Mrs. Corkel, out for an automobile ride. Only Kincannon emerged from the vehicle, because Lucas was either asleep or hunched down in the seat, so that Cole did not know but what Kincannon was alone. Lulu left with Kincannon (and Lucas), and Cole remarked to his wife after they left that he should have slapped Kincannon's face.

When they returned a short while later, Cole again made a threatening remark. Kincannon had just shaken hands with Lulu and bade her goodnight when Cole noticed that someone else was in Kincannon's car, and he asked who it was. Kincannon said, "See for yourself."

Cole walked closer to the car, and when he saw that it was Ralph Lucas in the vehicle, he exclaimed, "That's just who I thought it was."

Cole slapped Kincannon with his right hand and drew a .45-caliber revolver. The two men started arguing, and Eva pleaded with them to go away from her sister's house if they were going to fight. A few seconds later, though, Cole fired a shot into Kincannon's chest. Kincannon fell, and Eva ran toward the house shouting for Lucas to run. Cole fired another bullet into Kincannon's head after he was already down and then turned and started shooting at Lucas as he was trying to flee. After Lucas was down, Cole also put another bullet in him for good measure.

Cole immediately turned himself in to authorities, saying only that he was sorry for the conditions that "made the shooting necessary." At his trial in June of 1918 for the killing of Kincannon, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released later in the year, however, under a writ of habeas corpus issued by the Missouri Supreme Court, and, still later, a new trial was ordered.

While the Kincannon case was still pending, Cole was tried in June 1920 for the murder of Lucas and acquitted. The Kincannon case was then later dropped.

The reader might wonder how this case is connected to the Lee Nutt case that I wrote about last time. Admittedly, the connection is pretty thin--only that Nutt and Cole were friends. However, the connection will become much stronger next time when I chronicle the third episode in southwest Missouri's jealousy-driven three-act tragedy of the early 1900s.

  

A Series of Eternal Triangles--Part 1

A series of three related love triangles in the southwest Missouri-southeast Kansas area over a period of twenty years in the early part of the twentieth century resulted in the deaths of four men. The first act in this three-part tragedy was staged at Joplin in October of 1908, and the principal players were thirty-two-year-old David Lee Nutt, his wife, and his cousin.

About nine months earlier, Nutt and his wife, Blanche, were living on a farm near Neosho when Nutt's cousin Jake Nicely came to live with the couple and their three children. Nicely, who was of "prepossessing appearance" and about ten years younger than his cousin, "proved attractive" to the twenty-eight-year-old Blanche, and a friendship grew up between them.

In 1900, just two years after he and Blanche were married, Lee, as Nutt was usually called, had been involved in a mining-related dynamite accident that put out one of his eyes and blew off one of his hands. Whether Lee's disfigurement had anything to do with Blanche's disenchantment with her husband is unknown, but, for whatever reason, the relationship between Blanche and Nicely soon "ripened" into something more passionate than friendship.

One day in July, the clandestine lovers took off together, leaving Nutt to take care of the children alone. Nutt at first swore vengeance, but when the illicit couple was located in Kansas City, he and other relatives pleaded with Blanche to come home. "The efforts of the peacemakers were spurned," however, and the illegal lovers stayed together.

On October 25, 1908, Nutt came to Joplin on business and met his wife on the street that evening. He again pleaded with her to come back to him, but she still refused. He spent the night in a Joplin hotel ruminating over the treachery of his wife and his cousin. The next day, Nutt, who was carrying a revolver, again saw Blanche on the street and followed her into Church's shoe store. Discovering that Nicely was in the store with her, Nutt was overcome with anger. He fired several shots at Nicely, at least two of which took effect, and Nicely died almost instantly.

Nutt was arrested at scene without resistance. At his trial in 1909, Nutt pleaded self-defense, claiming that Nicely had physically assaulted him when he first entered the store and tried to speak to his wife. How much stock the jury placed in Nutt's version of what happened in the store is not certain, but they came back after only 45 minutes of deliberation with a verdict of not guilty, citing the "unwritten law" in addition to the self-defense claim.

A short time after this episode, Blanche divorced Nutt, and Nutt moved to Granby, where he remarried and where he made the acquaintance of one John Cole, who figures prominently in the next act of this three-part drama. (To be continued.)