On Wednesday morning, November 25, 1964, Mountain View (MO) resident Joseph Brown, after not hearing from his father for several days, went to check on the older man, who lived alone in an expensive home in a secluded area a few miles north of town. Joseph found the body of his father, Wilfred Gerald Brown, lying on a bedroom floor and clad only in underwear, with his feet bound and his hands tied behind his back.
Authorities who investigated the murder estimated that Wilfred Brown had been dead about a week, not just because of the state of the body but also because all the days of a wall calendar had been marked off up until November 18. Investigators found that about $2,000 worth of guns were missing from the home. Also missing was Brown's billfold, which was thought to have contained about $500. Investigators theorized that whoever had killed the man was familiar with the area, because the Brown home sat at the end of a dead-end road and was not visible to casual passers-by on the main road.
Because of the body's advanced state of decomposition, a cause of death was not immediately determined. However, after an autopsy on Friday, a coroner's jury ruled that Brown had died of shock, brought on by a blow to the head while he was struggling to free his trussed body. Authorities announced, also, that they were seeking four teenage boys who were suspected of having stolen some property from Brown about two weeks before the murder. It was thought that they might have returned to rob him again and ended up killing him.
A break came in the case when the Mountain View marshal received an anonymous letter with the names of several of the suspects pasted on a plain sheet of paper, and six youths were arrested in connection with the robbery/murder. A crude diagram was drawn on the paper indicating that George Montgomery had struck the fatal blow. Montgomery, David Holly, and Wayne Conley, all of whom were from Belleville, Illinois, and all of whom were 18 years old, were charged with murder, while another 18-year-old and two 17-year-olds were charged with burglary in the case. One of the 17-year-olds, James Davis, had reportedly gone to school at Mountain View the previous year.
At his first-degree murder trial in September 1965 in Carter County on a change of venue, Montgomery pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of robbery in a plea-bargain deal and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Conley also took a change of venue to Carter County, where he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in another plea-bargain deal and was also given 25 years in prison. Montgomery's conviction was later overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court on the grounds that he could not be convicted of robbery when he had not been charged with robbery. In other words, the prosecutor had put the cart before the horse.
I have not traced what happened at Montgomery's second trial or even whether he had a second trial. Nor have I found any information about Holly's case except a reference to his having filed a motion to vacate the sentence he received (whatever that sentence was).
