Kill the Son of a Bitch: The Story of Blanche Connors

In the wee hours of Sunday, December 25, 1887, the body of a "colored" man identified as Joseph Peters was found in Kansas City in a pool of blood near Ninth Street and State Line Road on the Missouri side of the line. Peters had two deep cuts and a severed artery.

Shortly after daylight, a police officer followed a trail of blood from the scene and found a second pool of blood a block or two away outside the home of “Aunt Jane” Grisby. Upon inquiry, he learned that Aunt Jane had hosted a Christmas Eve party on Saturday night at which “bad whiskey flowed freely” and that there had been a serious disturbance.

About 1:00 a.m. an “octoroon named Blanche Connors” had been playing the organ when Peters approached and whispered something to her. Almost instantly, a Black man named Paul Enders struck Peters, and the two ran out of the house, followed by Blanche and a third man, later identified as George Thomas, alias Bony George. 

The officer found Enders and the woman at a nearby house. Blanche was wearing an apron that had a blood on it and had a cut in it, and a knife that appeared to have been recently washed was lying on the bed.

Blanche and Enders both denied knowledge of the fatal stabbing, but the officer arrested both of them as suspects. At a coroner’s inquest held over Peters’s body, a young Black woman named Alice Marr testified that she witnessed the assault. She said Paul Enders, Bony George, and Blanche Conners (alias Matt or Mattie Mason) had the victim down in the yard in front of Aunt Jane’s house, and she heard Blanche say, “Kill the son of a bitch.” Alice said she saw Enders the next morning, and he admitted they had attacked and killed Peters for his money.

The coroner's jury ruled that Peters had died from wounds inflicted with a knife wielded by either Paul Enders, Bony George Thomas, or Blanche Connors and that, regardless of which one had inflicted the fatal wound, the other two were active accomplices. Enders and Blanche were charged with murder, but Thomas could not be located.

Enders’s case was severed from Blanche’s, and he was tried first. The jury failed to agree, largely because Alice Marr, the state’s star witness, had disappeared, and the judge declared a mistrial.

When Blanche’s trial began in mid-April 1888, she sat in the courtroom “gorgeously arrayed,” according to the Kansas City Star. A rival newspaper described her as “a good-looking octoroon, about 25 years of age.” Although Alice Marr was again missing, the state made a stronger circumstantial case against Blanche than it had against Enders, and the jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder. Blanche Connors became the first woman in Jackson County ever convicted of first-degree murder. 

Interviewed shortly after her conviction, Blanche was described as "a handsome quadroon” with “great brown eyes.” The “quadroon” appellation was accurate, even though the term would be considered politically incorrect today, because Blanche was, in fact, one-fourth Black, not one-eighth as “octaroon,” the term by which she’d been described in previous reports, denotes. 

Blanche’s maiden name was Martha “Mattie” Mason, and she had been born in the Indian Nation, the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and a half-Black, half-Cherokee father. Her mother died when she was only eight days old, and she was raised at first by her father's family but mostly by a German woman in Franklin County, Missouri. She was still a mere girl when she struck out on her own and moved to St. Louis, where she married a Black man named Connor. However, they stayed together only about a year. She got the nickname Blanche because of her light complexion.  

At Paul Enders’s second trial in late January 1889, the defendant was found not guilty. A month later, Blanche was granted a second trial because the judge said the same evidence had been used to convict her that had been presented at Enders's trial and yet she'd been found guilty while he was found not guilty. 

At her second trial in April 1889, Blanche was found not guilty. Appearing dazed, she left the courthouse in the company of a Black woman who reportedly kept a bawdy house on Broadway in Kansas City.

A year or so later, Blanche was convicted of feloniously assaulting another woman, and she spent about a year and a half in the Missouri State Prison. What happened to Blanche after that has not been traced.

The story above is a condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/47KQOZ1.

Alice Dyke: Cold-Blooded Murderess or Self-Defender?

Who are you going to believe? Inhabitants of “a resort for the lowest kind of harlots” or the companions of a young real estate agent from a “highly respected” family who was killed at the ill-famed resort? That was the question facing residents of Kansas City when they awoke on July 31, 1887, and picked up the Sunday morning newspaper. 

Earlier that morning, shortly after 12:00 a.m., 27-year-old Alice Dyke shot and killed a young man named John Hamilton in the doorway of her brothel or “saloon” at 449 West Fifth Street. His two companions claimed that they and Hamilton had merely been passing along the street when they saw a woman, later identified as Alice, standing in the front doorway of the house. 

When Hamilton said "good evening" to her, so their story went, Alice immediately started cussing Hamilton, rushed up to him, and shot him with a .32 caliber pistol. They said they didn’t know the woman and that the shooting was entirely unprovoked. 

Alice Dyke was arrested and interrogated at the police station. She refused to talk at first, but when she finally did tell her story, it was entirely different from that of Hamilton's companions. She said the three men had been to her place two or three different times prior to the shooting. On the last visit, they got into a dispute with Alice over the price of a bottle of soda, and Hamilton went away cursing and threatening her. She said that when they came back around midnight, she refused to admit them because she feared they were trying to steal the $450 she had on the premises. Feeling threatened, she shot Hamilton in what she thought was self-defense when he began kicking at her door and trying to break it down.  

Two girls who boarded with Alice said they had not actually witnessed the shooting but that they did hear a big commotion at the door, such as Allice described, before they heard shots fired. They also confirmed that Hamilton or someone who looked exactly like him had visited the house and raised a ruckus prior to the fatal visit. 

Alice Dyke, who went by various aliases from time to time, had lived in Kansas City much of her life and had a reputation as someone with "a long acquaintanceship with vice.” 

At a coroner's inquest held over Hamilton’s body, one of his companions admitted that the three young men had visited a saloon in the vicinity of Alice Dyke’s place early Saturday night, where they had purchased and drunk some soda pop, but he suggested that it was not the same house where the shooting took place. The coroner's jury returned a verdict charging Alice Dyke with felonious assault resulting in death, but a grand jury later indicted her for murder in the first degree,

At her trial in October of 1887, much of the prosecution testimony focused on Alice's reputation for immorality, but even a policeman who served as one of the prosecution witnesses admitted that, despite her bad reputation, he thought she was very honest. In addition, defense testimony tended to confirm Alice's story that the three men had been kicking at her door when she fired the fatal shots. She was found guilty of murder in the second degree and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. 

Alice was transported to the penitentiary in Jefferson City, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed her guilty verdict in November 1888. Her second trial in April 1889 ended in a hung jury, and she was released on bond. At her third trial in September 1889, the state’s case was “very weak,” owing to the absence of at least two critical witnesses, and the jury found Alice not guilty after 3 or 4 hours of deliberation. 

The story above is a greatly condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/3NnJyLN.

Unlawfully Intimate

    On Sunday morning, July 22, 1876, a man standing on the north bank of the Missouri River in southern Warren County, Missouri, discovered a body floating downstream. The body was pulled to shore and identified as that of Samuel Taylor, a thirty-eight-year-old man who lived nearby with his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Martha, and one child. 

   Taylor was described as a man of “rather loose habits and of very weak mind.” Although he was white, he was known to associate mainly with his Black neighbors. Examination of Taylor's body revealed several wounds that appeared to have been made by a large pocketknife or similar object, and authorities concluded that he'd been killed by some unknown party.

   Suspicion soon settled on Dan Price, a thirty-three-old Black man who was a close associate of Taylor. He and Price often fished and hunted together. Price, a widower, frequently visited the Taylor home, and rumors had been circulating in the neighborhood that Price had been “unlawfully intimate” with Taylor’s wife. 

  Price and his paramour were both arrested on August 4 and taken before a justice for examination. Testimony at the hearing centered around the alleged romance between Price and Mrs. Taylor and the fact that Price and the victim had been seen together shortly before Taylor disappeared. At the end of the hearing, the case against the woman was dismissed, but Price was held for murder. 

    Martha Taylor left the area after her discharge, but additional evidence against her soon came to light. She was brought back to Warrenton, charged as a conspirator in her husband's murder, and given a new preliminary hearing. The primary witness against her was Maggie Price, Dan Price's 16-year-old daughter, who said she'd overheard Martha and her father talking about "putting Taylor out of the way." Some of the other testimony against Mrs. Taylor was too salacious "to give publicity to," according to the local newspaper.

  Although the outcome of Martha’s preliminary hearing is unclear from newspapers, she apparently was charged as an accessory to murder and let out on bond. Shortly after the hearing, Dan Price escaped from the Warren County Jail, and Martha temporarily harbored him before he fled the territory.

   Price was arrested in Illinois in late October and brought back to Warren County, where a joint indictment was found against him and Martha Taylor. As principal in the crime, Price was charged with first-degree murder, and Martha, as an accessory before the fact, was charged with second-degree murder.

   In late November, Price was found guilty and sentenced to hang. Martha Taylor’s trial began almost immediately after Price’s ended. She was found guilty of murder in the second degree and sentenced to twenty-five years in the state penitentiary.

   Dan Price was executed on January 18, 1877. After serving less than five and half years in prison, Martha Taylor received a full pardon and was released in April 1882.

   The brief account above is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4le5mWs.