“I Have Killed Pete”: Maud Lewis Murders Her Lover

About 2:45 a.m. on Monday morning, May 13, 1895, two shots rang out in the vicinity of Elliott Avenue and Wash Street (now Cole Street) in St. Louis. Tracing the shots to a boarding house at 2719 Wash Street, officers found the dead body of State Senator Pete Morrissey lying in the bed of 28-year-old Maud Lewis, madam of the house. Blood was oozing out of a bullet hole in the victim's head.

Maud was in a state of hysteria, but two young women who boarded with her and their gentlemen callers (who were physician friends of Morrissey) gave testimony implicating Maud in the shooting. Albert Andrews, porter at the Lewis house, was highly excited and unable to give an intelligent account of what had happened.

The doctors said they'd been at Senator Morrissey's saloon about midnight when Maud Lewis, who was generally known as the senator's mistress, came in. Accompanied by one of the women who boarded with her, Maud tried to get Morrissey to go back to her place. Morrissey finally agreed, and he took his two friends along with him. The drunken entourage left for Maud's place and got there about 2:30 Monday morning.

Morrissey's doctor friends and their female companions were upstairs, while Maud was entertaining Morrissey in a downstairs room when shots rang out, only about fifteen minutes after the group arrived.

According to the doctors, when they raced downstairs to investigate, Maud came out of her room crying, "I have killed Pete." Andrews, the porter, said, however, that just moments before the shots rang out, he heard Maud say, "Don't Pete. Don't." He said he rushed into her room, saw Morrissey lying dead, and picked up a .38 caliber revolver that was on the bed beside the body.

At an inquest held over Morrissey’s body on Monday afternoon, the coroner’s jury reached a verdict that the senator had come to his death from gunshots fired by “one Maud Lewis.” Maud was arrested, and when a newspaperman visited her in her cell later that evening, she was "very nervous" and "had a wild look in her eyes." She said her real name was Fay O'Neil, not Maud Lewis, but she refused to go into further details about her background. The next day, however, she told a different newspaper that her maiden name was Laura Lucas.

Maud said Morrissey had treated her badly ever since she'd known him but that she still loved him. She admitted she must have killed him, but she didn't know how because she had no recollection of pulling the trigger. She said both she and Morrissey had been drinking heavily leading up to the incident.

At Maud's preliminary hearing, Albert Andrews, the man she supposedly employed as a porter, tried to shield her by claiming he'd seen a stranger running from the house immediately after the shooting. A newspaper investigation revealed, however, that Andrews was more than just Maud's porter. The two had actually been married at one time. So, Andrews's story was given little credence. Pleading self-defense, Maud testified that she and Morrissey had argued just before the shooting and that he had choked her. However, she was held on a second-degree murder charge at the end of the hearing.

While Maud was still awaiting trial, Albert Andrews signed a written confession that he, not Maud, had killed Morrissey, but his latest story was met with at least as much skepticism as his previous claim of having seen a stranger running from Maud's house.

At Maud’s trial in October 1895, the defendant was found guilty of second-degree murder, and she was assessed a punishment of fifteen years in prison. Despite the verdict against Maud, there was considerable sentiment in her favor. Senator Morrissey had been thrice indicted for fraud, had a reputation for debauchery, and was known to abuse Maud with regularity. So, there were many people who were “not prone to judge too harshly her who cut him short in his career.”

Denied a new trial by the trial judge and later by the Missouri Supreme Court, Maud was taken to the state penitentiary at Jefferson City in November 1896. Within just a few months, though, her friends and relatives began petitioning for clemency, citing, among other things, Andrews's reiteration that he was the real killer of Morrissey. The governor finally pardoned Maud in early January 1901 after she served about four and half years of her fifteen-year term. 

My latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4bVZq0d, contains a much more detailed account of Maud Lewis's story.