Thirty-year-old Phillip H. Kennedy and twenty-two-year-old Lulu Prince got married on December 4, 1900, at the courthouse in Kansas City in a hurry-up wedding that the local Times considered a "queer" ceremony. Kennedy declined to kiss the bride and rushed out of the courthouse as soon as the judge pronounced him and Lulu man and wife. A day or so later, he took Lulu to a theatrical show, but he refused to live with her.
Barely over a month later, the curious story of the Kennedy marriage made headlines again, when the groom applied to the circuit court on January 8, 1891, to annul the marriage. Kennedy claimed in his petition that he'd been forced into the marriage because of threats Lulu's father and brothers had made against him. Kennedy refused to talk about the relationship between him and Lulu prior to their wedding or the circumstances that led to such a hasty ceremony.
In early December, after the wedding but before Kennedy applied for an annulment, Lulu had met with a Kansas City Star reporter to try to dispel the rumors that she and Kennedy had been forced to get married because of “their intimate relations.” She claimed the real reason was simply that she and Kennedy had been engaged and, when she found out that he was planning to wed another young woman, she was determined to hold him to his promise of marriage. Kennedy, on the other hand, denied that he had ever been engaged to Lulu Prince.
But in early January 1901, Lulu's father visited Kennedy
in his office and ended up calling Kennedy a "rape fiend" after an exchange of heated words. Lulu also visited or
spoke by phone with Kennedy several times after her marriage, trying to get him
to change his mind about living with her, but he refused. When Lulu learned from
the January 9 Kansas City newspapers that
her estranged husband had filed a motion for an annulment, she determined to try again.
On the evening the 9th, she met Kennedy in his downtown office, and tried to get hm to reconsider, but he rebuffed her. Driven to desperation, she resolved the next day to give him one last chance, in the form of an ultimatum. Armed with a .32 caliber revolver, she sent to Kennedy's office building, and when he once again told her he didn't want to have anything to do with her, she pulled out the gun and shot him in the hallway outside his office. As he was pronounced dead, she walked over, kicked him in the side of the face, and declared, “He’ll never seduce another girl.”
The “strikingly beautiful” young woman was arrested, and a coroner's jury ruled that Lulu Prince Kennedy should be held on a first-degree murder charge. Many people, however, expressed sympathy for any girl who defended her honor against a man who wronged her with a false promise of marriage.
Much of the testimony at both the coroner's jury and later at Lulu's trial centered around the questions of whether Kennedy had indeed seduced Lulu and whether she was in "delicate health" at the time of the marriage. The prosecution said "no" on both counts, and even the prosecution gave mixed signals on these questions. Although Lulu's lawyers argued that Kennedy had, in fact, seduced and impregnated her, but Lulu herself seemed more concerned about protecting her reputation for morality than about the murder charge against her.
At Lulu's trial in June 1901, she was convicted of second-degree murder. Lulu was released on bond pending an appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court. In July 1903, the high court overturned her conviction and remanded the case to Jackson County for retrial. At her second trial in January 1904, the defense presented evidence of mental illness in Lulu's family, and the jury found that she was not guilty by reason of insanity but that she had now regained her sanity. Thus, Lulu walked out of the courtroom a free woman.
This is a greatly condensed version of a chapter from my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4sz2VAd. The case of Lulu Prince Kennedy is a very intriguing one with a lot of interesting back story not included in the shortened version above.
