Clara Schweiger of Spotted Adder Snake Fame

When Clara Schweiger shot and mortally wounded her husband, Louis Schweiger, in May 1915, in the Jackson County courthouse in downtown Kansas City, a local newspaper suggested that readers might be familiar with Clara because of her "spotted adder snake fame." This was a reference to a strange incident involving a poisonous snake that was delivered to her home six months earlier, but whether the earlier incident factored into her shooting of her husband is not clear.

Louis Schweiger and Clara Dulle had married in 1902, and to all appearances, the couple seemed happy for the first ten years. They had no biological children, but they had an adopted son, Norman, to whom they were both very devoted. Trouble in the marriage began about 1912, when gossip spread in the Schweiger’s neighborhood that Louis was paying attention to another woman. The gossip preyed on Clara’s fragile mind, and she grew very jealous and anxious. 

The friction in the marriage came to a head in October 1913, when Schweiger, Clara, and their son were taking a streetcar to church. When Schweiger spoke to a neighbor woman on the streetcar, his wife went into a rage, accusing him of being unfaithful. She jumped up and took Norman off the streetcar, and when Schweiger returned home, she and the boy were not there. He tried to get her to come back home, but she wouldn’t do it. So, Schweiger left his wife and filed for divorce. 

The divorce was pending and Clara was back living in the Schweiger home with nine-year-old Norman when the postman showed up on November 10, 1914, to deliver the mail. Clara met him at the door, and he handed her a package. “Looks like a box of bon bons,” he remarked. 

When Clara took the package, though, she felt something move inside it and said so to the mailman as she handed the parcel back. Together they opened the box, and a small, deadly adder poked its head out. The postman picked up a big rock and smashed the snake to death. 

Suffering from “severe nervous shock,” Clara admitted to a newspaperman that she’d had trouble in the past with some of the neighbor women. She didn’t know whether the past trouble with her neighbors was related to the sending of the snake, but she was convinced that someone was deliberately trying to hurt her.  

Schweiger’s divorce suit came up in court later that month, and it was granted over Clara's objection. Clara was further devastated when her husband was granted custody of their son.

After Schweiger’s divorce petition was granted, Clara hired Tiera Farrow, one of Kansas City’s first female lawyers, to file a motion on her behalf to annul the divorce. Unbeknownst to Ms. Farrow, her client was carrying an automatic revolver in her purse when the two women showed up at the courthouse for a hearing on May 1, 1915. Infuriated after the judge ruled against her motion, Clara approached her ex-husband in a courtroom corridor and shot him three times, then stood over him and pumped another round into him as he slumped to the floor. Schweiger was rushed to a hospital, where he died later that day.

Clara was charged with first-degree murder and waived a preliminary hearing. When the trial got underway in late February 1916, spectators filled the courtroom, drawn not only by the novelty of a woman defendant in a murder case but the even more unusual phenomenon of a woman lawyer as counsel for the defense. 

Tiera Farrow gave a moving defense of her client, declaring that Clara’s passionate love for an uncaring husband drove her to madness, but Miss Farrow’s pleas were to no avail. The jury came back with a verdict finding Clara guilty of second-degree murder with a recommended sentence of fifteen years in prison. 

Clara appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, and she regained custody of her son while she was out on bond awaiting the high court's decision. In early 1918, the supreme court affirmed Clara's guilty verdict, and she was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary. 

However, she was paroled in 1921 after serving less than four years of her scheduled sentence. Then in 1925, she was granted a full pardon and restored to citizenship after many of her friends petitioned the governor. 

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/4tujpur.

Almost Like a Tigress: The Story of Annie Hunning

About 8:00 o’clock Saturday evening, December 9, 1911, thirty-six-year-old Martin Hunning, a farmer living in an isolated area south of Murphy in Jefferson County, Missouri, arose from the kitchen table and went to the telephone to call a neighbor. The phone, which had just been installed, was situated near a window, and as Hunning was waiting for the central switchboard to connect him to his neighbor, somebody fired a shotgun through the window. The blast tore half of Hunning’s head off, and he fell instantly dead. Hunning’s thirty-five-year-old wife, Annie, rushed to the door of the cabin and heard a man’s voice say, “We’ve got to beat it. They’ve got a telephone.”

From that statement, Annie deduced that there must have been two men involved in the murder, but it was too dark for her to see. Turning back in fright, she stepped over her husband’s dead body to telephone for help and then “dropped in a swoon.”

At any rate, that was what she told neighbors who answered her call, and none of them questioned her version of events. At least not at first. Volunteers patrolled the roads around the Hunning home until daylight on Sunday, when a search party was organized. The first sign that Annie might not be telling the truth came when the search party found the tracks of only one person around the window through which Hunning was shot. Bloodhounds were brought in, but they lost the scent of the suspect when the searchers came to the edge of a cliff. 

On December 12, Hunning’s funeral was held at a nearby church, and the dead man’s widow and his elderly mother were “the chief mourners.”

One theory of the crime was that an ex-convict who held a grudge against Hunning had killed him for having helped send the man to prison, but Jefferson County prosecuting attorney Albert Miller placed little stock in that idea. He was, instead, developing his own theory.

On December 14, four and a half days after the murder, twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Seidl, a neighbor of the Hunnings, was arrested on suspicion, as a result of Miller's investigation of “neighborhood gossip” about an "eternal triangle" involving Seidl and  the Hunnings that had been spreading since the morning after the murder.

Seidl was arrested for questioning but released after several hours. Asked about the rumors involving her and Seidl, Annie denied that there had been any "domestic infelicity" in her household, and she said she knew Seidl had not killed her husband. 

Despite Seidl’s release, Prosecutor Miller remained dogged in his determination to ferret out the facts behind the murder. On December 18, he announced that he had ordered the exhumation of Hunning’s body for the purpose of convening a new coroner’s inquest. He summoned several neighbors of the Hunnings to the December 19 inquest, and they testified that Annie's reputation for morality was not good and that she was known to have a close relationship with Joseph Seidl. Annie's own father testified as to an angry confrontation he had witnessed between his son-in-law and Seidl the previous summer. At the end of the inquest, both Annie Hunning and Joseph Seidl were arrested and taken to the Jefferson County Jail at Hillsboro.

On Sunday morning, December 24, Seidl finally broke down, after an all-night interrogation, and confessed to an amorous relationship with Annie. He put the blame for the illicit  affair squarely on Annie, saying, "She  tempted me, and I yielded." Seidl still maintained, however, that he had not killed Annie's husband.

Annie was also grilled at length, but she refused to break. Afterwards, the officer who questioned her marveled at her strong will and said that she had eyed him defiantly, "almost like a tigress." 

A joint preliminary hearing was held for Seidl and Annie Hunning on December 29, and the justice ruled that they should be held to await the action of a grand jury. The next day, Miller announced that he had enough evidence to file first-degree murder charges against the pair without waiting for a grand jury. 

Miller filed the charges in early January 1912, and the trial was set for March. Part of the evidence Miller had in his possession were some love letters Seidl and Annie  had exchanged since their incarceration that a trusty had turned over to the prosecutor. Confronted with this new evidence, Annie finally admitted that she had foreknowledge of her husband's murder, but she downplayed her own complicity in the crime. 

When Seidl was told of Annie's story, he begged to differ. He signed a statement that Annie was in on the crime from the beginning and had set the stage for it by placing her sewing machine near the window with a lighted lamp on it, which he used to guide his aim for the murderous shotgun blast.  

A couple of days after giving their confessions, Mrs. Hunning and Seidl repudiated them, saying they had only done so under duress and that they thought they were only admitting to their romantic involvement, not to the murder. However, Seidl’s confession, which was published in full in St. Louis newspapers, was very damning in its detail, as were the confiscated love notes.

Annie's and Seidl’s cases were severed, and his trial began first, in late March at Hillsboro. His confession was admitted as evidence over strenuous objections from the defense. The jury returned a guilty verdict on April 3 with a sentence recommendation of life in prison. 

Annie's trial began immediately after Seidl's concluded, with Seidl serving as the state's star witness. He told how Annie had promised they would get married and that she had over a $1,000 she would give him if her husband were out of the way. He admitted on cross examination that she'd never specifically asked him to kill Martin Hunning, but she knew about the plan all along.

Annie testified in her own defense, repeating the story she'd told from the beginning of hearing a voice outside her window. She admitted being "unduly friendly" with Seidl, but she claimed not to know that he was the one who killed her husband. 

Annie's first trial ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, but at her second trial in mid-May, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and fixed her punishment at life imprisonment.

In late May, Annie and her lover were transferred together to the state prison at Jeff City. Annie was paroled in December 1919 after serving only seven and half years of her scheduled life sentence, and she was restored to citizenship in February 1921. Seidl remained in prison, but he, too, was discharged under parole in 1922.

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/3OA5fbX.

Always the Smile: The Cold-hearted Aggie Myers

In the wee hours of May 11, 1904, two Black men broke into the home of twenty-year-old Clarence Myers at 2313 Terrace Street in Kansas City and attacked Myers and his twenty-one-year-old wife, Aggie, in their bed. One of the intruders knocked Aggie senseless while her husband struggled with the other attacker. Aggie awoke enough to crawl to her back door, where a neighbor heard her cries. The neighbor found Clarence's body lying in a pool of blood in an adjoining room.

At least that's the story Aggie told police when they arrived after daylight, but authorities had their doubts almost from the very beginning. They found the Myers home in total disorder with blood spattered everywhere and furniture broken and overturned. If robbery were the motive for the crime, the intruders had gotten very little, because several valuables, like Clarence's gold watch, were left behind. There were also a number of other troubling inconsistencies. The whole scene looked to police as if it had been staged, and a doctor who examined the victim's body said he thought Clarence had been dead several hours longer than Aggie's version of events accounted for.  

Aggie was taken to the police station for questioning. Authorities learned that her maiden name was Alice "Aggie" Brock, that she'd grown up in Higginsville, and that she's come to Kansas City four years earlier with her parents. She had been married briefly to a man named Payne before divorcing him and marrying Myers. Despite being sternly grilled by police, Aggie stuck to her story that two Black men had broken in and killed Clarence, and she had ready explanations for several of the inconsistencies in her story. Interviewed by a reporter after her release, she gave a lengthy statement pleading total innocence and questioning why police would even suspect her of such a heinous crime. 

Aggie visited her dead husband at the undertaker's office, but she shed few tears and declined an invitation from her in-laws to accompany them to Newton, Kansas, for Clarence's funeral.

On May 20, two Black men were arrested, but Aggie said they were not the men who'd killed her husband. 

In early July, twenty-year-old Frank Hottman was arrested in Walla Walla, Washington, and charged with the murder of Clarence Myers, based on evidence that had been found at the scene of the crime, on Hottman's movements after the crime, and on evidence found on his person when he was interrogated in Washington. Hottman, a childhood friend of Aggie Myers, had been a person of interest in the case early on. He had visited the Myers home and had been seen with Aggie elsewhere in Kansas City in the days leading up to the crime. On the Sunday prior to the murder, the two had been buggy riding together at Higginsville, their childhood home. Then, the day after the crime, Hottman had left town. 

Interviewed in Washington, Hottman initially denied involvement in Myers's murder, but later he gave a full confession and implicated Aggie as the mastermind behind the crime. He said Aggie wanted her husband dead so that she could marry him (Hottman). They had planned to kill Clarence in his sleep, but he woke up and a terrific struggle ensued, with Aggie finally slicing her husband's throat while Hottman held him.

Aggie, however, steadfastly denied any involvement. She stuck to her story of the two intruders and said officers must have coerced a confession out of Hottman. She admitted being friends with him but denied any romantic involvement. 

Despite her claims of innocence, Aggie was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Officers who interrogated her were struck by her stoic manner, as she coolly denied their accusations. No matter how hard they grilled her, she remained calm, looked them in the eye, and offered just the hint of a smile. "Always the smile," said a newspaperman who reported on the police interview. One officer picked up an umbrella and remarked that Aggie was as cold and unfeeling as the umbrella's silver handle.

Hottman was brought back to Kansas City, and when a joint preliminary hearing for him and Aggie was held on August 1, a large crowd turned out, most of them straining to get a glimpse of the "trim figure" of Aggie Myers. While she was "tolerably good looking" and carried herself with dignity, Hottman was a "low-browed fellow" with a "hulking, awkward frame" who met the crowd's expectation "of what a murderer should look like." 

The two cases were severed, and Hottman's trial began first, in January 1905. In addition to getting Hottman's confessions admitted into evidence, the prosecution called several witnesses who testified as to the intimate relationship between him and Aggie Myers. Prosecutors also exhibited several items of evidence, such as some bloody cuffs belonging to Hottman that were found at the Myers place after the crime.

Hottman's only defense was a plea for mercy, based on the supposed coercive tactics of his interrogators. The jury, though, came back with a quick verdict of first-degree murder and a sentence of death.

Aggie Myers was granted a change of venue to Clay County for her trial, and it was held in early June 1905. The courtroom audience seemed to sympathize with her until Hottman took the stand as a state witness and told of the conspiracy between him and Aggie to kill her husband, recounting the horrific details of the crime. Aggie later took the stand in her own defense, but her tired story of two Black intruders failed to regain any of the sympathy she'd lost. She, like Hottman, was found guilty, but she accepted the news with the same aplomb she'd displayed since the crime. One commentator remarked that her self-possession was so marvelous that he wondered why the defense had not put it forth as evidence of her insanity.  

Aggie’s motion for a new trial was denied, and she was sentenced to hang. Upon appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the sentence, but she and her lawyers continued to plead for clemency. Aggie's case drew nationwide attention, and many men even expressed a willingness to marry her if and when she was released. According to the Kansas City Times, though, the women were very slow "in offering themselves to Frank Hottman."

Both Aggie and Hottman eventually had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment by the Missouri governor. Hottman died in the state pen at Jefferson City in 1923, while Aggie was paroled two years later after serving over twenty years behind bars.

She later married again and moved to Colorado.

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

A Shotgun Wedding Turns Deadly: The Story of Lulu Prince

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.