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.
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