I Showed Him the Road: The Story Mary Appleby

Sitting in a cell in November 1921 at the Greene County Jail a couple of days after gunning down her husband on Main Street in Springfield, twenty-four-year-old Mary Teague Appleby tried to express her feelings toward the man she’d killed, in some crude lines of verse she wrote down on cheap note paper. Here is a sample:

I gave him kind words, I showed him the road;
I tried not to let him go on with the load.
When a lift just in time would set everything right.
For I know what it means to be losing the fight.

I was his wife in his trouble and need,

I offered to help him, but he didn’t heed.

Although critics might find fault with the meter and verbiage of her lines, the Springfield Leader opined, "perhaps they express her feelings in the best way she knows. She apparently has but little education."

The Leader’s last observation was a definite understatement, because the only institution of learning Mary had attended in recent years was the school of hard knocks. Born in Christian County, Mary grew up in Stone County and later Webb City, where her father worked in the mines. When she was eighteen, Mary married 35-year-old Jim Thompson in Kansas City, and the couple had a son. However, the marriage was a rocky one, and the couple split up in late 1920 or early 1921 after moving to Springfield. Thompson took the boy and moved to Rogersville.

Mary soon became “intimately associated” with twenty-four-year-old Abe Appleby, a ne'er-do-well who seldom worked and depended on Mary to support him. Mary "played the hotels" in Springfield with Appleby acting almost as her pimp and taking most of the money she made.

Mary and Appleby got married soon after her divorce from Thompson became final in mid to late 1921, but she continued to work the hotels. In early November, Appleby was arrested for allegedly beating Mary up, but she put up his bail to get him released.

On Wednesday, November 9, Mary and her sister Eva Giles went shopping, and they were supposed to meet Appleby at the corner of College and Main streets at 3:30 p.m. When they didn’t arrive until about 4:00 p.m., Appleby grew angry at Mary and started cussing her, according to Eva's later story.

Mary got into a heated argument with her husband, and he threatened to kill her. The argument continued to escalate, and Mary ended up killing Appleby instead, in front of a pressing store in the 200 block of Main Street, when he struck at her and tried to grab a gun away from her that he'd given her to keep for him.  

     Two police officers quickly arrived on the scene and took Mary into custody. A Springfield Missouri Republican reporter who visited Mary in the Greene County Jail later that evening described her as slender and pretty with an overall appearance that reminded him more of a schoolgirl than a murderess. 

On November 10, the day after the shooting, a coroner’s jury reached a verdict that Abe Appleby had come to his death by a gunshot from his wife, Mary Teague Appleby, and two days later, a charge of second-degree murder was filed against her.

Mary’s trial got underway in early January 1922 before a packed courtroom. Most of the defense testimony centered around Appleby's abusive treatment of his wife, and Mary also testified in her own defense. The jury deadlocked, with a 10-2 vote in favor of acquittal, and Mary's second trial took place in April 1922. Her ex-husband, Jim Thompson, attended most of the proceedings and lent his support, allowing his son to sit on Mary's lap part of the time while the trial was going on. The defense once again offered much testimony as to Appleby's ill treatment of Mary, and this time she was acquitted. Mary's friends where excited for her, but Mary herself took the news with “no undue display of emotion.”

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/4n5NHkQ.