The Mysterious Death of Grover Myers

When fifty-four-year-old Grover Myers died at Gravelton, Missouri, on April 15, 1939, after a two-week illness, the cause of death was generally thought to be pneumonia, and the people of Gravelton mourned the passing of a well-known member of their community. Myers had lived in the vicinity all of his life, except for a few years in North Carolina, and he had several siblings livingin the area, including Dr. O. A. Myers, one of the physicians who’d treated Grover prior to his death. Like his brother, Grover Myers was considered a prominent citizen.

About a week after Myers’s death, a seventeen-year-old lad who had worked on the Myers farm whispered that he’d once seen Myers’s forty-four-year-old wife, Mary Louise, “in affectionate embrace” with Frank Stroup, a thirty-nine-year-old neighbor of the Myers family. This news set the neighbors’ tongues wagging, and speculation soon arose that maybe there was more to Grover Myers’s death than met the eye. If the neighbors had known more about Grover’s time in North Carolina, their tongues might have started wagging even sooner.

Sixteen years earlier, Grover and Louise, while married to previous spouses, had been convicted of “immoral conduct” in North Carolina on the grounds that they had deserted their respective families to live with each other. Grover Myers was sentenced to six months working on county roads, while Louise was sentenced to three months in the county home. Grover got his work sentence suspended upon payment of a $200 fine and a promise to return to his family.

He didn’t keep his promise very long, though, because shortly after Louise’s release, the two lovers got married at Winston-Salem, absconded to Missouri. After living in St. Louis about three years, the couple moved to Grover’s home territory of Wayne County, and they’d been there ever since. But now, Grover lay dead, and rumors were starting to circulate in the neighborhood that he might not have died of natural causes.

When Grover’s sister Ala Whitener got wind of the rumors, she began an investigation on her own. Already suspicious of the circumstances of her brother’s death because he had appeared on the road to recovery the last time she’d visited him, she soon arrived at the conclusion that foul play was involved. Law officers followed up on her lead and soon reached the same conclusion. Grover's body was exhumed, and the lab report confirmed that he had died of arsenic poisoning, not natural causes.

Louise Myers adamantly denied any involvement in her husband’s death until after the lab tests came back. Confronted with the lab report, she readily admitted poisoning her husband by putting arsenic in his tomato wine, and she cited Grover's cruelty toward her as the reason. She admitted being intimate with Stroup, and she implicated him and a neighbor woman named Nita Cook in the crime, 

After Louise’s confession, she, Stroup, Ms. Cook, and Arley Kemp, another neighbor with whom Louise was rumored to have been a “close friend,” were officially arrested and charged with first-degree murder. 

Mrs. Myers and Frank Stroup were separately arraigned on first-degree murder charges, but the murder charges again Arley Kemp and Nita Cook were dropped for lack of evidence. At her trial in mid-August 1939, Louise repudiated her previous confessions, but when the judge allowed them into evidence anyway, she changed her plea from not guilty to guilty. She was then sentenced to life in the state penitentiary and transported to Jefferson City. 

Brought back to Greenville to testify at Stroup's trial in September 1940, she repeated her claim that Stroup had urged her to poison her husband so that she and Stroup could get married. Stroup admitted an affair with the woman and even to being present when the idea of poisoning Myers arose, but he denied encouraging Louise to commit the crime. In early October, the jury acquitted him, and Louise Myers was returned to the state prison. Citing her poor health, the Board of Probation and Parole paroled her in March of 1952.

This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/4v41viY.