The Alleged Murder of Gus Leftwich

   When Gus Leftwich, editor of the Gallatin (MO) Democrat, and his wife, Bertha, were poisoned on Saturday morning, February 12, 1898, by arsenic in their coffee, it was thought at first that both victims would recover, and the poisoning was considered an accident. But after Gus Leftwich took a turn for the worse and died the next day, rumors began to circulate that the poisonings were by design, and a coroner's inquest into Leftwich's death on Monday found that he had come to his death by arsenic poisoning "administered by some party or parties unknown."
   The complete findings of the inquest were not revealed until a day or two later. Those findings revealed that, according to one of the rumors, Gus had called Maria, his fourteen-year-old daughter by his first marriage, to his bedside shortly before his death and accused her of having put poison in the coffee, and the girl ran crying from the room.
   According to the rumor, Leftwich did not want this fact known publicly, and he asked that no investigation into his death be made. However, after he, in fact, died, the supposed confrontation with his daughter leaked out, and it was brought out at the inquest. Maria herself was called as a witness at the inquest. She admitted that her father had questioned her about putting poison in the coffee, but she was not grilled on whether or not she had actually done so, probably because of Leftwich's request that his death not be investigated, thus accounting for the indefinite finding of the coroner's jury.
   Suspicion, though, quickly settled on the daughter. It was thought, however, that she had meant only to poison her stepmother and that Leftwich's poisoning was accidental. Mrs. Leftwich was in the habit of arising early and eating breakfast and drinking her coffee alone, but on the fateful morning, her husband had taken breakfast with her and had drunk more of the coffee than Bertha. "Unhappy family conditions" had apparently existed in the Leftwich home for some time, as Maria and one or more of her siblings did not get along with their stepmother. Maria, in particular, was considered a "wild and willful" girl, and her relations with Bertha were "not at all cordial."
   Many people around Gallatin demanded a more thorough investigation of the matter and suggested that a grand jury look into Leftwich's death. Shortly after Gus died, his brother Dr. Morris Leftwich, superintendent of the masonic home in St. Louis, visited in the Leftwich home. Unswayed by the rumors, Dr. Leftwich came away convinced that Gus's death had been nothing but an accident, pure and simple. He said the accusation that Gus had accused Maria of giving him poison was a canard. Morris took Maria and her 18-year-old brother, Austin, back to St. Louis to live with him.
   In April, a Daviess County grand jury indicted Maria and Austin for the murder of their father, but they were allowed bail of $2,000 each. When their case finally came up in December 1898, the prosecutor decided to drop the charges, saying that there was insufficient evidence even to say for sure that Mr. and Mrs. Leftwich had been poisoned on purpose, much less evidence to prove who did it. The prosecutor said the case had been investigated thoroughly, and that any one of the Leftwich household members might have poisoned the coffee but that there was almost no evidence to suggest that a particular family member actually did so.

The Murder of Wilfred Gerald Brown

On Wednesday morning, November 25, 1964, Mountain View (MO) resident Joseph Brown, after not hearing from his father for several days, went to check on the older man, who lived alone in an expensive home in a secluded area a few miles north of town. Joseph found the body of his father, Wilfred Gerald Brown, lying on a bedroom floor and clad only in underwear, with his feet bound and his hands tied behind his back. 

Authorities who investigated the murder estimated that Wilfred Brown had been dead about a week, not just because of the state of the body but also because all the days of a wall calendar had been marked off up until November 18. Investigators found that about $2,000 worth of guns were missing from the home. Also missing was Brown's billfold, which was thought to have contained about $500. Investigators theorized that whoever had killed the man was familiar with the area, because the Brown home sat at the end of a dead-end road and was not visible to casual passers-by on the main road. 

Because of the body's advanced state of decomposition, a cause of death was not immediately determined. However, after an autopsy on Friday, a coroner's jury ruled that Brown had died of shock, brought on by a blow to the head while he was struggling to free his trussed body. Authorities announced, also, that they were seeking four teenage boys who were suspected of having stolen some property from Brown about two weeks before the murder. It was thought that they might have returned to rob him again and ended up killing him. 

A break came in the case when the Mountain View marshal received an anonymous letter with the names of several of the suspects pasted on a plain sheet of paper, and six youths were arrested in connection with the robbery/murder. A crude diagram was drawn on the paper indicating that George Montgomery had struck the fatal blow. Montgomery, David Holly, and Wayne Conley, all of whom were from Belleville, Illinois, and all of whom were 18 years old, were charged with murder, while another 18-year-old and two 17-year-olds were charged with burglary in the case. One of the 17-year-olds, James Davis, had reportedly gone to school at Mountain View the previous year.   

At his first-degree murder trial in September 1965 in Carter County on a change of venue, Montgomery pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of robbery in a plea-bargain deal and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Conley also took a change of venue to Carter County, where he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in another plea-bargain deal and was also given 25 years in prison. Montgomery's conviction was later overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court on the grounds that he could not be convicted of robbery when he had not been charged with robbery. In other words, the prosecutor had put the cart before the horse.

I have not traced what happened at Montgomery's second trial or even whether he had a second trial. Nor have I found any information about Holly's case except a reference to his having filed a motion to vacate the sentence he received (whatever that sentence was). 

Appalachian Decoration Day

    When I was growing up in Fair Grove in the 1950s, nobody I knew used the term “Memorial Day.” Everybody called it Decoration Day.
    I knew the holiday was a solemn occasion, but I didn’t know it was intended to honor those who had died in service to our country. In my family, that wasn’t how we observed it.
    Instead, it was a day to remember all of one’s deceased loved ones. The holiday was more a family occasion than a patriotic one, and it was especially important to my dad, because his parents were deceased.
    So, every year, on the last Sunday morning in May, my family would pile into the old ’51 Chevy and set out from Greene County headed to Bloodland Cemetery, inside Fort Leonard Wood, eighty-five miles away, where Dad’s parents were buried.
    Dad had grown up in Bloodland, but the small town had been demolished when the fort was built in 1940-1941. Bloodland and several other villages were erased from the map. About the only landmarks left were the cemeteries. People living within the fort’s boundaries had to move, but they could return to visit the graves of their loved ones. 
    Former Bloodland residents made a special effort to come back for Decoration Day, to pay their respects to their deceased loved ones but also to renew old acquaintances. Decoration Day was a time of reunion and solemn remembrance, infused with a picnic atmosphere.
   When my family reached Bloodland, it was usually mid-morning, and a makeshift table with outdoor fare like baked beans and coleslaw would already be set up at the edge of the cemetery grounds. Mom always brought along a dish or two, which she added to the buffet. By the time we decorated my grandparents’ graves and Dad paid his respects to other folks, living and dead, it was usually time to eat. There was always a prayer first and sometimes a hymn. Despite the informal air, a spiritual quality imbued the proceedings.
    About mid-afternoon, Dad would say his goodbyes, and we would load up for the trip home. I was always ready to leave, because I hardly appreciated the Decoration Day tradition at the time.
    In the summer of 1969, though, when I took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, I found myself looking back wistfully on those boyhood trips to Bloodland Cemetery. It had been almost thirty years since anyone had lived at Bloodland, and many of the former residents were now dead themselves. The tradition of gathering there for Decoration Day was already dying out. But during that hot summer of 1969, when we trainees would march south from the barracks at Fort Leonard Wood to the firing ranges where Bloodland had once been, I would glance over at the cemetery as we passed, and I would remember.
    Dad died in 1970, and he was buried at Greenlawn Cemetery in Springfield. Afterwards, our family tradition of visiting the cemetery on Decoration Day moved to Greenlawn. Even though Dad was a World War II veteran, our trip to the cemetery was still more a personal remembrance of a loved one than a patriotic observance. But the gatherings at Greenlawn had none of the atmosphere of picnic or homecoming I’d witnessed as a boy.
    Eventually, I began to think of the holiday in late May as Memorial Day rather than Decoration Day, and I learned it was formalized shortly after the Civil War as a day for remembering those who’d lost their lives in service to the country. The change in how I referred to the late-May holiday roughly coincided with the adoption of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established that Memorial Day and certain other holidays would always be observed on a Monday.
    The new law not only helped “Memorial Day” displace “Decoration Day” as the generally accepted term for the late-May holiday, but the three-day weekend provision of the act also gradually caused many people to view the holiday as the unofficial kickoff of summer—a time for going to the lake and having fun. Many Americans today scarcely consider the holiday as a time to honor the deceased.
    I’m not one of the lake-goers, but I’m also not among those who reserve the day for honoring our dead war heroes. Although I long ago adopted the term “Memorial Day” and have come to understand the holiday’s patriotic purpose, I still think of it as a time to remember all my deceased loved ones.
    Since I took basic training, I’ve rarely been back to Bloodland Cemetery. It’s now been almost 85 years since anyone lived in Bloodland, and the tradition of returning to the cemetery for Decoration Day is a faded memory. Yet I still occasionally think about those long-ago family trips to Bloodland, and I get even more nostalgic than I did 55 years ago marching through Missouri’s hot July sun past my grandparents’ graves.
    Only recently did I learn that celebrating “Decoration Day” as a time of reunion and remembering one’s loved ones, as we did at Bloodland, is a tradition that can be traced to Appalachia. Predating even the Civil War, Decoration Day is still practiced in many Appalachian communities today.
    Appalachian Decoration Day got carried to the Ozarks by early settlers, and it flourished here for many years. However, the ritual has melded over time with the more northern tradition of Memorial Day and has been weakened by the secular spirit of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act so that it scarcely exists as a separate, distinguishable tradition.
    But it still lives in the hearts and minds of many of us Ozarks folk who have always thought of Memorial Day not as a day for honoring our military dead but instead as a day for getting together to celebrate our families and remember our loved ones who have gone before us. That doesn’t make us unpatriotic or unappreciative of those who have died in service to America. It just means we’re following a different tradition.

P. S. Last time, I mentioned that I'd started building an author website for the first time and that it was a work-in-progress. I didn't realize just how much of a work-in-progress it was. For instance, I didn't know that you had to format the darn thing especially for mobile devices separately from how you format it for desktops. Anyway, it's still a work-in-progress, but I have made a little progress since last week. Here's a link for anybody who wants to check it out: https://www.larrywoodauthor.com/.

Joe Silvers and His Caged Bird

Around the first of November 1872, 28-year-old Joseph Silvers of Sedalia learned that a young woman was being held in the Missouri State Penitentiary and that the only way she would be released any time soon was if she were to become married. Strange as this might seem, it was apparently true, and Silvers, actuated primarily by concern for the young woman's welfare, promptly wrote a letter to the warden of the prison asking for the woman's name and that of her father's. 

On November 5, a representative of the warden, in the warden's absence, responded that there was indeed a young woman in the state penitentiary, serving a life sentence, with the exception that she could be released upon marriage. The respondent enclosed a picture of the woman and described her as "handsome and intelligent." He said the woman was well educated, and he thought she would make a good wife. He didn't know who her relatives were, although she told him she had a stepmother who caused her to commit the crime that got her incarcerated. 

A week or so later, Silvers appeared unannounced at the Jefferson City prison and asked to see the lady in question. He said he'd come all the way from Sedalia with plans to marry the woman and that he did not intend to leave until the thing was arranged. 

The woman, who was allowed to receive Silver's in the matron's room, was described by a newspaper reporter at the time as "very pretty" with hair done up in "gorgeous style." Silver agreed, later describing her as "handsome as any woman he ever saw." 

Silvers proposed marriage, and the woman agreed and promised to be a good wife, with the stipulation that he never "throw up" to her the fact that she had been in prison. Stating that he was not wealthy but that his love was strong, Silvers promised never to use her imprisonment as a cudgel.

The only thing left to do to consummate Silver's matrimonial plans was to get Governor Benjamin Gratz Brown to pardon the young woman. Thus, he wrote to the governor from Jefferson City on November 13, asking for said pardon. He said he had seen the young woman and that he "loved her on sight." Silvers said he thought he would "go crazy without her love," if Brown refused his request. 

Silvers planned to stay in Jeff City until he had an answer, but knowledge of his strange request soon leaked out, and he quickly became an object of ridicule, among friends and strangers alike. All the publicity surrounding his effort to marry the imprisoned woman so disgusted Silvers that, without waiting for an answer, he returned to Sedalia, where he was met with "taunts and jeers." 

So unbearable did the teasing become that Silvers gave up his plans to marry the woman and left Sedalia to become a "wanderer upon the face of the land." 

On a personal note, I recently started building an author website. I've never had one before, because I was never convinced that it would really do me all that much good, but I decided to give it a try. It's still very much a work in progress, but I went ahead and went live with it, with the idea of tweaking it as I go along. For the curious, the link is www.larrywoodauthor.com.

Fake News, 1874 Style

In mid-November 1874, a report reached Springfield (MO) concerning a fatal affray involving two prominent Taney County residents, J. C. Johnson and Kenneth Burdett. Johnson, who was Taney's current sheriff and had recently been elected to the state legislature, and Burdett, who was a prominent doctor in the community, had allegedly gotten into a shooting affray at Forsyth that left Johnson dead and Burdett mortally wounded. "No particulars of the difficulty" were received, however. 

The reason no particulars of the affray were received is because it didn't happen. But that didn't keep several newspapers across Missouri from reprinting the report that Johnson and Burdett had killed each other in a gun battle. After all, it made a good story. It's even questionable whether such a report actually reached Springfield, since the Springfield papers were not among those that reprinted it.

In fact, both men lived a long time after 1874. J. C. Johnson went on to serve three terms in the state legislature. During this time, he also studied medicine and received a diploma from a St. Louis medical school. Returning to Taney County, he practiced medicine for many years and also continued his public service, being elected Clerk of the Circuit Court and Recorder of Deeds in 1894. He died in 1906.

Meanwhile, Dr. Burdett continuing practicing medicine after his supposed 1874 affray with Johnson. In 1890, he moved to Douglas County and lived on a farm east of Ava. He practiced medicine until shortly before his death in 1903. 

Fatal Affray Near Summersville

A baseball game was in progress at Summersville, Missouri, on Saturday, September 4, 1886, when two players from opposing sides, 20-year-old Jerry Orchard and 24-year-old Riley Martin, got into a heated dispute. Friends had to intervene to prevent "a serious termination of the quarrel," according to a Texas County correspondent.

The following Thursday, September 9, a corn-cutting, to be followed that evening by a dance to celebrate the harvest, was held at a farm near Summersville. Most of the members of the rival ball clubs were present, and "the little brown jug" passed freely among the workers throughout the day.

After the work was done, the womenfolk served a big feast for supper, and then the music and dancing got underway. The dance was "in full blast" when "brawling cries" came from the front yard, and dance-goers discovered that the week-old feud had been revived. Riley Martin was about to come to blows with 18-year-old Zem McCaskill when Jerry Orchard showed up and took McCaskill's side in the dispute. Angry that his old foe from the baseball diamond was trying to interfere, Martin drew his pistol and snapped it at Orchard three times on an empty cartridge.

Orchard took off running, but Martin gave chase. Suddenly, Orchard drew his pistol, wheeled around, and fired three shots in quick succession at his pursuer. Two of the shots shattered Martin's right arm, while the third struck him below the left shoulder, passed transversely through his body, and exited out the right breast.

At this point, 30-year-old James Stogsdale, a friend of Martin's, came up behind Orchard, leveled his pistol at him, and fired. The ball ranged through Orchard's body and came out the right breast.

A crowd gathered around the wounded men, who lay on the ground seriously wounded, and in the confusion, Stogsdale fired another shot, this one at Zem McCaskill. The ball grazed McCaskill on the left side of his chest, cutting a six-inch-long gash in the flesh above his heart about the depth of the bullet.

At this juncture, 24-year-old Lewis Raider, a Summersville druggist, shoved his way through the crowd to where Orchard lay on the ground in an effort to try to prevent more violence. Stogsdale, though, would have none of it. "Goddamn you," he yelled, "I'll give you the benefit of a shot." The gunman then fired a shot that made "a terrible wound" in Raider's right thigh.

The would-be murderer then "broke away from the crowd, leaped the fence and disappeared in the darkness."

The wildest confusion ensued. Men yelled, women screamed, and people from miles around hurried to the scene. The wounded men were taken to nearby residences, and doctors were summoned. The wounds of Martin and Orchard were thought to be fatal, while Raider and McCaskill were less seriously wounded. Martin did, indeed, die from his wounds a few days later, while the other three men, including Orchard, quickly recovered.

It was thought that Stogsdale had escaped to Texas, but this supposition is called into question by later records. At any rate, little effort was apparently made to capture him. As far as I have been able to determine, no one was ever prosecuted for their part in this deadly melee.

Joplin Nightlife Gives a Springfield Fellow More Excitement Than He Can Stand

Joplin began as a wild, lawless mining camp in the late 19th century, and it still had a reputation as a wide-open town where almost anything went even as late as the Depression era and beyond. A Springfield newspaperman, Franklin Rhoades, ventured to Joplin one evening in January 1934 to visit some of the town's raucous nightspots and report on them. Prohibition had put a bit of a damper on the revelry in Joplin for a few years, but the ban on alcohol had recently been lifted, and Joplin was once again Joplin, according to the reporter.

All seven of the spots Rhoades visited were on the outskirts of town rather than in Joplin proper, and the first place he stopped was the Oriole Terrace between Joplin and Redings Mill. It was "free beer night," which meant that for a 25 cents admission charge, you could have all the beer you could drink throughout the evening. There was a big crowd in attendance, a thick haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air, and lots of dancing was going on, with a small jazz band playing popular dance music. "The large pavillion was jammed," and "a spirit of maudlin merriment was everywhere." While men of all ages and walks of life were in attendance, most of the women present were under 30 years old, and scantily dressed girls in their teens, wearing heavy makeup, "flitted from lap to lap." A woman from Joplin who accompanied the reporter pointed out a few of the men present and identified them for Rhoades. A man who was trying to drink from the same glass as a tall, red-headed girl managed a department store, and a young man who had his arms around a blonde girl was a holdup man just back from the penitentiary. 

At 8:30, the pavilion was cleared for a floor show. "Out tripped a big peroxide blonde in black brassiere and bloomers," said the Springfield reporter. "The crowd went wild, and in answer to their applause, the 'dancer' jerked off the brassiere" and then quickly fled to the dressing room. Even the women joined in the "thunderous applause," and the stripper soon reappeared wearing a yellow evening dress that had the "transparency of cellophane." The blonde's underwear was "an imitation fig leaf" which "remained until the end of her act, but the dress stayed only a few minutes during a ten-minute performance." 

The next act was a boy of about 15 who started singing a song, "which lasted about two-thirds of a verse before the guests booed him off the floor." Then "everyone went back to their free beer and wrestling."  

The next place the Springfield writer visited was the Korean Club two miles south of the Oriole Terrace, and he found it to be a "poor night" at the Korean, which was decorated in Oriental patterns. The admission was 25 cents, the same as the Oriole Terrace, but there was no floor show and no free beer, only dancing that featured "a 12-piece negro orchestra." Only eight couples were in attendance, all of whom had come out in a group for the chicken dinner served earlier. 

Since it was a slow night at the Korean, Rhoades soon moved on to the next place on his list, the Tavern, located in a stucco building on West Seventh Street. While there, he saw several women whom he, being a police reporter, recognized as "Springfield's missing ladies of the evening." If the Springfield police still wanted them, said the reporter, they could find a dozen of them at the Tavern, but in the meantime the women seemed to be "doing right well at entertaining 'lonely bachelors.'"

The Tavern hostess joined Rhoades and his companion at their booth and seemed eager to have him give her place a good write-up. A floor show started shortly after the reporter's arrival: "Two small brunets in evening frocks sang and tap danced the first set. Next was a violin solo by a comely blue-eyed girl." 

After the violin solo, the hostess told the reporter to "wait and see what's comin' next." Directly, "a small, shapely young woman skipped out on the floor, wearing high-heeled pumps, and wielding two small fans." Soon she stood erect and dropped the fans, and everyone "clapped, stomped, yelled and whistled." As soon as the fan dancer finished her act, the hostess nudged Rhoades and told him, "Put that in yer paper, Sugarfoot." She added that, when he wrote the place up, he should say that the Tavern had only the best people because she ran an orderly club. "They's men comin' out here what have got nice money to spend--and we see that they has a good time."

The hostess then told the reporter that drinking, dancing, and a floor show weren't the only attractions the Tavern had to offer. Escorting him to an adjoining room, she showed him what he called "the biggest gambling hall I have seen in years." A gaggle of women swarmed around a big roulette wheel, while most of the men were playing faro. Others were playing poker or tossing dice. "Ten grand a week turns over here," the hostess bragged.

Before leaving the Tavern, Rhoades noted that so many drunks were collapsed on tables that a newcomer would have thought all the liquor had already been sold. The clubs Rhoades visited could not legally sell hard liquor, but he said that it was readily available from bootleggers if a person wanted to pay a premium price and that plenty of people seemed eager to pay it.

Farther west on Seventh, the Springfield man stopped at the Cotton Club, Joplin's newest and swankiest nightspot. However, the place was experiencing the same problem as the Korean--very little business. There were about a dozen couples dancing to a 14-piece band, but the manager told Rhoades he was losing up to $250 a week. He said his patrons had spent so much on Christmas that they couldn't afford nightclubs. 

Rhoades went to a few other places, like the Sturgeons and the Trading Post, but they mainly featured food instead of entertainment. 

Back in Springfield, Rhoades wrote his story up under the headline "Joplin Gives Night-Lifers Plenty to Do." A subhead added, "There's Almost More Excitement Than a Simple Springfield Fellow Can Stand." 

The year 1934, of course, did not mark the end of Joplin's lively nightlife. The town was still widely known as a raucous town throughout the World War II era. Toward the end of the war, General Eisenhower, in a radio address announcing that the ban on fraternization between American troops and German women had been lifted, is reported to have said, "Now, Berlin will be like Joplin, Missouri, on a Saturday night."  

Indeed, I still occasionally heard older folks remark on Joplin's rowdy reputation ten to fifteen years after the war when I was growing up in the Springfield area.