Virgil Reece Takes the Gate: The Story of Gertrude Lytle

Gertrude “Gertie” Lytle was a troubled young woman. Born Gertrude Graham about 1902, Gertie married John M. Lytle at the age of nineteen in Arkansas. The marriage soon failed, and Gertie was cast adrift.

In early 1930, Gertie came to St. Joseph, Missouri, and checked into a hotel, where she drank a bottle of poison in a failed suicide attempt. Taken to a hospital, she slowly recovered, and when she got out, she made her way to Savannah (MO) because an elderly woman she met in the hospital had told her what a nice place it was. 

In Savannah, Gertie went to work for the McCormick family, and the first day she was there, she met Virgil Reece, a World War I veteran and prominent citizen of the community. The two hit it off immediately, and they dated for the next two years. 

During those two years, Gertie also worked for the Breit family and for Virgil's father. She enjoyed living and working on the Reece farm, and she told friends that she and Virgil were planning to get married.

Her dreamworld came crashing down when she learned in early June 1932 that Marie Thompson, an old friend of Virgil’s, was coming back to Savannah. Gertie noticed that Virgil “showed considerable interest” in Miss Thompson’s return, and he became cold toward Gertie.

Gertie was devastated by Virgil’s loss of interest in her, but she put on a brave front, telling him that he could "take the gate." Gertie left the Reece farm and went back to stay with the McCormicks on June 16. Mrs. McCormick later recalled that Gertie seemed cheerful, but she wasn't as carefree as she let on. A week or so later, she visited the Breits, and, knowing the layout of their home and where everything was kept, she slipped a .32 caliber revolver into her purse while no one was watching.

Miss Thompson arrived from Oklahoma near the same time as Gertie’s visit to the Breit home, and the Thompson woman began keeping company with Virgil. Gertie still pretended not to care, but she was seething with jealousy and anger on the inside.

On the evening of June 27, when she saw Virgil and Miss Thompson pull up in Virgil's car and park on the north side of the Savannah square, Gertie strode out into the street and pulled out the stolen revolver. She strolled up to the driver's side door and escorted Virgil to the gates of hell by shooting him in the head. 

When a bystander demanded to know why she'd done that, Gertie replied, "Virgil knows," as she walked away.

Approached by a night patrolman, Gertie handed over the revolver. She announced, "I just killed Virgil," and she later said that she had planned to kill herself, too.

Virgil was rushed to a hospital but died a few hours later. Meanwhile, Gertie was taken to jail and charged with first-degree murder. She waived preliminary examination, and her trial was held in November 1932. The key point of contention between the prosecution and the defense was whether Gertie acted from mere spite or from righteous indignation. The defense argued that Virgil's rejection of her drove her to temporary insanity. Implicit in the argument, although not directly stated, was the contention that Virgil had taken Gertie to bed under a false promise of marriage. The prosecution argued, on the other hand, that Virgil had made no such promise. He had, to the contrary, made it clear he did not want to get married.

After closing arguments, the judge gave instructions that left no room for an in-between verdict. Either Gertie was not guilty by reason of insanity, or she was guilty of first-degree murder, which carried a penalty of death or life imprisonment. The jury came back hopelessly deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial.

At Gertie’s retrial in February 1933, the jury found her not guilty, despite the fact that the charge had been reduced from first-degree murder to second-degree murder. The jury held that Mrs. Lytle was now sane but was insane at the time of the crime, and she walked out of the courtroom a free woman.

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/3RsmBJ1.

An Honorable Girl: The Story of Ada Lee Biggs

After 20-year-old Ada Lee Biggs was convicted of second-degree murder in November of 1928 in Ste. Francois County (MO) for killing her stepfather, William Simpson, newspapers speculated that the jury must have doubted her word because of inconsistencies in her story. While it's true that the story Ada told when first arrested differed somewhat from what she told the jury, her claim of abuse at the hands of her stepfather was pretty consistent from the beginning.

The basic facts of the case were straightforward—on the evening of July 14, 1928, Ada poked a shotgun through a window of her home in Bismarck (MO) and blew the top of her stepfather’s head off. But even at that time, a St. Louis newspaper reported that "a sinister tale of a middle-aged man...who was attracted by the daughter of the widow he married..." lay in back of the crime.

Ada's father died when she was young, and her mother, Bertie, married William Simpson when Ada was about eleven years of age. Simpson's inappropriate behavior toward Ada began shortly after the marriage, and according to Ada, he made life hell for her from the time she was 12 years old. He would not let her have friends, and he became very jealous if a boy even looked at her.

As Ada grew older and more physically mature, Simpson’s advances became more insistent. He started groping her and trying to get her to have sex with him whenever her mother was away from home. Ada told her mother of Simpson’s conduct, but Mrs. Simpson didn’t believe her.

Finally, on December 15, 1926, when Ada was 18, Simpson, who was about 50, took Ada out in his car to a secluded spot, raped her, and threatened to kill "the whole damn family" if she told anybody.

Ada left home after that but soon came back when Simpson threatened to have her committed to a home for delinquent girls. Simpson's abuse resumed, as he raped Ada once or twice a month during the first half of 1927. Somewhere along the line, Bertie finally started believing her daughter, and in mid-1927, she invited her brother, Oscar Greenwalt, to come and live with the Simpson family to help protect her and Ada from her husband's rampages.

Simpson, who stayed drunk much of the time, suffered from ataxia and was given to spells. Most of his neighbors considered him about half insane. His spells worsened after Greenwalt arrived, and around the first of 1928, Bertie and her brother began plotting to get rid of Simpson. They tried to get Ada to kill him, saying they'd vouch for her, but she resisted the idea at first.

She finally agreed to the idea after Simpson went on a day-long spree on Saturday, July 14, 1928. About five o’clock in the afternoon, Bertie told her brother that they had to "do it today.” Greenwalt agreed, and they appointed Ada to carry out the murder.

Simpson took regular steam baths to try to combat the effects of his ataxia. So, the conspirators waited until later that evening when it was time for him to take his steam bath. Even at the last moment, Ada still balked at the assignment, but she finally agreed after her mother brought out a shotgun and her uncle cocked and handed it to her. While Simpson was taking a steam bath, Ada, nineteen at the time and a recent graduate of Bismarck High School, slipped up outside the window about ten o’clock and shot the man, almost blowing his head off.

When authorities arrived, Ada, Bertie, and Greenwalt denied involvement in the crime. Based on evidence found at the Simpson home, however, Greenwalt was taken in for questioning the next day, and he broke down and confessed to his involvement, implicating his sister and niece as well.

When Ada was arrested and questioned, she gave a statement taking full blame for the crime, trying to shield her mother and uncle. She said the reason she did it was because of the mean way her stepfather treated her and because he had threatened to kill her. To a newspaper reporter, Ada clarified that Simpson had "brutally assaulted" her.

Ada was charged with first-degree murder, and her mother and uncle, who knew all the details of the crime even before Ada confessed, were charged as accessories. The people of Bismarck exhibited “a strong sentiment in favor of Ada” in the aftermath of the shooting, while they were mostly indifferent toward Oscar Greenwalt and his sister.

Ada’s case was severed from the other two defendants, and when her trial came up at Farmington in November 1928, she told her whole story, pleading self-defense. She addressed the members of the jury in an even voice: "Gentlemen..., after my honor, my virtue, had been taken, I realized I could never marry. My social standing, my character, were ruined. That is what drove me to the insanity that I did."

Two or three defense witnesses testified to Ada’s good reputation prior to the crime, including Richard Dennis, a young man who had kept company with Ada before being driven off by Simpson. He called Ada “an honorable girl.”

Although Ada had been charged with first-degree murder, the jury came back with a verdict finding her guilty of second-degree murder. So, it's not clear, as the newspapers suggested, that the jury did not believe her story. It might well be that they did believe her story but still felt obligated by the law to find her guilty of the lesser offense.

Arguing for the idea that many people did believe Ada’s story is the fact that she was sentenced to only ten years in prison, while her mother and uncle, who both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder a couple of weeks after Ada's trial, received sentences of 15 years behind bars.

Ada was paroled in mid-1933, after serving less than five years. She got married the same year, and the couple later had two children. She died in 1979 and is buried at Cape Girardeau.  

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/3QQYt2z. 

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.

 

Murder of Nathan Stark and Hanging of Ira Sexton

   On the evening of October 28, 1897, 28-year-old Nathan Stark was driving a wagonload of corn near his home in Mercer County, Missouri, when a neighbor, 23-year-old Ira Sexton, emerged from some bushes and called for him to halt. Sexton told Stark that his (Sexton's) brother-in-law, Buzz Melton; his sister-in-law, Luvilla Anderson; and another man were waiting at Stark's home to kill him and take his money, Sexton proposed to help Stark and wanted him to dismount the wagon, but Stark was immediately suspicious. When he refused to dismount, Sexton, whom one newspaper described as a notorious character with "a tough reputation," pulled out a revolver and ordered Stark to hand over his money, which amounted to about $60. Stark "showed fight" and grabbed hold of the gun. After a brief tussle over the weapon, Stark jumped or fell from the wagon, got up, and started running. Sexton, who'd regained control of the revolver, opened fire, striking Stark in the back, but Stark kept running. He saw Luvilla Anderson standing outside his house. She called to him but he was afraid to approach the house for fear that what Sexton had told him was true. Instead, he kept going until he reached the house of a neighbor, William Cravens, who took him in and tried to make him comfortable. Stark told Cravens that Ira Sexton had shot him.
   Stark's wound was considered fatal, because the bullet had torn through the intestines and abdominal cavity, but he lived a couple of days, long enough to give an official dying declaration naming Sexton as his assailant. Meanwhile, Sexton was arrested the day after the shooting at the home of Buff Melton, where he'd been staying since his recent marriage to Buff's sister, Hattie. Hattie and Luvilla Anderson, who was another sister to Buff, were arrested as conspirators, along with a man named Cooksey, who had just arrived at Melton's house the day of the shooting and was a stranger to most folks in the area. Luvilla, whose husband had recently died, was engaged to marry Stark, but the prosecution theory was that she only wanted his money and didn't really want to marry him. At least one report suggested that the mysterious Cooksey was Luvilla's lover. All four suspects were taken from nearby Mercer to the county jail at Princeton for safekeeping, because talk of lynching was prevalent around Mercer. Sexton's preliminary hearing a few days later even had to be postponed because it was considered too dangerous to bring Sexton back to Mercer.
   Charges against Hattie Sexton and Cooksey were soon dropped, but Ira Sexton was officially charged with first-degree murder and held for trial at his preliminary hearing in early December. Luvilla was charged as an accessory, but charges against her were later dropped as well, for lack of evidence.
   At first, Sexton had not even bothered to deny his crime. He admitted that he shot Stark but said he didn't intend to and had only done so because Stark "showed fight." At his trial in February 1898, however, he did deny the deed, and the defense even called witnesses to try to establish an alibi. The jury didn't buy it. Sexton was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang in April.
   The execution was automatically stayed when the defense appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, but the high court sustained the verdict in November and reset the hanging for December 28, 1898. On the fateful day, Sexton spoke at some length from the scaffold that was set up inside a stockade at Princeton, once again proclaiming his innocence. He even sang a couple of songs before being dropped through the trap to his death.

   According to county histories, thirty or more murders had been committed in Mercer County prior to Stark's killing, but Sexton was the first person ever to be convicted of murder. 

   Sketches from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The Murder of Columbus Yandle

   On the night of March 14, 1893, Columbus “Lum” Yandle (also spelled Yandell or Yandall) was killed when someone fired a shotgun at him through a window in his home north of Henderson in the southwest corner of Webster County, Missouri. A township constable, Yandle died almost instantly, and he was buried in Panther Valley Cemetery in his neighborhood.
   The murder was a mystery at first, but barely more than a week later, Wesley Hargis; his uncle, John W. Hargis; and Yandle’s widow were arrested on suspicion. Wesley Hargis was only about eighteen years old, while his uncle was considerably older. Mrs. Hargis, who was Lum’s second wife, was about twenty-three, more than twenty years younger than her deceased husband.
   The younger Hargis broke down almost immediately after his arrest and confessed the crime. He admitted shooting Yandle but said he’d only done so at the urging of his uncle and Mrs. Hargis, who had paid him to commit the murder. It was reported at the time that John Hargis, Yandle’s hired hand, and young Mrs. Yandle, “a handsome brunette,” had been “criminally intimate” for four years. Wesley Hargis said his uncle had promised him $200 and Mrs. Yandle had pledged $100 for him to commit the deed. He claimed the woman had told him she was tired of living with her husband and wanted to marry John. He further stated that his uncle had helped him load the shotgun with which he killed Yandle.
   After Wesley’s confession, his uncle was interviewed. John said only that Wesley had told him that Mrs. Yandle wanted him to kill her husband, but he denied that he himself had anything to do with the crime.
   Mrs. Yandle was then interrogated, and she, too, denied involvement in the murder. She claimed that she and her husband were best friends who lived happily together and that no intimacy had ever existed between her and John Hargis, as many people were claiming. “The Hargis boys are trying to lay the burden of the crime on me,” she concluded.
   The three suspects were taken to Marshfield and lodged in the county jail. A grand jury promptly indicted all three of them for murder. Excitement in the Henderson vicinity was great, as all parties had been well thought of prior to the crime. There was some talk of taking the suspects out of the calaboose and dealing out summary justice.
   The cases of Wesley Hargis and Mrs. Yandle were heard in late November 1893 in Hickory County on changes of venue. In exchange for his testimony against the other two defendants, Wesley Hargis was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder, and he received a 99-year sentence in the state penitentiary. Mrs. Hargis was tried immediately after young Hargis’s plea deal, but, despite young Hargis’s testimony, she was acquitted. After a series of delays and changes of venue, John Hargis’s case was set to finally come up in Wright County in early September 1895, but it ended up being nol-prossed for lack of evidence. Whether Wesley Hargis served very much time in the state pen is also in doubt, as there seems to be conflicting evidence on the question.

 

Daring to Curse a White Boy

Louis Wright and his fellow members of Richard and Pringle’s famous Georgia Minstrels arrived in New Madrid, Missouri, by train on the snowy morning of Saturday, February 15, 1902. In the afternoon, the black performers gave a street parade, and some of the local white boys taunted the “flashily dressed” minstrels with gibes as they marched through the downtown area. As Wright and one or two of the other performers walked back to the opera house after the parade, two young white men started throwing hard, slush-packed snowballs at them. When the young black men told them to quit, the local toughs responded by hurling insults as well as more snowballs. Growing angry, Wright turned and cursed the white boys. The town marshal showed up just in time to avert further trouble, advising the white boys to go home and the minstrels to stay off the streets.
That evening, a large crowd packed the opera house in New Madrid for the minstrel performance, and a number of boys and young men, including those who had clashed with the minstrels on the street earlier in the day, took seats at the front of the auditorium near the stage. As one of the black performers later recalled, the local youth were still angry that “a nigger had dared to curse a white boy,” and they wanted to find him, take him out, and whip him. The show had barely begun when some of the young white men started making wisecracks about the performers, and the minstrels promptly replied in kind. The banter seemed good-natured at first, but it soon turned ugly. The remarks, loud enough to be heard throughout the auditorium, became more and more insulting as the performance progressed.
Some of the older men in the audience tried to make peace, but just as the performance closed, a half-dozen young white men tried to charge the stage. As they were going through a narrow passageway that led up the stairs onto the stage, somebody pulled out a revolver and fired a shot. Another report said that the white men had already reached the stage and had begun to attack the minstrels with chairs before the first shot was fired.
Exactly who fired the first shot is unknown. The account of the affair that went out to the St. Louis Republic and other white newspapers across the country asserted that the first shot came from one of the black performers on the stage, but one of the minstrels claimed a couple of weeks later that none of the young black men even had a handgun.
After the first gunshot, the place erupted into chaos. Suddenly, “half a dozen pistols were being fired at random by the negroes and white men,” said the Republic. Panic ensued…, and men, women and children rushed pell-mell from the building, screaming and crying.”
In all, about twenty shots rang out. At least one minstrel and one white man received minor wounds. The minstrels escaped out a side door and took refuge in their railroad car, which was parked on a side track nearby.
Local law officers arrived and placed the minstrels under arrest. Taken to jail, they all denied firing any shots or knowing who did, and no weapon was found on any of them. They spent the night crammed into a damp cell with standing room only.
Outside, things died down for the night, but the next day groups of men collected on the corners discussing the shooting affray at the opera house the night before and plotting vigilante action. Meanwhile, throughout the day on Sunday, the prisoners were taken one by one from the jail to the courthouse across the yard for interrogation before a special jury, composed of thirty of the town’s “best citizens,” which had been called to investigate the shooting.
Under an intense “sweating,” one or more of the minstrels revealed that Louis Wright was the person who had cursed the white boys on Saturday afternoon. Most newspaper accounts said Wright was also identified as the man who fired from the stage, but the minstrels denied this.
However, the identification was good enough for the would-be lynchers. Late that night, Sunday, February 16, five men marched to the jail and took Louis Wright out under the ruse that they were part of the special jury and needed to question him some more. Joined by a mob of fellow vigilantes, the so-called “jury” took Wright to a big elm tree at the edge of town and strung him up.
Whether the only offense Louis Wright committed was daring to curse a white boy or he also fired random shots from the stage, one thing seems clear: Wright and his fellow minstrels, as the Independence (KS) Daily Reporter said three days after the incident, were “not the only ones to blame by any means” for the melee that led to his lynching. In turn-of-the-century America, young black men were often lynched if they killed a white person or sexually assaulted a white woman, but some, like Louis Wright, were lynched on even shakier pretexts.
This story is condensed from my book Yanked Into Eternity: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.

Emmett Kelly

America's favorite clown, Emmett Kelly, Sr., was born in Sedan, Kansas, around 1898, and the family moved when he was about seven years old to rural Houston, Missouri, near the village of Yukon, where he grew up. Both Sedan and Houston claim Kelly as a favorite son. I live in the Joplin area, which is almost exactly halfway between the two towns, and I've been to both places. (In fact, I lived at Houston for a year during the early 1970s.)
Sedan has an Emmett Kelly Museum featuring clown memorabilia, especially that which is related directly to Emmett Kelly. The museum was opened in the late 1960s, and Kelly came back to Sedan for the occasion.
Kelly got his start in entertainment when he was still a teenager at the Old Settlers Reunion in Houston (now called the Texas County Fair and Old Settlers Reunion) drawing cartoons and doing a chalk talk while dressed as a clown. The town named a city park for Kelly in 1975, and just as he had returned to Sedan for the museum opening, he came back to Houston for dedication of the park. Every year Houston also hosts the Emmett Kelly Clown Festival during the first weekend in May.