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.