For God’s Sake, Give Me a Chance: The Lynching of Walter Mitchell

On Thursday evening August 6, 1925, twenty-one-year-old Leonard Utt and his teenage girlfriend, Maud Holt, attended a social event at Excelsior Springs, Missouri. About midnight, as Leonard was driving the girl to her home near Lawson, several miles north of Excelsior Springs, a black man waved the couple down, knocked Utt senseless, and tried to sexually assault Maud but was scared off by her screams and flailing.
The assailant fled toward Excelsior Springs, and when a black man was found asleep in a vacant house in Excelsior Springs early the next morning, Utt identified him as the attacker. The suspect was taken to the city jail, where he was identified as Walter Mitchell (aka Miller Mitchell), a thirty-three-year-old black man originally from Meridian, Mississippi.
Maud Holt was summoned to Excelsior Springs, and she, too, identified Mitchell as the man who had attacked her. Mitchell’s arraignment on an assault charge was set for 2:00 p.m. that afternoon.
As word of the attack on Maud and the identification of a suspect spread, angry citizens poured into Excelsior Springs throughout the morning of August 7. As the mob increased in numbers and became more threatening, Chief of Police John F. Craven and several deputies attempted to remove the prisoner to safety through a basement door but were turned back by members of the mob.
Shortly before noon, Clay County prosecutor Raymond Cummins was notified at Liberty of the tense situation in Excelsior Springs, and he immediately set out for the scene. Upon arrival, Cummins pled with the mob not to resort to violence. He organized a committee of citizens and law officers to speak directly with Charles Holt, Maud’s father. Holt was brought into the city hall, but Holt declined an invitation to help escort Mitchell to safety.
About 2:00 p.m., Cummins, realizing that mob action was imminent, called the Kansas City police and asked for reinforcements. A riot squad of over fifty officers was dispatched to Excelsior Springs.
Before they could arrive, however, the mob, now numbering about 500 men, broke into the jail about 3:00 p.m. and knocked the lock off Mitchell’s cell with a sledgehammer. They dragged the prisoner outside, brushing aside a token resistance from the guards. Despite being handcuffed, Mitchell screamed and resisted as he was dragged into the street.
A few men lifted the prisoner above their heads and started down the street with him, carrying him a short distance in that manner before setting him back down and forcing him to walk. As the lynch mob and their victim marched past the Elms Hotel, the town’s most fashionable mineral-water resort, tourists and health seekers gawked at the terrible parade.
A rope was fastened around the doomed man’s neck as he was dragged along, and when the vigilantes reached an oak tree near the south edge of town, the leader of the mob asked Mitchell if he had anything to say. He replied, “Yes, I’m guilty, but for God’s sake give me a chance.”
But the ruthless mob had no intention of giving Mitchell a chance. One of the gang climbed up the oak tree and tossed the other end of the rope over a high limb. Mitchell continued to squirm and moan, even as “willing hands” drew him several feet into the air. He died, though, within three or four minutes, and the mob promptly dispersed.
The first police reinforcements from Kansas City arrived about ten minutes too late to prevent the lynching. They cut down Mitchell’s body, and it was taken to a local undertaker’s office, where a long line of people stood in the street outside waiting to view it.
Clay County officials declined to investigate the lynching, despite the fact that Chief Craven and others said they knew who the leaders of the mob were. The Missouri governer then stepped in and ordered an investigation. A grand jury was subsequently held, but it was discharged after 100 witnesses were examined and “no one remembered who actually pulled the rope that took Mitchell’s life.”
This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Show-Me Atrocities: Infamous Incidents in Missouri History.