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.

The Tramp Became a Demon

About 6:00 p.m. on September 2, 1896, Alice Gammon, an eleven or twelve-year-old deaf girl, left the canning factory in Rhineland, Missouri, where she worked, and started on foot to her home a half mile away. Meanwhile, a “tramp mechanic” named Tom Larkin had arrived in Rhineland by rail early that morning with two companions, and they spent the day repairing gasoline stoves for whoever would hire them. Late in the afternoon, Larkin left his two companions in Rhineland and walked out into the surrounding countryside alone.
Shortly after leaving the factory, Alice noticed someone following her. As she neared her home, the path she was on took her into a thicket of woods, and halfway through it, the man who’d been following her made a rush toward her. Seizing Alice, he threw her to the ground and smothered her cries with her skirts. The girl struggled and fought, as the assailant, in the words of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “clutched her throat and pressed his sharp finger nails into the soft white flesh until the blood came.
“Failing in his design,” the St. Louis newspaper continued, “the tramp became a demon.” He pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed Alice, then withdrew the bloody blade and plunged it into her flesh again.
The attacker then released the girl and dashed into the woods.
Weak and bleeding from the attack, Alice staggered and crawled to her nearby home, where she told her eight-year-old sister what had happened, and the little girl summoned help.
After a doctor treated Alice, she revived enough to describe her assailant. Constable William Dixon found a man answering the description at the railroad depot about 300 yards from the scene of the assault. The suspect stoutly denied the attack, but his missing finger, which Alice had mentioned, was convincing evidence. In addition, the constable took the suspect to Alice’s house, and she positively identified him.
Since Rhineland was a small village with no jail, Dixon escorted the suspect to the town’s only hotel and placed him under guard in one of the rooms. The prisoner identified himself as Thomas Larkin from Chicago.
Larkin had scarcely been confined when word spread that the doctor attending Alice had said her wounds were likely fatal. The people of Rhineland began collecting near the hotel and plotting to take Larkin from his guards so they might visit a swift vengeance upon him. The deliberate German folks of Rhineland took several hours talking over the matter, while Larkin moaned and quaked in fear.
After midnight, the crowd, now swollen in numbers, began to grow impatient. About 3:00 a.m. on the morning of September 3 they started toward the hotel with a rope. Constable Dixon came out in front of the hotel to plead with them, and they finally disbanded. For the time being.
After daylight, though, more citizens from the surrounding countryside poured into town, and by mid-morning, Dixon realized he and his deputies could not hold off the horde for long. He sent for the Montgomery County sheriff, but before the sheriff could arrive, reports of indecent proposals Larkin had made toward other women began to circulate.
By the time the sheriff arrived in the late afternoon, the crowd at Rhineland had grown so large and so indignant that the lawman was unable to remove the prisoner as he had planned, but his presence helped deter the would-be lynchers from trying to act during the daytime.
About ten o’clock that night, though, word reached the mob that Alice Gammon was dying. Whether the report was valid and the girl did, in fact, later die is not clear, but the mere rumor of Alice’s impending death was sufficient to incite the horde to action.
Eight or ten masked men, one of them toting a long rope, advanced out of the crowd and started battering the front door. The sheriff, the constable, and a deputy were on the other side of the door, and when it yielded, the officers put up a stiff resistance, knocking one of the besiegers down. The other vigilantes, though, overpowered the lawmen and quickly located Larkin. They tossed the rope around his neck with a running noose and half-dragged, half-carried him outside as he struggled for his life. The mob took him to a spot about 200 yards east of the railway station and just north of the track near the woods where Alice Gammon had been attacked.
The other end of the rope was thrown over a limb of an oak tree at the edge of the woods, and the howling mob grasped the rope and drew Larkin up. They left him dangling beneath the limbs of the tree for passengers and crew to see as they passed on the nearby railroad tracks. When a freight train went through Rhineland after daylight on the morning of September 4, about seven hours after the lynching, Larkin’s body was still swinging from the limb, and a number of curious onlookers were standing nearby gawking at the grisly sight.
This story is condensed from a chapter in my book Show-Me Atrocities: Lynchings and Hangings in Missouri.
This month marks ten years that I've been doing this blog. Hope I'm still around in another ten years.

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.

Carney Murders

My book entitled Desperadoes of the Ozarks , which is more or less a followup to my Ozarks Gunfights book, will soon be released by Pelican Publishing. In fact, I think it's already available for pre-purchase on sites like Amazon. Each chapter in the book, as was the case with the gunfights book, is devoted to a different notorious character or incident. So, for the next several posts, I'll briefly describe some of the chapters.
The first chapter is about the killing of Jackson Carney and his wife, Cordelia Carney, by Carney's cousin George Moore at Shell Knob in December of 1869. Moore had grown up in the Carney home almost like a brother to Jackson, but he had left home about a year earlier and had apparently led a wayward life during the intervening year. He showed back up in Barry County in December and on the fateful day hung around Carney's store all day apparently just waiting to enact his murderous design. After the store closed, he killed both Carney and his wife, stole a couple of hundred dollars, and took off. He was captured a day or two later and taken to the Barry County jail at Cassville. A day or two after that, he was strung up on a corner of the Cassville square by an indignant mob bent on vengeance for the foul murders. Carney and his wife were buried at the Carney Cemetery, now called the Old Carney Cemetery, which is located about ten or fifteen miles south of Aurora just a few miles off Highway 39.

A Galena Lynching

Last time I mentioned that, although Joplin may have been the most populous of the mining towns of the tri-state region and probably had the most notorious reputation, several of the smaller mining towns in the area also witnessed more than their share of crime and rowdy behavior, and I cited Webb City as an example. Galena, Kansas, was another prime example. From its founding in the spring of 1877, Galena was a rough town where fights and even killings were not uncommon, the first murder being the shooting death of William "Tiger Bill" St. Clair at the hands of Bob Layton and friends in June of '77.
Galena was still a rowdy place over twenty years later near the turn of the century. The town witnessed an especially large rash of crime during one two-day period near the end of April 1899. The Joplin Globe reported that Galena "has been 'going on' at a lively rate for the past day or so, the old town having been the scene of cutting scrapes, exhibitions of cowboys on a rampage, murder and lynching, as well as larceny and other things. A history of the city for the past two days could be dished up in such a way as to rival the slaughter of the most bloodthirsty pirates or the lawlessness depicted in the most sensational of the dime novels."
The most shocking crimes during the spree were the murder of a black woman named Laura Canafax by her lover, Charles Williams, and the subsequent lynching of Williams by a mob of black men. After Canafax's body was found strangled to death on April 24, a coroner's jury quickly declared that she had come to her death at the hands of Williams, and the suspect was lodged in the local jail. During the wee hours of the morning of April 25, the mob of about fifteen men formed at the jail, broke the lock to Williams's cell, and invited him to come out. When he refused, they fired four bullets into his body, killing him instantly.
In addition to the murder and lynching, there were also two knife fights and a couple of lesser crimes committed in Galena during the same two-day period.

Lynchings

Last time, I mentioned vigilantism in the Ozarks, a topic that brings to mind lynchings, since extra-legal execution was the most extreme form, yet a fairly common form, of vigilantism in early Ozarks history, as well as in the history of America as a whole.
Many people automatically associate lynching in this country with racism. Extra-legal execution, especially hanging, was, in fact, often employed by whites against blacks who had supposedly committed one crime or another, even though in many cases the evidence for such crimes was scant. In this racist sense, lynching was not as common in Missouri and other parts of the Ozarks as it was in the deep South. Of course, this was partly because the concentration of blacks in this area was not as great. Even so, we definitely had some high-profile cases of racial lynching, such as the notorious Pierce City lynchings of 1901 and the equally infamous Springfield lynchings of 1906, but overall such lynchings weren't as common in this area as they were in the deep South.
White men lynching other white men, though, I'm not so sure about. I have a hunch that the Ozarks witnessed at least its share and very likely more than its share of this type of lynching. I don't have any statistics to back up my assumption, but I've read enough old newspaper accounts and so forth to know that a lot of such extra-legal hangings occurred in this area.
This area also saw a rare instance of black men lynching another black man. In the wee hours of the morning on April 25, 1899, Charles Williams, "a disreputable negro," as a Joplin newspaper called him, was dragged from his jail cell at Galena, Kansas, at the edge of the Ozarks, by a mob of black men and shot four times when he "showed fight." Williams's girlfriend had been found dead in her bed the day before, and Williams was suspected of having strangled her to death in a fit of rage.