Killing of Sheriff Shenneman and Lynching of Charles Cobb

I know that Cowley County, Kansas, is a quite a ways from the the Missouri and Ozarks regions I normally write about, but it was the scene of one of the incidents in my recent book Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas. So, I'm going to write about it, since I don't have anything else in mind that I particularly want to write about at this time.

After killing a lawman in northern Kansas in early January 1883, nineteen-year-old Charley Cobb fled the area and headed south. He was tentatively located later the same month working on a farm in northwest Cowley County. Sheriff Albert T. Shenneman went out from Winfield to the farm on January 23 to positively identify the suspect and make his arrest if he proved to be the fugitive.

Posing as a doctor, Shenneman gained admittance to the house and identified Cobb. He then sprang on him in an attempt to disarm him, but Cobb shot the sheriff during the struggle. The seriously wounded Shenneman and the farmer finally managed to get Cobb’s pistol away, and a schoolmaster from a nearby school also hurried to the aid of the other two men. Cobb was placed under arrest and sent to the county jail at Winfield, while the sheriff lingered in pain at the farmhouse. He explained to a reporter that he hadn’t pulled his revolver on Cobb because he hated to wield a weapon against a mere boy, but Cobb had proved stronger and wirier than Shenneman had given him credit for.

The deputies escorting Cobb to jail learned as they approached Winfield that a mob was waiting to take their prisoner from them, and they hid him out until the mob dispersed and then delivered him to the jail in the wee hours of January 24. Interviewed in jail later that morning, the diminutive Cobb denied his identity, and he said he would not have shot the sheriff if Shenneman had identified himself as a law officer and demanded his surrender instead of jumping him as if to rob him. Later that day, the prisoner was taken to Sedgwick County Jail in Wichita for safekeeping.

Shenneman died on the night of January 25. The next day, a man from the suspect’s old neighborhood in northern Kansas arrived in Wichita and positively identified him as Charley Cobb, the same man who’d killed the lawman northeast of Topeka. Cobb claimed the witness was simply mistaken, because he had never seen the man before in his life.

On Saturday morning, January 27, Shenneman’s chief deputy and two sheriffs from surrounding counties started with Cobb in a carriage from Wichita to Winfield. Nearing Winfield, the officers again learned a mob was waiting to take Cobb from them, and the two sheriffs took him away from the town while the deputy went into Winfield and was confronted by the mob demanding to know the whereabouts of the prisoner. During the wee hours of January 26, one of the sheriffs escorted Cobb back to Wichita for safekeeping.

On Wednesday, January 31, the deputy brought Cobb back from Wichita to Winfield yet again, and the prisoner was successfully lodged in the Cowley County Jail early that evening. But he didn’t stay long.

About 2:30 a.m. on February 1, an organized squad of thirteen men wearing black masks descended on the jail and forced the acting sheriff to hand over the keys to the jail under a threat of having his head blown off. Three or four of the “black maskers,” as the local newspaper called them, went into the jail and came out herding the prisoner. He was taken to the west edge of Winfield to a railroad bridge over the Walnut River. A rope was looped over his neck and the other end tied to a beam of the bridge. The vigilantes positioned Cobb on the bridge and dropped him between the railings to his death. As soon as the mob withdrew into the night, a crowd of curious onlookers surged up to the bridge to gawk at the suspended man.

The body was cut down later on the morning of February 1, and a coroner’s jury held that day concluded that Cobb had come to his death at the hands of unknown parties.

Newton County's First Female Murderer

On the morning of June 2, 1913, W.  A. Angle stepped outside the store that he ran about a mile south of Joplin just across the county line in Newton County and found a body lying in the road not far away. The dead man had a revolver lying beside him and a bullet hole in his breast. There was some suggestion at first that the death might have been a suicide, but the fact that the man had been shot in the back precluded such a likelihood. There were signs of a struggle, and found near the body was a woman's switch, a type of hair extension, which officers speculated had been lost during the scuffle. Two sets of footprints, apparently those of a man and a woman, led away from the body to another set of tracks made by a buggy. Authorities thought, therefore, that a man and a woman had been involved in the killing, but little else was known at first. One window of Angle's store had been broken, indicating that some sort of robbery attempt had occurred, and both Mr. Angle and his wife had heard a shot during the night.
At an inquest held by the Newton County coroner later the same day, the dead man was identified as George Kellem (aka Frank Dunbar) of Pittsburg, Kansas. The fact that Kellem had served a prison term in Kansas for burglary supported the theory that there had been an attempt to rob Angle's store. Kellem's wife, Pinie, was located and called to testify. She had been staying with her father in Newton County, and she said the last time she saw her husband was when he left about 1 a.m. to return to Joplin. She said her husband was carrying a revolver belonging to a man named Downing when she separated from him and that he had gone to look for Downing.
Later, however, Kellem's father testified that his son and Pinie argued the previous week when they were at his house in Pittsburg and that she had said to the younger Kellem, "Wait until we reach Joplin and you'll get your dose."

By this time, Pinie had left, but she was soon relocated and arrested on suspicion. She admitted arguing with her husband but denied any involvement in the crime and tried to implicate a man and a woman who had supposedly left the area for Oklahoma on the night of the killing. Nonetheless, she was held for a preliminary hearing, which took place on June 17. At the examination, the state presented evidence that Pinie not only had argued with Kellem but had pointed a revolver at him and threatened him on more than one occasion. She was supposedly jealous because of attentions Kellem was paying to a woman named "Big Mary." Pinie was charged with second-degree murder, reduced from a first-degree charge, and released on $1,000 bond pending the action of a grand jury. John Downing (the man Pinie had implicated) was charged as an accessory to the crime, but he had not yet been apprehended.
The grand jury failed to indict Pinie when her case came up in the fall of 1913, and she was released. However, some new evidence, including the fact that George Kellem was not really Pinie's husband, turned up in the spring of 1914. Pinie was located living in Webb City with her real husband, Louis Peckham, and both of them were arrested.
The husband was soon released, but a charge of murder was refiled against Pinie Peckham. At her trial in June at Neosho, testimony revealed that, at the time of the crime, Pinie had left Peckham and gone to live with George Kellem. She was variously known as Pinie Peckham, Pinie Kellem, or  Pinie Dunbar, and her maiden name was Tutsinger. She was described as a small woman about 25 years old with black hair and eyes. Despite her infidelity, her husband seemed to be "very devoted to her," according to the Neosho Times.

On the day before the crime, Pinie and Kellem had traveled from Pittsburg to her father's home south of Joplin. Pinie had threatened to kill Kellem, and Kellem had gotten possession of her revolver and taken out the ammunition for fear that she would carry out the threat. Pinie, however, got possession of Kellem's own revolver and put it in her purse. The idea of robbing Angle's store was thought to have been a mere frame-up as a way of getting Kellem out on the road so Pinie could kill him. It was thought that Pinie had one or more accomplices in the scheme but that she was the one who did the actual shooting. Her husband, Peckham, was released, and no one else was charged in the crime.

The trial ended at noon on June 9, and the jury deliberated until after dark, when they returned a verdict of guilty of second-degree murder. It was reported that ten jurors initially favored acquittal but they eventually agreed to the guilty verdict on the condition that they would recommend that the defendant be released on probation and given a chance at reform. By the time they learned that a recommendation for parole had to go to the State Board of Pardons, the judge had already sentenced Mrs. Peckham to ten years in the penitentiary. Pinie became the first woman ever convicted of murder in Newton County and, according to the Times, "probably the first ever tried on that charge."
Pinie's lawyers filed a motion for a new trial, but it was overruled, and she was transported to Jefferson City on June 13. Her sentence was commuted by the governor on September 25, 1917, after she had served barely over three years of her sentence.

The Murder of Ella Scott

After thirty-two-year-old Eleanor “Ella” Scott was killed under mysterious circumstances at her home in La Cygne, Kansas, in mid-June of 1923, a few people whispered that her husband, John Ellison Scott, might have murdered her, but the large majority of folks throughout Linn County brushed aside the rumors. Even after Scott was charged with murder, most people stood by the thirty-one-year old Scott. Everything changed, though, when evidence was brought out that Scott had been secretly carrying on with his wife’s nineteen-year-old niece, Arlene.

In the fall of 1919, Arlene Scott, Ella’s teenage niece, had come to stay with the couple so that she could attend the local high school. After Arlene, who was no relation to Ellison, graduated from La Cygne High School in the spring of 1923, she moved to Pittsburg and enrolled for the summer term at the college there to obtain her temporary teaching certificate.

Meanwhile, on the night of June 19, Ellison and Ella Scott attended a tent show in La Cygne and drove home in the family car. They had been home just a few minutes when neighbors heard shots ring out, and a couple of minutes later, Scott appeared on the sidewalk outside the home exclaiming that his wife had been shot. By the time medical help arrived, though, Ella was beyond help and died from two gunshot wounds.

At first, nearly everyone believed Ellison’s story that he’d still been in the garage putting away the car when his wife was shot inside the house, presumably by a would-be burglar. The Scotts’ marriage had no outward signs of discord, and most people knew of no reason why Ellison might have wanted his wife dead.

But investigators were busy hunting up just such a motive.

People were still skeptical even after Scott was arrested on June 22, three days after the shooting, because county officials would not reveal the incriminating evidence against the accused. Taken to Mound City, the county seat, Scott pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and was released on $15,000 bond.

At his preliminary hearing on July 5, the accused was bound over for trial, but his attorneys immediately filed a writ of habeas corpus. The judge refused to release Scott but did grant a new hearing with an admonition to prosecutors that they present stronger evidence.

At Scott’s new preliminary exam, “much damaging evidence against the accused was brought out” that was not presented at the first hearing, according to the La Cygne Journal, but even then there probably would not have been enough evidence to make a strong case against Scott “had it not been shown that he made a trip to Pittsburg a couple of weeks ago,” met Arlene Scott, his deceased wife’s niece, and registered with her at a hotel as man and wife under assumed names. Arlene Scott denied that she had ever been intimate with her uncle-in-law, but the sheriff, following her to the stand, testified that Arlene had admitted just such an affair to him less than a week earlier. Scott was held for trial under a $20,000 bond, and he was unable to come up with the bail money, because the sensational testimony caused most of his supporters to desert him.

When Scott’s trial got underway at Mound City in mid-September, the judge ruled that no one under the age of eighteen should be admitted to the courtroom because of the spicy testimony regarding the intimacy between the defendant and Arlene Scott that was expected. The prosecutor sought to show that Scott’s motive for murdering his wife was twofold. He was financially embarrassed and hoped to collect on a $3,000 life insurance policy he’d taken out on Ella just before her death. Also, he did not get along with his wife, contrary to the impression the couple gave in public, and he wanted to be free of her so he could be with Arlene, with whom had had been carrying on an affair both before and after the murder.

Witnesses were called to establish the likelihood of an affair between the defendant and Arlene Scott, including the proprietor of the Pittsburg hotel where the couple had registered. In addition, a recent cellmate of Scott’s at the county jail testified that the defendant had confessed his intimate relations with Arlene to him.

Near the end of the trial, Ellison Scott took the stand in his own defense. He admitted going to the hotel in Pittsburg with his wife’s niece, but he claimed he simply wanted to talk with her in private because he had been under such suspicion since his wife’s death that Arlene was the only friend he had left. He said he wanted to get out of the public eye to protect Arlene’s reputation, and he gave the same reason for registering as husband and wife. Asked why he didn’t find some other private place to talk besides a hotel room, Scott said he had a bad headache and wanted to lie down. He admitted his actions were indiscreet, but he said he simply failed to consider the possible repercussions at the time.

On September 27, after deliberating over thirty hours, the jury in the Scott case failed to agree, and the judge declared a mistrial. At a new trial in April 1924, Scott was convicted of second-degree murder, but the state supreme court overturned the verdict, partly on the basis that, when a man was accused of killing his wife, proof that he was intimate with another woman was legitimate evidence but mere circumstances suggesting such a likelihood were not.

At his third trial, held on a change of venue at Garentt in Anderson County in March 1926, Scott was found not guilty. A case that had been hailed as the most sensational in Linn County history wound down with little publicity, and Ellison Scott quietly walked away a free man.

This story is condensed from a chapter in my latest book, Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas.

Murder of Savilla Scott and Hanging of Frank McDaniel

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the hanging of Willis Washam in 1854 in Greene County, Missouri, which was the first legal hanging in the county. The last hanging in the county and, as far as I know, the only other legal one occurred over 80 years later in 1935, when Frank "Sonny" McDaniel was hanged for the murder of his paramour, Savilla "Billie" Scott.
The 28-year-old McDaniel had served a term in the Missouri State Penitentiary for burglary and larceny and another on in the Federal prison at Leavenworth for violating liquor laws. Around 1932, he came back to Springfield, where he was unemployed and spent most of his time loafing in pool halls. However, the 24-year-old Savilla, who was estranged from her husband, took up with the idler, moved in with him, and helped support him through her work as an "elevator girl" at a Springfield department store.
In March of 1933, the couple had been living together for about nine months, but they often argued over McDaniel's continuing attention to other women. According to testimony at McDaniel's subsequent trial, the two went to a dance together on the night of March 27, but they again quarreled, and McDaniel left early. Later, Savilla went home accompanied by her sister and brother-in-law, and the three found McDaniel there. Savilla announced her intention of leaving McDaniel, started taking down some curtains she owned, and otherwise began making arrangements to vacate the premises. "Let her go, I don't give a damn!" McDaniel reportedly declared when he saw Savilla making arrangements to leave.
But apparently he did care. The next evening he was driving his car around Springfield with 22-year-old Edward Warren, an acquaintance, as his passenger, when he spotted Savilla on the street, stopped, and offered to take her to her destination. Savilla got in, but instead of taking her where she wanted to go, McDaniel drove south of Springfield a few miles and stopped on a dirt road a short distance west of Campbell Street Road. He lit a cigarette and told Savilla he'd brought her out here to kill her. She asked why, and he said, "Because you did me dirty." After a pause, though, he dropped his head and said, "I guess I won't."

McDaniel then drove east of Campbell Street Road and stopped on another isolated, dirt road. Regaining his resolve, he ordered both Savilla and Warren out of the car. He told Warren to stay at the front of the car, and he took Savilla to the rear of the vehicle. Warren heard Savilla pleading for her life, and he went to the rear of the car to try to intervene. McDaniel ordered him back to the front, though, and Warren soon heard four or five gunshots. McDaniel came back to the front of the car and threatened to kill Warren, too, but he decided to let him live, warning that he definitely would kill him if he didn't keep his mouth shut.
Savilla's body was found early the next morning, March 29, by residents of the area. She had been shot four times in the head and five times in total. McDaniel was arrested later the same day and was called to testify at a coroner's jury the next day, March 30. He offered an alibi and said that Edward Warren could verify it, but, instead, Warren ended up being the main witness against the suspect.
McDaniel was tried without delay, convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to be hanged on July 28. The verdict was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, however, and the prisoner was transferred to the state pen at Jeff City to await the high court's decision. The defense's main contention in its appeal was that McDaniel's testimony at the coroner's jury amounted to being compelled to incriminate himself.
The supreme court didn't see it that way, suggesting that McDaniel was just a material witness at that point and that his testimony had been freely given. In early March 1935, the justices affirmed the lower court's decision and reset the execution for April 12, 1935. McDaniel was brought back to Springfield from Jeff City on April 11. Early the next morning, he went to the scaffold on the courthouse grounds in Springfield still protesting his innocence. "God bless you all," he said, just moments before dropping into eternity.

Dispute over Route of I-44

I vaguely recall when Interstate 44 was constructed through Missouri, and I tend to think of it as an event that happened at a fairly specific time in the past. But actually it took almost a decade to complete from conception until the last leg of the highway was opened. Planning for the highway began about 1956, and the final section of the road was not completed until about 1964 or 1965. Throughout this period, newspapers contained stories updating the progress on construction of the highway. The progress hit a brief snag in 1959, when a protest arose over the proposed route of the road through Lawrence County.

Plans called for the new interstate highway to roughly follow the path of Route 66 from Springfield to Halltown and then to veer southwest across country to the Mount Vernon area, from where it would then roughly follow the route of U.S. 166 to the Oklahoma state line. In the early summer of 1959, a group of citizens from Lawrence County organized in opposition to the plan. The protesters, numbering about 200, wrote letters to US Senator Stuart Symington and US Congressman Charlie Brown demanding that Congress take action to stop construction of the highway until its route could be reconsidered. The group felt that, instead of building a completely new highway that ran between and parallel to Route 66 and US 166, the government should utilize one of the old highways as much as possible in construction of the interstate. The protesters felt that to build a completely new highway when both Route 66 and Route 166 were perfectly good roads was "a serious misuse of money."
Those who supported a brand new road pointed out that it was a little late to be organizing a protest, since plans for the highway had been known for at least two years or so. In addition, supporters of the already-announced plan said that, contrary to what the protesters said, constructing a new highway was actually cheaper than trying to bring either Route 66 or Route 166 up to interstate highway standards because of all the expenses involved in building access roads, overpasses, cloverleafs, and so forth.
Nothing came of the last-minute protest, and plans for the construction of I-44 across Lawrence County continued as scheduled. Only a small section of Highway 166 was used temporarily as one lane of the new interstate.
   

Sensationalist Reporting

I occasionally hear or read of someone complaining about sensationalism in the news media nowadays as if to suggest that this phenomenon is relatively recent. I agree that some news outlets and some journalists sensationalize the news just to try to attract more readers or listeners, but I strongly disagree with the implication that there was a time when such sensationalism didn't pervade the American media. If so, I don't know when it was. If anything, newspapers used to be much more sensationalist than they are today. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, almost nothing was off limits, including people's private lives. Suicide, for instance, was a subject that often made headlines. Nowadays, when a person commits suicide, newspaper accounts many times do not even give the cause of death, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not only was the cause of death almost always given, but the incident was also usually recounted in detail, insofar as the reporter could learn the details. It was not until around the 1920s or so, when the medical community began reprimanding journalists for reporting suicides, suggesting that such coverage only caused more people to kill themselves, that sensationalist reporting of suicides began to subside.
People's romantic lives were also considered fair game, although there was often a sexist element in deciding which stories to pursue. If a wife cheated on her husband, that was considered fodder for a good newspaper story, but if a man cheated on his wife, that activity was often allowed to continue with just a knowing wink.
When the Rev. J. B. Tharp, a 60-year-old Baptist minister from Weir City, Kansas, arrived in neighboring Fort Scott in early February 1902 saying that his wife had left him and run away with a younger man and that he was looking for the fleeing lovebirds, the Fort Scott Daily Tribune deemed the story not just newsworthy but worthy of a major headline and a full account of the wife's treachery. In addition to preaching the gospel, Tharp sold eggs and butter out of his home, and people would call at his house at all hours to make purchases. His wife was about twenty years younger than he was and looked even younger, as she was said to be beautiful. She often conducted the butter and egg transactions; so Tharp took little notice when one young man in particular started paying frequent visits to the home. Tharp was often away from home on the preaching circuit, and the relationship between his wife and her mysterious paramour blossomed in his absence. Tharp had a friend who tried to warn him that there was a growing intimacy between his wife and the young man, but the old preacher paid little attention until it was too late.

Tharp was holding revivals in Missouri when he received a letter from the friend that his wife and the young man had run off together, taking the couple's 9-year-old boy. Tharp hurried home and found that not only had his wife and her lover fled with his son but they had also taken about $200 in cash that Tharp had saved up and also converted a horse and buggy and other property belonging to Tharp into ready cash and taken it, too.
Tharp scoured Weir City at first, but no one had seen his wife or her lover during the past few days, and no once seemed to know the identify of the young stranger she had absconded with. Tharp then went to Lamar, Missouri, where his wife's folks lived, but they had seen no sign of their daughter, they said. Returning to Kansas, Tharp stopped in Fort Scott to institute a search in that town. When reporters got wind of his story, they rushed to interview him and to broadcast the story of his forlorn search.
Not finding his runaway wife in Fort Scott, Tharp left, saying he was headed to Kansas City to look for her there. The preacher did, indeed, overtake his wife in Kansas City a week or so later, but the paramour was not with her. Tharp retrieved some of the money his wife had taken from him, but he decided not to press charges against her. He refused to take her back, because he said he wanted to go his own way, and he allowed her to go her own way, too, and to keep their young son. "He returned to his home in Weir City," concluded the Daily Tribune, "and she will probably take up life with the man whom she loves better than she does her own husband."
And that's the kind of story that made sensational headlines in the "good old days."

First Legal Hanging in Greene County

The first legal hanging in Greene County, Missouri, took place on August 25, 1854, when Willis Washam was hanged from a gallows erected just north of Jordan Creek near present-day Benton Avenue. This was near the same location where two black men, Mart Danforth in 1859 and Bud Isbell in 1871, were later lynched.
Washam's trial was held during the July 1854 term of Greene County Circuit Court on a change of venue from Taney County. Washam had been charged with killing his stepson a year or so earlier. Details of the case, are sketchy, since the only extant accounts of the case (at least the only ones I've been able to find) were written years after the fact. Greene County Circuit Court records do contain a few details about the legal proceedings against Washam but few details of the crime itself.
According to the 1883 History of Greene County, Washam, who lived on Bee Creek, near present-day Branson, went down to the creek to fish one day with the stepson, who was about 14. After a while, they separated, and Washam returned to the house alone. The boy did not return, and he was found a few days later in the creek with a stone tied around his neck and signs of violence on his body. His wife accused Washam of having killed her son, and he was arrested and taken to Forsyth.
Washam managed to escape and struck out for Arkansas on his "famous horse, which he called 'Tom Benton'" with his and his wife's 8-year-old son. Washam worked for a while in Arkansas but returned after a few months when the young boy started pining for his mother. The wife appeared to welcome Washam back home and told him the charges against him had been dropped, but after he fell asleep, she sneaked off to Forsyth and turned him in. Washam awakened and started off again on Tom Benton, suspecting that his wife had betrayed him, when he was overtaken and re-arrested. The Taney County sheriff later claimed Washam had offered to give Tom Benton to him if the lawman would let the wanted man escape. Washam, on the other hand, claimed the sheriff had offered on his own to "look the other way" if Washam would turn over his horse to him, without Washam bringing up the subject. At any rate, Washam was brought back to Forsyth, where he took a change of venue and was transferred to the Greene County jail in Springfield.
According to the county history, Washam's attorney, Littleberry Hendricks, made a "hard fight" for his client but to no avail. After Washam was convicted, Hendricks moved for new trial. After the motion was turned down, he moved for an arrest of judgment, but that motion, too, was denied. He planned, at first, to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court but instead decided to try to get the judgment set aside at an upcoming adjourned term of the Greene County Circuit Court. At the hearing, two days before Washam's scheduled execution, the judge refused to take any action in the case, and the execution went off as scheduled on August 25.
An immense crowd gathered at the gallows to witness the event, people pouring into Springfield from as far away as Warsaw. Washam made a short speech before he was hanged in which he declared his innocence and said he could have gotten off if he'd been able to hire big-time lawyers.The county history claimed that during his speech, he said, "My old woman was sworn my life away, but I am ready to die."
Samuel Fulbright had assumed the duties of sheriff just a few days prior to the execution, and he was called upon to act as executioner. Several years later, Fulbright killed himself by poison, and a story circulated that a nagging guilt over the prospect that he had hanged an innocent man contributed to his suicide. The county history, however, discounted the story as silly. A story also arose when Mrs. Washam died several years later that she confessed on her deathbed that she herself had killed her son and cast the blame on her husband. The author of the county history said he had tried and failed to corroborate this story and that he was convinced that it, too, was a fabrication. He said he thought some unscrupulous attorney had made it up to use as an example of someone being wrongly executed in an attempt to get his own client acquitted.
The Washam case was recounted in the Springfield Leader in late April 1886 in the aftermath of the lynching George Graham near present-day Grant Beach Park. (By the way, the Graham case, which is a very fascinating case, is the subject of my next book, Bigamy and Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the Murder of Sarah Graham, to be released in October by Kent State University Press as part of its true crime series.) The 1886 newspaper account of the Washam case was very similar to what the county history had said three years earlier.
In early May, 1886, a week after the Leader account of the Washam case had been printed, a person styling himself "An Old Citizen" wrote in to say that neither the county history nor the recent Leader story was accurate in the details of the Washam case. The writer said he had been present at both the trial and the hanging and knew firsthand what he was talking about.
The letter writer said that the murdered lad's body was not found in the creek several days after it disappeared with a stone tied around his neck. Instead, the principal witness in the case, a neighbor named Wilson, testified that, on the day the body was found, he was attracted by the screaming of the dead boy's younger brother and that, when he came running, he found Mr. and Mrs. Washam, with their clothes saturated with water, standing on the bank arguing, each accusing the other of having hindered the rescue effort. The dead lad did not have a stone around his neck, and the only marks of violence were three bruises on one side of his neck and one bruise on the other side, as might have been caused by the grip of a person's fingers and thumb. The neighbor said that, after the boy was dragged from the water, an effort to resuscitate the victim was made but to no avail.
Washam's testimony was that he and his stepson went fishing and that, after he separated from the boy, he was attracted by the shouts of his younger son, who had tagged along also. Washam rushed back to where he'd left the boys and jumped into the water to try to save the older lad. While he was still wrestling to get the boy ashore, the mother showed up and jumped in also, but Washam claimed he got tangled up in her clothes, which caused him to have to let go of the boy in order to save himself. Washam was said to have previously made threats against his stepson, which, along with the bruises on the neck, gave rise to suspicion against him.
The "old citizen" also said that it was not true that Littleberry Hendricks had made a valiant effort to save his client. Hendricks did not even become Washam's counsel until after the defendant had been convicted and his original court-appointed lawyers had abandoned him. Hendricks had filed Washam's appeals only because he felt anyone was entitled to file such appeals, not because he was valiantly fighting for his client. Washam's hanging was scheduled for a Friday, and Hendricks appeared before the judge on Thursday in a last-minute attempt to get his appeal heard. The judge said he would hear the case early Friday morning but then, after Hendricks left, the judge ordered the sheriff to adjourn the court until Saturday, thus cutting off any chance for the appeal to actually be heard.
In addition, the "old citizen" said Washam did not blame his wife during his speech on the gallows but simply said that he was innocent and would have been acquitted if he'd been able to afford good attorneys.

Although the facts of this case are, as I say, very sketchy, the story of the "old citizen" seems to me to have more of a ring of truth to it than the county history account. And the idea that Washam was, indeed, innocent seems to have gained considerable credence in the late 1800s and early 1900s, although this might have simply been a case of romanticizing past events.