Wild Shenanigans at the Vaudeville Theatre

Last week I mentioned the rowdy activities at Johnson’s Vaudeville Variety Theatre in early-day Joplin, but sometimes things crossed the line from rowdy to violent.  

In 1877, Frank Carney, a brother of Cora Johnson, arrived in Joplin to visit his sister and began helping out in the Vaudeville saloon. On October 17, George O’Bannon stumbled into the bar drunk and knocked over a stove, scattering fire and ashes on the floor. Carney tried to get the man to clean up the mess, and they got into a violent argument. When O’Bannon cursed Carney, Carney knocked him down and began beating him, but O’Bannon pulled a knife and stabbed his assailant. O’Bannon was quickly arrested and lodged in jail, while Carney, although seriously wounded, soon revived.

In the wee hours of December 18, 1879, Cora announced that it was time to close the saloon and started to lock up. Two young hellions named Billy Beck and Charles Marshall told her not to be so fast because they wanted something more to drink. Willing to stay open a while longer, Cora sat back down, but when Beck asked whether his credit was good, she told him no. Beck replied with profane language, and bartender Johnny Manning intervened, herding Beck out of the building. While Cora went behind the bar to get the day’s receipts from the money till, Marshall followed Beck and Manning outside and fired a shot at the bartender. Manning ducked back into the saloon, and the two hellions rushed in behind him. Marshall fired a shot that struck a mirror near Cora’s head, shattering the glass into pieces, and Cora dashed into an adjoining room. The two hell-raisers fled, as A. S. Johnson gave chase with a double-barrel shotgun. Both young men were later arrested for felonious assault.

One of Johnson’s employees, gambler Jake Pecora, started running a lunch counter at the Vaudeville saloon in partnership with Al Searle. On Sunday, June 27, 1880, the two partners got into a disagreement and ended up, according to the Joplin Daily Herald, indulging in “a first class row.” Pecora drew a pistol, but Searle kicked it out of his hand, causing it to go off, and the ball struck Searle in the foot. Pecora was arrested and charged with felonious assault. Among the witnesses for the state in the case were Thomas Carney, who was another brother of Cora Johnson, and a soiled dove named Allie Rogers. The charges against Pecora were eventually dropped.

On June 6, 1881, after A. S. Johnson had sold the saloon to Pecora, Tom Carney started to take some silverware from the saloon, claiming it belonged to his sister and her husband. Pecora said he owned the silverware because it came with the property, and the two men got into a violent argument. Pecora had Carney put out of the saloon, and Carney went next door to his sister’s house to get a pistol. Back at the saloon, he opened fire on Pecora, who returned fire. Approximately eight shots were fired in all, and Charles Thompson, a theater performer, was hit and mortally wounded. Carney was charged with murder, but he, too, died from his wounds before the case came to trial.
And those were some of the wild goings-on at Johnson's Vaudeville Variety Theatre in early-day Joplin. This story is condensed from a chapter in my Wicked Joplin book.       

A. S. and Cora Johnson and the Vaudeville Variety Theatre

In 1870s Joplin, the Vaudeville Variety Theatre was the place to be for rowdy miners looking for ribald entertainment.

A. S. Johnson arrived in Joplin about 1872 and opened a vaudeville show in a building on Broadway, and he and his wife, Cora, also ran an adjoining saloon. The Vaudeville building had rooms to house the itinerant players, and Cora usually kept a stable of prostitutes on the premises as well. Broadway was the link between Main Street in West Joplin and Main Street in East Joplin, and at this time there was no bridge over Joplin Creek so that Broadway actually went down into the valley, which is where Johnson's theater was located.

Dolph Shaner's Story of Joplin, published in 1948, paints a colorful picture of Johnson's Variety Show:

     This amusement hall provided a cheap vaudeville show of song and dance numbers.         Occasionally a burlesque troupe from St. Louis acted before the brilliant kerosene floodlights,   replaced later with more brilliant gas jets; burnt cork artists, Indian club swingers, slack rope   walkers, banjo pickers and German bands entertained. It was a bad place for decent people, because   many women who frequented the vaudeville reddened their cheeks with rouge and penciled their     eye brows. They were even seen there in red petticoats or red scarfs.... As if this were not enough,   the "hussies" on the stage, in the amusement emporium, were bold enough to appear in knee length   skirts and whirled about showing a glimpse of lace on white muslin undergarments.

During the late 1870s and into the early 1880s, Cora was occasionally indicted in Jasper County for keeping a bawdy house. Like most of the madams of early-day Joplin, she was, as a rule, merely slapped with a minor fine and released to resume her avocation. She or her husband was also occasionally cited for selling liquor without a license or selling liquor on Sunday. Like most activities in early-day Joplin, the goings-on at the Vaudeville Theatre were scarcely deterred by the Sabbath. The liquor cases, too, usually resulted only in small fines.

The Vaudeville Theatre drew well throughout most of its stay in Joplin, even though it was open nearly every night of the week and even when it faced competition from other venues, like the more sophisticated Opera House near 2nd and Main. “No matter what the number of counter attractions they may offer to…the amusement seeker,” remarked a Joplin Daily Herald reporter in January 1878, “Vaudeville claims her full share.”

Johnson made periodic trips to large cities to secure new talent for his vaudeville show. In early February 1878, for instance, he went to Kansas City and brought back seriocomic vocalist Jennie Southern. Later in the year, “the great Negro delineator” Billy Diamond, sometimes called “the black Diamond of America,” played to full houses on Joplin’s Broadway.

On the night of November 17, 1879, the brass band that Johnson employed in conjunction with his vaudeville stirred up Joplin when it marched down Main Street and got into a noisy competition with another band that was playing at the Opera House at the time. “It was a sight and sound never to be forgotten,” said a Daily Herald reporter the next day.

The Johnsons sold their theater in the spring of 1881 and then sold their adjoining property in the summer of 1881 to Joplin’s boss beer man, Charles Schifferdecker. They hung around long enough for Cora to be cited in June of 1882 for running a house of ill fame but apparently took their leave soon afterward.

This blog entry is condensed from a chapter in my book Wicked Joplin.

Macomb Train Robbery

On the evening of January 3, 1899, a westbound train was held up by about half a dozen men at Macomb, Missouri, a station along the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad, a few miles east of Mansfield in Wright County. Later evidence showed that the robbers had arranged for a local man, Oscar Ray, to purchase a passenger ticket from Norwood to Macomb as a way of insuring that the train would stop at Macomb, although Ray apparently was otherwise unaware of the outlaws' plans.
When the train stopped at Macomb, Ray got off and started directly toward his home three miles into the country, while the robbers, all of them masked except one, appeared on the scene and compelled the engineer and fireman to leave the engine and go back and uncouple the passenger cars from the front part of the train. The robbers then commandeered the engine, the mail car, and the combination express/baggage car, and one of them got in the engine and drove the three cars away from the station a distance of one fourth to one half mile. Here the robbers broke into the express/baggage car, blew open the safe, and robbed it of its contents, including about $900 and several watches. The holdup men then fired a few warning shots before hurrying to their horses, which they had left about a half mile south of the track, to make their getaway.
A local farmer named Lewis Nigh and two men named Jennings and Sheppard, who were not from the area, were arrested on suspicion at Nigh's home on January 7. Nigh's son-in-law Elmer Byrum was arrested the next day, and he soon turned state's evidence, implicating another local farmer, Jake Fagley, and a man named Jack Kennedy, who had first been introduced to Byrum under the alias of Wright. Kennedy was arrested in Kansas City on January 10, and Fagley was arrested about the same time or shortly afterward in Laclede County, 65 miles from Macomb.
All six men were charged with train robbery, but young Byrum cut a deal with the prosecution and the charges against him were dropped (or at least he didn't spend any time in prison). He testified against the other defendants, naming Kennedy as the ringleader of the gang and the one who had talked the local farmers into going along with the scheme. Kennedy was from the Kansas City area and had spent some time there in the city jail, where Jennings had been one of his fellow inmates. Kennedy had at one time been a railroad engineer, and he was the man who had driven the engine away from the station at Macomb. Sheppard was also from the KC area, but he was just a 17-year-old lad.
All five defendants were convicted of train robbery and received varying sentences. Although Kennedy was supposedly the leader of the gang, Jennings received the longest sentence, twenty years in the state pen. Kennedy received a seventeen-year sentence. Both Nigh and Fagley were given twelve years, while Sheppard, probably in consideration of his youth, was sentenced to only ten years in prison.
Nigh died in prison just a year or so after being sent up, and the other four were all released early, either under the state's three-fourths rule or by having their sentences commuted by the governor.
Discharged in 1912, Kennedy went on to resume his career in train robbery. Using a similar M.O. as the Macomb robbers had used, Kennedy and a sidekick held up a train near the small community of Seventy-Six in eastern Missouri in early November 1922 as it was bound from St. Louis to Memphis. After uncoupling the mail and express cars from the passenger cars, the outlaw pair drove the locomotive and two cars down the track a ways before stopping and robbing the mail car. They then uncoupled the engine from the other two cars and drove it south, jumping from the still-running locomotive near Wittenburg, where their getaway automobile was hidden in some brush.
Unbeknownst to the bandits, postal detectives were onto their scheme and were waiting for them near the vehicle. When the two outlaws made a move for their guns, the officers opened fire, killing both desperadoes.

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.