by Rocky Macy
In early January of this year I began a sub-series within this blog that I captioned "Ancestor Archives," and in that effort I try to profile one of my ancestors each week. Normally I write about somebody in my direct line, some form of a grandparent, but I am also branching out to include a few extraneous relatives - aunts, uncles, or cousins - who appear to be noteworthy for one reason or another. I profiled a grand-uncle, for instance, who was a noted educator in the early twentieth century, and I am tentatively planning to profile two cousins of mine who were murderers.
This piece is not intended to be a profile of those murderers, and I will not even use their names. Profiles will follow at another time as "Ancestor Archives." Today I am highlighting the system of "justice" that was in effect at the time the first killer committed his crimes.
One of my murderous cousins was a contemporary first cousin whom I knew well. He was a druggie and a drunk who killed an elderly man for his social security money, left a trail of clues that even a county sheriff could follow, and was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison - where he was soon himself murdered by fellow inmates.
The other murderous cousin of mine was actually a first cousin, three times removed - which means that he was a first cousin to my great-grandfather. I knew through some earlier research that he had murdered a man who had run off with his wife, and that a jury had acquitted him of the murder because the jurors felt the circumstances justified the killing of the man.
I subscribe to a couple of websites that archive old newspapers, and yesterday I began sorting through the back issues of newspapers in the area where that killing occurred. The shooting had taken place in a shoe store in Joplin, Missouri, in 1908. As I began finding articles related to the shooting, I quickly realized that the tale was far more complicated than I had originally supposed it to be.
Today's posting will focus on the brutality of his crimes (plural) and on the defense that he used to walk away a free man from two almost identical murders that occurred twenty years apart. Hopefully this piece will also illuminate some of the social attitude toward the role of wives in early twentieth century America and show that society has at least made some advances in that regard over recent decades.
At some point during the latter years of the first decade of the twentieth century, my cousin, a miner in a rural Missouri town, invited a cousin of his to room with him and his family - a family consisting of a wife and three small children. As sometimes happens in even the best of families, the boarder soon developed a relationship with the man's wife, and the two ran off together leaving the distraught husband to parent the three children alone.
The abandoned husband eventually found his wife and pleaded with her to return home, but she refused. Finally one day he either happened to see her and his cousin entering a shoe store in Joplin, or he was clued in by a friend that they were in that vicinity and was out looking for them, when he followed the couple into the store. My cousin, who just happened to have his loaded pistol with him, fired three shots at close range. His bullets hit the man who had stolen his wife in the arm and the back, causing the man to fall lifeless to the floor, and then the shooter stood over the man and fired a third shot directly into the man's temple. (The third bullet was actually lodged in the floor beneath the man's head.) The man who had committed the murder, my cousin, then walked outside on the sidewalk and waited on the police to come and arrest him.
My cousin had a good lawyer and presented in court with his three young children sitting at the defense table with him. His primary defense was what was called the "unwritten law" that a husband had right defend his marriage - or, taken a bit further - that a wife was essentially the property of a husband and he was justified in defending what was rightfully his. The jury, which would have been all male at that time, bought that argument and acquitted him.
The man's wife left him anyway, and he met and married a new wife within a year of the acquittal.
Fast forward twenty years.
By 1928 my cousin was still working in the mines, although he had moved to a different mining community after having served two terms as City Marshall in his former town and then losing an election for a third term. By then he had also lost an arm in a mine explosion. My cousin still had his second wife, and he was the father of twelve, some of whom were step-children. My cousin and his large family were living in a large house when a friend of his, a man, asked if he could rent a room in the house, and my cousin thought, why not? The man moved in and - you guessed it - struck up a relationship with my cousin's wife!
One afternoon my cousin and his nineteen-year-old son returned home early from the mine and found my cousin's wife (the boy's mother) in her bedroom alone with the boarder. The scoundrel rushed from the house and was hurriedly pursued by the father and son. The father, pistol in hand, fired three shots. The first one missed, the second was an intentional shot to the man's shooting arm, and the third was a head shot for the kill. Again, the shooter calmly waited for the police to show up and arrest him.
And again he pleaded the "unwritten law," and again a jury of his male peers acquitted him.
Here is one more kink to that rather twisted tale: The victim in the second shooting had himself been arrested a few years before for murdering two men who had displayed their affections toward his wife and sister. His jury had not been as understanding as the two juries that had acquitted my cousin, and the fellow had been sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. However, the Supreme Court (I'm assuming the "State" Supreme Court) overturned that decision after the guy had served only one year of the sentence, and it was sent back to the lower court for a retrial - where he was acquitted.
Okay, here is one final kink to the tale: A few years ago a graduate student at Arizona State University was doing some family research of her own when she found an old journal of her mother's which told an insider's tale of the second murder committed by my cousin. The student's mother had been a three-year-old in the household where the killing took place and could remember the commotion surrounding the murder. Her daughter, as a grad student, went on to write a scholarly paper on the event. As a part of her research, she had her DNA tested expecting to uncover cousin connections to my cousin, the killer, the man who was married to her grandmother and was her presumed grandfather. Instead she found that she was related to the victim - the boarder whom her grandmother's husband had shot and killed.
Whoops.
I wish I knew a hungry screenwriter who could turn all of this into a movie!
