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    Murder & Mayhem in Southeast Kansas
    Murder & Mayhem in Southeast Kansas
    Murder & Mayhem in Southeast Kansas
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    Murder & Mayhem in Southeast Kansas

    By Larry E. Wood

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    From railroad towns like Ladore to cow towns like Newton and Wichita, southeast Kansas pulsed with rowdy activity during the late nineteenth century. The unruly atmosphere drew outlaws, including the Dalton Gang, and even crazed serial killers the likes of the Bender clan. Violent incidents, from gunfights to lynchings, punctuated the region's Wild West era, and the allure of the frontier also attracted the everyday people whose passions sometimes spawned bloodshed as well. Award-winning author Larry E. Wood explores thirteen of these remarkable episodes in the criminal history of southeast Kansas.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateMar 25, 2019
    ISBN9781439666494
    Murder & Mayhem in Southeast Kansas
    Author

    Larry E. Wood

    Larry Wood is a retired schoolteacher and a freelance writer specializing in the history of the Ozarks and surrounding areas. He is the author of two historical novels and sixteen nonfiction books, including seven published by The History Press. Wood's books, stories and articles have won numerous awards from organizations like the Ozark Writers' League, the Ozark Creative Writers and the Missouri Writers' Guild. Wood maintains a blog on regional history at www.ozarks-history.blogspot.com.

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      Murder & Mayhem in Southeast Kansas - Larry E. Wood

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      1

      DEADLY DAY IN LADORE

      A QUINTUPLE LYNCHING

      On Tuesday, May 10, 1870, seven young men rode into Ladore, Kansas, looking to raise hell. The men were drawn by Ladore’s rough-andtumble reputation as a place where whiskey flowed freely and rowdy behavior generally went unchecked. But there were some things even the people of Ladore would not abide. When the seven young hellions got liquored up and crossed the line, only one made it out of town alive.¹

      Located in southern Neosho County about six miles north of present-day Parsons, Ladore was, in the spring of 1870, a booming little town slated to become a junction point of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad (aka the Katy). The place pulsed with boisterous activity in anticipation of the road’s completion, and all manner of debauchery and incivility found a home. Dramshops have multiplied, complained a local resident at the time, and drunken rowdies have become so bold that decent people are almost afraid to show their faces on the streets.²

      More than thirty years later, L.A. Bowes, foreman of the construction crew that was building the railroad, remembered the town in similar but more colorful terms. All the Wild Bills, Texas Jacks, Buckskin Joes and Alkali Ikes seemed to have congregated there, he recalled. It was the toughest place…I ever struck. Whisky was sold in nearly every house in the town. Vice and immorality flourished like a green bay tree.³

      The seven young men, identified initially only as Texans or straggling outlaws from the Indian Territory, hit town about noon, according to Bowes, and commenced to fill up on tangleleg. Heavily armed, the men took entire possession of the town. By evening, they started knocking people down and robbing them, firing off their pistols indiscriminately, and raising the devil generally.⁴

      About 9:00 p.m., the seven men went to the boardinghouse of James N. Roach, a quarter-mile south of town near the railroad right-of-way and asked for rooms. Seeing their state of intoxication, Roach told them he didn’t have any rooms for them, but they retorted that they would stay anyway. The hardened wretches hit Roach with their pistols, knocking him down and leaving him for dead, as they presumed.⁵

      The hell-prompted villains then turned their attention to the female quarters on the bottom floor of the two-story building, where Roach’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Sophia, and two hired girls, fourteen-yearold Jane Talbott and her thirteen-year-old sister, Alice Talbott, roomed. A number of railroad workers were staying on the second floor, and two of the hellions guarded the outside stairs that led to the workmen’s quarters to prevent them from interfering while the other five men stalked toward the girls’ room. Sophia made her escape by slipping into an adjoining room and hiding, but the drunken scoundrels dragged the Talbott sisters from their room and herded them outside, where they took turns raping them.⁶

      Still stunned but conscious, Roach could hear the screams of the young girls, but he dared not stir for fear that the men would kill him. During the night, an argument erupted among the desperadoes over one of the girls, and the leader of the gang shot and killed one of his own men.⁷

      Finally, the crying and screaming of the younger girl became so heartrending that even one of the gang members took pity on her and returned her to the boardinghouse. Meanwhile, the men brutally outraged and ravished the other.⁸

      Shortly after midnight, the villains broke up. One of the gang members took the Talbott girl to the nearby Labette Creek woods, where he wrapped her and himself in a blanket and soon fell asleep. Three others deemed it prudent to head out of town, and they started northeast on the Osage Mission road. The remaining two went looking for more liquor. Meanwhile, Roach finally ventured to give an alarm.⁹

      The two thirsty desperadoes called at The Inn, a boardinghouse in Ladore run by James Abell. They found Susan Abell and her daughters, fifteen-year-old Sarah Matilda and twelve-year-old Elizabeth, there alone, because Jim Abell had already answered the alarm and was out looking for the rapists with a posse of Ladore’s other male citizens. The Inn was closed, but the ruffians started breaking in. Susan picked up an ax and herded her daughters up a ladder into an unfinished attic. When the desperadoes gained entrance into the house and tried to follow the females into the attic, Susan fended them off with the ax, and they finally gave up and turned their attention to the liquor they’d come for.¹⁰

      About daylight, the posse, now swollen to almost three hundred men, found the man who’d taken Jane Talbott to the woods, still curled up in his blanket with the girl. They first tried to hang him with a grapevine, but it broke. They then procured a rope and strung him up to a limb of a hackberry tree on the bank of Labette Creek.¹¹

      Near the same time, the two desperadoes who’d gone to Abell’s boardinghouse were found there in a drunken stupor. They were taken to the local barbershop, a log building, and guarded there momentarily, then brought down to the Roach place, where the Talbott girls identified them as two of the party who had attacked them. They were promptly strung up side by side on the same limb as their comrade.¹²

      Sometime after daylight, the other three men were overtaken on the Osage Mission road and brought back to Ladore. They, too, were marched before the Talbott girls, who identified two of them as participants in the previous night’s crime. Alice Talbott said the third man was the one who’d taken her back to the boardinghouse, and both girls agreed that he did not participate in the hellish deeds of the other six men. Identified as Peter Kelly, he was placed under guard pending further investigation, while his two partners soon adorned the hackberry tree alongside the other three men. It was not yet 11:00 a.m. on May 11, 1870.¹³

      Before they were launched into eternity, the lynching victims gave their names as William Ryan of Illinois, Patrick Starr of New York, Patsey Riley of Massachusetts, Richard Pilbin of Missouri, and Alexander Mathews of Canada. The man who’d been shot by the gang leader was identified as Robert Wright.¹⁴

      The men’s bodies were left hanging for several hours, and most of the residents of Ladore took the opportunity to amble down to Labette Creek and gawk at the gruesome ornaments dangling from the hackberry tree. About 3:00 p.m., county coroner Stephen Carr arrived, and the bodies were cut down and laid out beneath the tree. Very little effort was made, however, to identify the vigilantes who’d done the lynching, perhaps because virtually all the adult men of Ladore had participated, either directly or indirectly, in the extralegal action. No official of the law ever asked any questions about the hanging or in any way interfered with those engaged in it, Bowes recalled years later. Instead, the jury came to the hasty and rather meaningless conclusion that the five men who’d been hanged had come to their deaths by strangulation at the hands of parties unknown.¹⁵

      From The Katy Railroad and the Last Frontier. Used by permission, University of Oklahoma Press.

      The man who’d been shot, added the jury, came to his death by a pistol shot from an unknown person, inflicted while the deceased was attempting to commit a rape. After the inquest, all six of the dead outlaws were dumped into a large hole that had been dug near the hackberry tree and buried there in a common grave.¹⁶

      Sheriff Michael Barnes showed up at or near the same time as the coroner, while the vigilantes were still debating what to do about Peter Kelly. Barnes took charge of him and escorted him to Osage Mission. He was temporarily lodged in the city jail there and later transferred to the Allen County Jail at Iola. He and several other prisoners escaped from the Iola jail in July, but Kelly was soon recaptured. Charges against him for his part in the Ladore tragedy were eventually dropped.¹⁷

      Doctors who treated the Talbott girls reported them in critical condition. It was thought that the younger of the two, who was torn and terribly cut with a knife, could not survive, but she recovered and lived at least into adulthood. The older girl died in July 1871, when she was barely sixteen years old, although it’s not known whether her ordeal at the hands of the Ladore villains just over a year earlier contributed to her premature demise.¹⁸

      Editorial observers were swift to uphold the action of the Ladore vigilantes. The citizens of Ladore deserve the thanks of every decent person, said the Chetopa Advance, for hanging these vile scoundrels, who, by their acts have thrown the atrocities of the savage Indian into the shade. While generally in agreement with the Advance’s sentiment, the Osage Mission Journal was more circumspect: "We exceedingly regret that any person should deem it necessary to take the lives of human beings ‘without due process of law.’ Heretofore we have borne the reputation of being a law-abiding people. If the people of Ladore have forfeited it, they certainly had grave reasons for their proceedings. If justification is possible, they are justified. ‘The way of the transgressor is hard.’"¹⁹

      Ladore Cemetery is about the only sign left that the community ever existed. Photo by the author.

      After the five desperadoes were lynched, according to Bowes, Ladore became a good, moral town. Everyone seemed to be on his good behavior. The Wild Bills, Texas Jacks, Buckskin Joes and Alkali Ikes left for more congenial climes and the town settled into a quiet, peaceful village.²⁰

      Alas, Ladore’s prosperity was short lived. The first passenger train, running on the Neosho Division

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