Category Archives: Missouri

1938: Adam “Eddie” Richetti, Pretty Boy Floyd sidekick

Posted on by

On this date in 1938, Adam “Eddie” Richetti was gassed for a notorious gangland bloodbath, the Kansas City Massacre. Whether he was actually involved in said massacre is a different question.

Richetti was a sidekick of the much better-known outlaw Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, a guy who earned his cred in social banditry by taking time during his many Depression-era bank robberies to set fire to the mortgage liens.*

J. Edgar Hoover promoted this looker to Public Enemy Number One after the slot was vacated by the late John Dillinger — and that spotlight was much due to a railroad station shootout in 1933 known as the Kansas City Massacre. There, three gangsters led by Vernon Miller ambushed lawmen escorting Miller’s arrested associate Frank “Jelly” Nash. It was an attempt to free the latter, but he was shot dead in the fusillade — along with FBI agent Raymond Caffrey, two Kansas City detectives, and the McAlester, Oklahoma police chief who had helped arrest Nash only the night before. Several other John Law types were injured in the shootout.

While Miller’s role is known, the identities of his two confederates have never been established to the satisfaction of a historical consensus. The FBI tabbed Floyd and Richetti as the other gunmen involved, and the bureau’s page on the event still asserts this positively. Floyd and Richetti always denied it — while still a fugitive, Floyd even sent Kansas City police a postcard disavowing the attack — and there has long been a suspicion that the FBI’s conclusion was born of expediency instead of investigative rigor. Robert Unger’s 1997 book on the case is subtitled “The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

It would do for both Floyd and Richetti, however.

In 1934, the two had a one-car accident while driving in the fog. A suspicious passing motorist alerted police and in no time Floyd had been gunned down in an Ohio cornfield; his subsequent funeral in Oklahoma would draw a crowd tens of thousands strong.

Less mourned, Eddie Richetti was taken into custody and executed in the judicial way for the Kansas City Massacre, his trial a parade of eyewitnesses of questionable veracity. He was just the fifth person executed in Missouri’s brand-new gas chamber, which had just come online that same blessed year: any less time on the run, and he would have been bound for the hangman instead.

Eddie Richetti lives on in the culture as a supporting role in any film about Pretty Boy Floyd.

* Possibly an urban legend, but Floyd’s public popularity was real.

On this day..

1881: Albert and Charles Talbott, bad sons

Posted on by

Dr. Perry H. Talbott was among the most prominent citizens of Nodaway County, Missouri. In addition to being a skilled physician, Talbott was state legislator, a writer and a newspaper editor. He was a civic minded citizen with strong beliefs, highly admired by friends and neighbors. But towards his family, Dr. Talbott was cold and distant. Miserly and neglectful, he had little interaction with his children beyond the occasional scolding. When Dr. Talbott was shot by an unknown assassin on September 18, 1880, in his dying breath he blamed his political enemies. The Nodaway county authorities, however, believed the killer was someone closer to home.

-Profile of the July 22, 1881 Marysville, Missouri hanging of Albert and Charles Talbott at friend of he site Murder By Gaslight. Enjoy in full here.

On this day..

2020: Walter Barton, coronavirus milestone

Posted on by

Missouri graced America with her first coronavirus pandemic execution tonight.

Aptly emblematic of a moment where crumbling institutions reveal the post-Cold War empire’s far-advanced rot, Walter “Arkie”* Barton’s death on the gurney culminated three decades of shambolic re-prosecutions, reliant in the end for their victory on nothing but the unequal strength of the prosecutor’s office and the willingness of courts to certify junk science as real evidence.

The victim of the murder was the 81-year-old manager of Riverview Trailer Park, where Barton lived. He was friends with that woman, Gladys Kuehler, and visited her the afternoon of her murder; later, he together with Kuehler’s granddaughter and a neighbor discovered the woman’s body. She’d been sexually assaulted and horribly knifed, slashed and stabbed more than 50 times.

The key bits of evidence convincing jurors — several of whom submitted affidavits during Barton’s clemency stage regretting their findings — that Barton had been the author of this savage attack were essentially two:

  1. Blood-spatter expert testimony that a drop of blood on Barton’s shirt that was a DNA match for Gladys Kuehler had arrived there via a “high-impact” splat at velocity –i.e., flying fast off the murder weapon. This stuff is humbug of the same genus as the burn pattern pseudoscience that wrongly executed Cameron Willingham, and more importantly it’s conspicuously silent on why Barton, who didn’t change or wash his clothes, wasn’t ribboned with high-impact bloodstains from his slasher-film murder. His own hypothesis that he picked up a spot of blood at the time he helped discover the body is at least as compelling an explanation.
  2. The ubiquitous jailhouse snitch, behind bars for a list of frauds as long as your arm, to whom Walter Barton, that fool, just spontaneously confessed even while otherwise maintaining his innocence to everyone else who would listen. The use and abuse of these finks, whose comforts are directly controlled by one party in the adversarial hearing, is a factor in a great many wrongful convictions.

Aggressively prosecuted by an attorney general — Jay Nixon, subsequently Missouri’s governor — more politically ambitious than forensically rigorous over the span of no fewer than five trials, then upheld by a split 4-3 vote in the state’s highest court, this met the emptiest formal standards of technical sufficiency to take the life of Arkie Barton, a sort of hollow malevolent pantomime of a functioning liberal democracy’s justice system.

Barton’s was just the sixth U.S. execution of 2020, and the first since COVID-19 torpedoed everything in mid-March. The last previous U.S. execution was that of Nathaniel Woods in Alabama, on March 5. Various states have delayed scheduled execution dates during the 11 intervening weeks, but those and others loom on the dockets as states push to reopen once it’s semi-safe to operate the machinery of death.

* Because he hailed originally from Arkansas.

On this day..

1953: Carl Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady

Posted on by

On this date in 1953 — six months after the execution of a more notorious couple, the Rosenbergs — two Missouri kidnappers were gassed together for the abduction-murder of a millionaire car dealer’s son.

Robert Greenlease owed his millions to a string of midwestern GM dealerships planted at the very flowering of America’s interstate system and suburbanization.

Carl Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady reckoned he’d owe some of those millions to them, too.

On September 28 of 1953, those two snatched little Bobby Greenlease Jr from the grounds of a Catholic school in Kansas City via the all-too-easy expedient of Heady presenting herself as Bobby’s aunt.

Then they extorted Sr. to the tune of $600,000, and after several days’ negotiations, Greenlease paid it through an intermediary — a record US ransom sum that would not be surpassed until 1971.

But the motor magnate never saw his son again. Even by the time they’d sent their first ransom note, the kidnappers had shot little Bobby dead at a deserted farm just over the state line in Kansas.

Although this audacious attack on a minor oligarch made national headlines — it couldn’t help but remind of the Lindbergh baby case — the crooks basically had an opportunity to get away scot-free with all their ill-gotten gains. Bobby Greenlease’s body wasn’t discovered until a couple of days after the ransom was paid, and nobody knew who the abductors were at that point.

Hall and Heady absconded to St. Louis but the wealth, like the crime itself, was just too much for these small-time shoulders to bear. Instead of lying low, Hall — after ditching Heady and taking most of the ransom with him, a reckless provocation of his co-conspirator that might itself have blown up his cover in short order — took up residence in an expensive hotel and started throwing money around. A cabbie reported the shabby character’s suspicious spending, and in no time at all the two were in custody.

A further mystery, never solved, entered the case on the night of Hall’s arrest: half the ransom money disappeared. The mob-connected lieutenant who collared Hall and brought him to the station less $300,000 of the score eventually resigned from the force in disgrace and faced federal prosecution for misappropriation and perjury; the cop indicted with him earned a presidential pardon by turning on his comrade. Other ideas were that the criminals had buried half the money (they claimed this, for a while) and that better-connected figures higher up the food chain had taken in. All the bills’ serial numbers had been recorded but only a few were ever known to have surfaced again in later years, in Michigan and Mexico; where these trace remains of a family tragedy might rest today is anybody’s guess.

As for Hall and Heady, they emerged into the glare of national infamy and — because they had crossed the Kansas-Missouri state line — a federal prosecution. Heady remains to this day the last woman executed under U.S. federal auspices.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a detailed photographic retrospective here.

On this day..

1868: Melvin Baughn, Pony Express rider turned horse thief

Posted on by

We cadge today’s entry from the August 1950 Kansas Historical Quarterly; the article “Legal Hangings in Kansas” by Louise Barry can be perused in pdf form here.

A footnote in the original notes that “During the time in 1860 and 1861, when the Pony Express was in operation, one of the well-known riders on the route between St. Joseph, Mo., and Seneca, was Melvin Baughn. It is said he turned to a life of crime by joining a gang of horse thieves, soon after the Pony Express ended. Mooney is said to have been lynched sometime later.”

The Hanging of Melvin E. Baughn

Three Doniphan county men arrived in Seneca on November 19, 1866, with warrants for four horse thieves known to be in the vicinity. Sheriff William Boulton and a posse of Nemaha county men joined in the hunt. Jackson and Strange, two of the wanted men, were captured a little east of town. Three posse members (Charles W. Ingram, Henry H. Hillix and Jesse S. Dennis) overtook the other two criminals on the road to Capioma. When they rode up to arrest the men — Melvin E. Baughn and Zach Mooney — they were fired upon. Hillix was wounded severely and Dennis was fatally shot in the back, dying a few minutes later. The horse thieves escaped.

Baughn was arrested in Leavenworth on January 6, 1867, on a robbery charge. When recognized as Dennis’ murderer, he was turned over to Nemaha county officers who placed him in the Seneca jail. Four days later an unsuccessful attempt was made to lynch him. On February 6 he and another prisoner escaped.

More than 15 months later Baughn was captured near Sedalia, Mo., after being wounded by officers attempting to arrest him for a robbery. Upon being identified, he was returned to Kansas and to the Seneca jail. He was tried during the next term of the district court, early in August, Judge R. St. Clair Graham presiding. The jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree and on August 7 he was sentenced to be hanged on September 18, 1868.

A gallows was erected on the south side of the Nemaha county jail, and an area of the jail yard was enclosed by a “fence” of canvas. And, on the appointed day, at 3:18 in the afternoon, Baughn was hanged.

On this day..

1999: David Leisure, mob war veteran

Posted on by

Gangster David Leisure — not to be confused with the “Joe Isuzu” actor of the same name — was executed by lethal injection in Missouri on this date in 1999.

A rare real-life mafioso — perhaps the first executed in the United States since Murder, Inc. boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter in 1944 — Leisure shattered the tense 19-day calm after St. Louis mob boss Anthony Giordano died in 1980.

What would the post-Giordano underworld look like? The Leisure family sized up 75-year-old James “Horseshoe Jimmy” Michaels Sr. as a rival to eliminate for reasons both personal and professional. Paulie Leisure, his brother Anthony, and their cousin, our man David Leisure, already held Michaels responsible for permitting the murder of another family member in 1964. But as a more direct inducement, Michaels purposed to wrest control of a mobbed-up union from the Leisures.

On September 17, under Paulie’s orders, David Leisure and Anthony Leisure tailed Michaels onto Interstate 55, where by remote control they detonated a bomb they’d attached to the undercarriage of their enemy’s Chrysler Cordoba.

A nationally known gangland war ensued, nicknamed the “Syrian-Lebanese War” — not in tribute to world news but because mobsters of Levantine descent were a principal St. Louis crime faction, and it was for primacy among them that the Michaels and Leisure circles murdered one another. The next year, Paulie Leisure lost his legs to a retaliatory bomb, which in turn led the Leisures to kill Michaels’s grandson, and on and on.

By 1983, FBI informants had brought all our Leisure characters under indictment. David Leisure already had lengthy prison sentences for racketeering and for a different car bomb murder by the time the Show Me State was ready to prosecute the Michaels murder. Paul Leisure never got the death penalty but he died in federal prison a few months after his cousin’s execution. The St. Louis mafia has been said to be reduced by the present day to little more than a social club for aging wiseguys from a bygone world.

On this day..

1854: Willis Washam, “I never done it, though, boys”

Posted on by

Today’s hanging comes courtesy of a public domain History of Greene County, Missouri, whose account we reproduce in full below:

HANGING OF WILLIS WASHAM — THE FIRST LEGAL EXECUTION IN GREENE COUNTY.

August 25, 1854, the first legal hanging came off in Greene county. The subject was one Willis Washam, of Taney county. The crime which it was alleged Washam committed, and for which he was hung, was thus described at the trial: —

Washam lived on a little farm down on White river, near Forsyth, in Taney county. He was a poor man, somewhat well advanced in years, and lived a retired, obscure life. He had married a woman, who had a son, some fourteen years of age at the time of his death. The Washam family was not a model one. The old man and his wife had frequent quarrels, and both of them treated the son with great cruelty, frequently beating him with uncommon severity. It is said that the boy often showed fight, and was known to strike his mother with a single-tree and with a hoe.

One morning Washam and the boy went down on Bee creek to fish. According to the old man, when they reached the fishing place they separated. The boy never returned home alive. Some days afterward his body was found in Bee creek, with a heavy stone tied about the neck and marks of violence on the body. Mrs. Washam at once accused her husband of having killed her son, and, giving an alarm, he was at once arrested and imprisoned at Forsyth.

Becoming alarmed, Washam struck out for Arkansas, taking with him his own little boy, aged probably eight years, and riding a famous horse which he called “Tom Benton.” He worked on a cotton plantation down on the Arkansas river for some months, or until, as he said, he had a buckskin purse a foot in length full of silver dollars. His little boy never murmured for a long time, but at last one morning, while the two were lying in bed, he threw his arms about his father and said, “Daddy, when are you going to take me home to see my mammy?” Washam immediately arose, and in two hours was on his way back to Taney county, and behind him on old “Tom Benton,” was his little boy, who was overjoyed at the prospect of soon seeing his “mammy.” Arriving at home, Washam was cordially received by his wife, who told him that he was now considered innocent of the crime of which he was accused: that no proceedings had been commenced against him, and that indeed the matter had almost died out in the minds of the community. Washam lay down to sleep in fancied security, but before morning he missed his wife, and searching for her found that she had left the premises. Suspicioning that she had gone to Forsyth to betray him (which was true) Washam again mounted “Tom Benton” and started to escape. He had not gone far before he was overtaken by the sheriff of Taney county, and arrested and taken to Forsyth. On his way to Forsyth the sheriff said Washam offered him “Tom Benton” if he would let him escape; but Washam said that the sheriff himself offered “to look the other way” if Washam would give him his horse. Washam had been indicted and on being arraigned at Forsyth took a change of venue to this county. There were many threats made to lynch him by the people of Taney county. At the July term, 1854, of the circuit court of this county Washam was brought to trial. Judge Chas. S. Yancey presided. E. B. Boone was circuit attorney, A. G. McCracken clerk and Junius T. Campbell sheriff (by appointment). Hon. Littleberry Hendrick was the counsel for the prisoner. The jury before whom Washam was tried was composed of Ezekiel C. Cook, foreman; Wm. Gray, Qualls Banfield, Wm. White, James S. McQuirter, Sam’l McClelland, Mark Bray, John Freeman, Thos. Green, Joseph Moss, John R. Earnest, and Jabez R. Townsend. The trial lasted two days. The testimony was mainly of a circumstantial character, and that most damaging to the prisoner was the evidence of his wife. On the 21st of July the jury reurned a verdict of “guilty of murder in the first degree.” The next day Judge Yancey sentenced Washam to be hung at Springfield on the 25th of August following, — speedy punishment and short shrift certainly.

Mr. Hendrick made a hard fight for his client, but it was without avail. He made a strong speech to the jury, and urged the members to be careful not to hang a fellow-man on circumstantial evidence. After Washam was sentenced Mr. Hendrick moved for a new trial and for arrest of judgment; both motions were overruled. He then moved for a suspension of the sentence until the case could be heard in the Supreme Court; this motion was also overruled. He then prepared to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, but as there was to be an adjourned term of the circuit court held in August, he decided to attempt to set aside the sentence of the court then. At this adjourned term, two days before the hanging of his client, he moved to vacate, set aside, and annul the judgment of the court and set aside the verdict of the jury, but Judge Yancey refused to take any action in the matter.

It is doubtful if Mr. Hendrick could have secured a new trial for his client in the Supreme Court, since all the proceedings had been regular, and there remained but the matter of guilt and innocence, questions of fact, which the jury had passed upon; yet it is strange that he did not take the case to the Supreme Court, at any rate, even if but for the purpose of delay, and it is said that he afterward expressed regret that he did not do so, as he was fully convinced of VVasham’s innocence.

On the 25th of August, the day set for the execution, without commutation, postponement, or mitigation of the sentence, Willis Washam was hung. The execution took place in the northeastern part of Springfield, on the north side of “Jordan,” [Creek] and west of the present site of the cotton factory. The gallows stood not far from the tree on which the negro ravisher was hung. An immense crowd from all parts of Southwest Missouri was present, coming from Buffalo, from Bolivar, from Warsaw, and other points miles away. Washam made a short speech on the gallows, saying he was innocent of the crime for which he was to be made to suffer, “and,” said he, “if I had plenty of money to hire big lawyers with and pay expenses, I could get clear. My old woman has sworn my life away, but I am ready to die. I never done it, though, boys; I never done it.”

Sheriff Samuel Fulbright had been elected sheriff a few days previously, and he was the executioner. It is said that he always regretted the part he had to perform on this occasion, even to his dying day, and there are those silly enough to allege, without any good reason, that this was the moving cause that impelled him to take his own life, which he did, by poison, only a few years since. Washam died game, and after being pronounced dead his body was cut down and given to Dr. —-, of Springfield, who used it for scientific purposes. A few years since a story was put in circulation and obtained some credence, that Mrs. Washam, wife of him who was hung and mother of the murdered boy, had died at her home in Taney or Wright county, and on her deathbed, it is said, she made confession that her husband was innocent of the crime for which he died at Springfield, and that she, herself, had perpetrated the dreadful deed and murdered her own son with her own hands, tying the stone to his neck and sinking the body in Bee creek, and, then by all manner of devices, had contrived to fasten the burden of guilt upon her husband, and caused him to suffer what should have been her punishment. After careful investigation the writer has been unable to obtain a corroboration of this story, and does not hesitate to declare it a fabrication. At any rate, from the evidence and all of the facts adduced, there seems no reasonable doubt but that Washam was guilty of a deliberate and atrocious murder and suffered a just punishment. It is said that the story of Mrs. Washam’s confession was first told by an ingenious but unscrupulous attorney, who was trying to acquit a client of murder in the circuit court of this county.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, another family homicide was avenged on the scaffold. This account from the Washington (Penn.) Review and Examiner of September 9 that same year will read very banal to anyone without an abiding interest in the particulars of the Anglo hanging ritual, until we come to the final paragraph’s gruesome revelation that “the left eye was found to be forced out of its socket and very black all around; the knot of the rope was on this side.”

On this day..

1862: Frisby McCullough, Missouri bushwhacker

Posted on by

On this date in 1862, Confederate soldier Frisby McCullough was shot as a terrorist during the U.S. Civil War’s guerrilla Missouri campaign.

McCullough had a youthful stint in the California gold rush to his back when he returned to Missouri in the mid-1850s to practice law. (He also served in the Missouri State Guard, a pro-slavery militia that had been established in 1861 by the since-exiled secessionist governor.)

With the onset of the Civil War in 1861, McCullough signed up for the pro-slavery Southern army and after a few different assignments became detailed to aid Confederate Col. James Porter in the hasty bush war raging in that frontier state.

We’ve previously detailed that conflict here. For purposes of this post it will suffice to say that the border state of Missouri was fiercely contested during this war, and claimed by North and South alike.

The Union commander John McNeil was not very inclined to charitably reading the treasonable secessionist irregulars who opposed him in the state, whom the Union considered to be operating illicitly behind its lines — in the character of spies and saboteurs, like the British agent John Andre during the Revolutionary War. This very much applied to our man, since McCullough’s particular gift was recruitment — you know, luring loyal citizens into sedition and rebellion.

On August 6, 1862, McNeil’s forces routed Porter’s at the Battle of Kirksville, and they pressed their victory. The very next day after, McNeil had 15 Confederate prisoners taken at Kirksville executed as former POWs who had violated their paroles by returning to the field: “I enforce the penalty of the bond,” McNeil icily reported to Washington.

Not long after, northern sentries also captured the ailing McCullough riding alone near Edina. He wasn’t a parolee — but “he had no commission except a printed paper authorizing the bearer to recruit for the Confederate army,” McNeil would write of him later in a missive to a comrade. At a snap trial on the 8th, “he was found guilty of bushwhacking and of being a guerilla. He was a brave fellow and a splendid specimen of manhood. I would gladly have spared him had duty permitted. As it was he suffered the same fate that would have fallen to you or me if we had been found recruiting within the Confederate lines. He met a soldier’s death as became a soldier.”

A memoir of the southern travails during this conflict titled With Porter in North Missouri; a chapter in the history of the war between the states is in the public domain; chapter XXII relates with umbrage the fate of McCullough whom the author Dr. Joseph Mudd* greatly admired:

Leaning against a fence he wrote a few lines to his wife, and these, with his watch and one or two other articles, he delivered to an officer to be given her, with assurance of his devoted affection in the hour of death. Upon the way to the place of his execution he requested the privilege of giving the order to fire, which was granted to him. All being ready, he stood bravely up, and without a tremor in his manly frame or a quiver in his clarion voice, he called out, ‘What I have done, I have done as a principle of right. Aim at the heart. Fire!’

… He was a good citizen, a high-minded gentleman, of fine presence, brave as a lion, gentle as a woman. Even in his death the strongest Unionists who knew him respected and admired his virtues and entertained the most bitter regrets that what they considered his misconceptions of duty had led him to his fearful fate. At the time of his death he was thirty-three years of age.

* Dr. Joseph Anthony Mudd hailed from Maryland: he was the brother of the Maryland Dr. Samuel Mudd who narrowly avoided execution as a conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

On this day..

2013: Joseph Paul Franklin, Larry Flynt’s would-be assassin

Posted on by

On this date in 2013, hoping “for people to think of me as a person who is filled with a lot of love for people, not filled with hate for people,” Joseph Paul Franklin was executed by lethal injection in Missouri for a three-year racist killing spree.

Born James Clayton Vaughn, Jr., before he renamed himself into a portmanteau of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin, our killer suffered by his own account a childhood warped by the disinterest of his mother and the physical violence of a usually-absentee father. He took up an interest in evangelical Christianity and white nationalism, and in 1977 began crisscrossing the country committing racially motivated attacks against Jews and African Americans.

He would later say that his intent was to trigger a race war. (Franklin renounced racism in prison.)

Victims fit many descriptions to enrage a white supremacist: mixed-race couples ambushed from sniper positions, two black youths walking home, a black fast food manager, a Jewish parishioner waiting for worship outside a synagogue, even two white girls he picked up hitchhiking who said something about a black boyfriend.

He wasn’t tried for all these murders and his own accounts of his career shifted over time; he’s estimated to have taken at least 18 lives in various near-random shootings covering 11 different states. If Franklin himself knew the exact count, he took it to the grave.

“Do you know how many people you murdered?” he’s asked in this interview.

“I’d rather not mention it.”

“By my count, it’s 22 people.”

“That’s approximately it.”

Whatever the exact body count, Franklin is best known for two killings he didn’t quite manage to commit.

On May 29, 1980, he shot civil rights activist Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jordan recovered, and President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Jordan’s bedside in hospital was the very first story covered on CNN’s debut broadcast on June 1, 1980.

Two years previous, incensed by Hustler magazine’s interracial spreads, Franklin had attempted to assassinate porn publisher Larry Flynt. Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down as a result: he’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Nevertheless, Flynt opposed Franklin’s execution. “I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die,” Flynt wrote in the Hollywood Reporter a month before Franklin went to his death.

Franklin has been sentenced by the Missouri Supreme Court to death by legal injection on Nov. 20. I have every reason to be overjoyed with this decision, but I am not. I have had many years in this wheelchair to think about this very topic. As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

On this day..

1860: Samuel Brust

Posted on by

From the New York Times, September 7, 1860:

A Murderer Hung.;

HIS DYING SPEECH AND CONFESSION.

Some months since SAMUEL SIMON BRUST murdered WM. FREDERICK SCHMIDT, in St. Louis. BRUST fled to Cincinnati, but was soon after arrested there and taken back to St. Louis, where he was tried, convicted and sentenced. On Friday last he was hung in the yard of the St. Louis jail. On the scaffold, after offering a prayer, he made the following speech to the spectators:

BROTHERS AND SISTERS: This is my last minute I am here. In a very few minutes I am gone. I have completed my life.

I killed WM. FREDERICK SCHMIDT. I took the money from him. I confessed to my minister here from the very first day when I got my sentence. I was very sorry for it, because I have done such a big crime.

Now, our God he gave me punishment. He let me fall, drop down here far as to hell, and then afterwards he help me out again with His strength, with His grace. He help me up again so far I can stand up. I don’t care nothing about it. I don’t care anything about this, and I know, for I am sure and certain that God in Heaven is my Father. Jesus Christ, He gave me the grace, He gave me the law, and here I stand, knowing who I look to, and though I lose my life, I am very happy and very well satisfied with this. The only place where I found my help, that was the grace at the foot of Jesus Christ. That is the only place where any sinner, any big-crime sinner, can find help, as he suffered on the cross for all sinners in the whole world.

And I thank God for it, and I love him to the last minute for all what he has done on me. He gave me a sound body; he gave me a soul, and fetched me so far as here, but he never told me to do such a big crime as that. It was my own fault. It is nobody else have the badness to fetch a man so far as that; but if every man will look right what he is here if he have committed a big crime, and look right to Him, it is only the grace of God can fetch him so far as he find out himself his own heart. I confess myself as a big sinner, as a big crime committer. I have done it, and I am very well satisfied with this here. This here rope don’t fetch me to death. It kill my body, it take the life out of my body, but I know I got heaven for me. I know my Lord suffered for me on the cross, and I will get him for my help. I know I am a blind sinner. I found it very true, and what Jesus Christ has left in his words. That is the only place where a man can find out his sins.

It is very hard to die on this here rope, for a young man. But it is not hard for me, I know this rope will fetch me up to my home; I don’t take it for myself — this here rope, but it is the grace of God that helps me see this here.

I thank God for everything; I thank Him for the last minute I got a soul in my body. I wish every sinner to fall on the feet of Christ, and beg to Him for forgiveness; I wish everybody to go in himself and find Him out for help; that is the only help he can get. I had punishment harder than any man in this city, but I believe God told me in this kind of punishment here in this way. He knows how to get me out. I forgive everybody who have had anything to do with me, and I say to you, gentlemen, brothers and sisters, to-day the same. I wish now to speak a few words in German.

BRUST then delivered substantially the same speech as given above, in the German language, and during the entire delivery, his voice never faltered, neither did he exhibit any excitement or nervousness. When he had concluded he made another prayer, then stepped quickly upon the drop, adjusted the rope around his neck with his own hands, and put his arms behind him so that they might be tied together. The Sheriff touched the drop, and after a few struggles life was extinct.

On this day..