1821
Missouri became a state in 1821.
about 0:09:35The story
In the spring of 1940 he met 19-year-old e Della Wilson at a doctor's office, and they married six months later. In 1961 he bought 20 cattle with a bad cheque and got nine months.
Asked why she stayed, she said that he was her husband, that she had been taught you stayed, and that the husband was the boss.
He also used them in a cattle fraud. Blacklisted from the auction houses for his own bad cheques, he had vagrants buy cattle in his name, then claimed they had impersonated him. He refined the scheme: he set the men up with post office boxes and bank accounts, had them buy cattle with cheques, sold the cattle two counties away and gave them a cut. In 1989 he recruited Jack McCormick, who described himself as a common gutter tramp and drunk, from the Victory Mission in Springfield, Missouri, with the promise of $20,000 a year. That evening McCormick met Rose Clevenger in a bar, and she drove him back to the farm for his belongings. McCormick reported the rifle to the police, but they found him unconvincing and he refused a polygraph.
After nine fruitless days they brought McCormick back on the tenth; confronted with the spot, he lost his nerve and said it might have been a discarded pan, and asked to be taken away. A new tip led them to a barn off the property, where three bodies lay head to toe in a shallow grave beneath bales of hay, wrapped in blankets and two to three years dead. They were Paul Jason Cowart, 21, of Dardanelle, Arkansas; John Wayne Freeman, 27; and Jimmy Dale Harvey, 27, of Springfield, Missouri. A few days later, in another barn on the same land, police found Wayne Warner under a floorboard. Six weeks after that a body came out of a well, identified as Dennis Murphy by a belt buckle reading Dennis.
The judge refused to let the psychologist Marilyn Hutchinson testify about battered spouse syndrome in the guilt phase.
She died there on December 31st, 2003, aged 82. Her obituary drew a long argument in the comments, with relatives defending her and others insisting she had known exactly what the X's meant.