Haunted Carthage, Missouri by Lisa Livingston-Martin

Author:Lisa Livingston-Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

Public executions were common across America during this time, and while associated with the old West, public hangings would continue for decades. In Carthage, public hangings would occur both on the courthouse lawn and at the jail yard until the 1920s. The revulsion of the writer in the foregoing account was not isolated and eventually led to the movement to conduct executions behind high prison walls. The last public execution in the nation occurred in 1937 in nearby Galena, Stone County, Missouri, and is an example of the atmosphere surrounding these events, as described in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Everyday Magazine, March 20, 2001:

Jack Jennings’ buddies beat him to the good perches in the trees. They could see over the temporary wall to the gallows on the courthouse lawn. He slipped through the crowd and found a narrow gap between two of the wall’s rough-cut oak planks. He held his ground. Jennings wasn’t about to miss Stone County’s first and only public hanging. Jennings was 14 when Roscoe “Red” Jackson was hanged at dawn on May 21, 1937, for murdering a traveling salesman for his car and $18. Several hundred witnesses were jammed inside the temporary stockade, built around the gallows, and many more people milled about the courthouse square .

Sheriff Isaiah H. Coin had issued about 400 written invitations to the hanging. Holding a pass was enough to get inside the 40-foot-square stockade. “I had an uncle who got in, but the kids weren’t allowed,” said Jennings, now 77. “I got my spot and could see them walk Red up the stairs and put the noose on him. Everybody got real quiet. The priest said some prayers and Red said something. They put the hood on him and I heard the crack of the trap door dropping. Just like that, I couldn’t see him anymore. The crowd inside was just too big for me to see him go down.”

Nobody could have known it then, but they constituted the last big audience for an execution in the United States. There are some qualifiers—Owensboro, Ky., had hanged a man one year earlier without building a stockade to limit viewing…historians…cit [e] Jackson’s as the nation’s last public execution…

Public executions were regular events during the first half of the nation’s history. In the 1890s, about 90 percent of all executions were held in the county in which the offense was committed—not in state prisons. That put arrangements into the hands of sheriffs, who could make them as public as they cared to. Some executions drew special excursion trains. But by the 1920s, states had taken over 90 percent of executions…Missouri followed suit in 1938, ordering that all executions be carried out in a gas chamber at the old Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. In the same month as Jackson’s hanging, the Missouri Legislature passed a law ending hangings by county and moving the executions to Jefferson City. State Sen. Paul Jones of Kennett, who was repulsed by the “carnival and Roman holiday” atmosphere of executions in his native Bootheel, pushed for the change.

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