The 1860s brought war and lawlessness to Jefferson County, Missouri.  On February 15, 1869, law abiding citizens had grown weary of waiting for justice. When two murder suspects were held in the local jail, several men from Jefferson and Washington Counties decided to take the law into their own hands.  The result was one of the most shocking events that ever occurred in the county. And it happened exactly 153 years ago today (February 15)!

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The small river community of Morse Mill, Missouri was caught up in the drama of unrest in 1862, when civil unrest within the country boiled over into neighborhoods and family relationships. That year claimed the lives of three members of the Samuel Eoff family. One son was claimed by war, another son was claimed by murder, and the patriarch of the family was claimed by vigilante justice.

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Missouri was the ancestral home of several native tribes, among them the Osage who were one of the most revered and feared tribes in the Midwest. The early nineteenth century brought the arrival of the European pioneers whose hunger for land and a place to raise their families created a clash of cultures, causing sorrow for both. The small town of House Springs, Missouri is one such place that began with a tragedy.  Yet traces of the lives that were lived and lost  on these grounds are preserved in the names that mark our towns and streets.  

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Martin Hunning was shot in the head as he answered the telephone he'd just had installed in his home in Murphy, Missouri early December 1911. His wife Annie heard the shattering glass and ran into the room to find her husband dead on the floor. Why would anyone want to kill "Jolly Martin?" Was it an act of revenge or cold-blooded murder? 

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Newlyweds Louis Bonacker and Josephine Glatt had barely started their lives when they made the mistake of allowing someone to stay overnight in their little rented cabin. Their kindness was repaid with a brutal double murder. Who would do such a thing? And why?

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On a hot July morning in 1880, Andrew Wilson and his young, pregnant lover, Martha Schulz, were gunned down by an assassin hiding in the cornfield near Ware Church Road in Jefferson County, Missouri.  Could this act have been retaliation for the shameful way Wilson had treated his wife, Sarah, who was a descendant of several of the oldest families in the county?

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Early in the morning of September 1, 1872, Henry Gasche of Hillsboro, Missouri, was brutally attacked in his bed by a blow from an ax. His wife, Caroline McFry Gasche was the prime suspect. Was she a cold blooded killer or a very sick woman? Decide for yourself, as the Jefferson County Library Genealogy Department  presents  the first episode of Murder and Mayhem in Jefferson County, Missouri.

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