Description

After a three-week trial, Young--who almost certainly did not commit the Spencer family murders--was also acquitted. Nevertheless, three days later he was hanged from his own pasture gate by a mounted lynch mob led by the same bounty-hunting detective who had designed, augmented, and executed Young's frame-up.

Attempts to arrest and indict the bounty hunter and others for Young's murder were extraordinarily complicated, involving a ludicrous hearing, a fruitless chase by a sheriff and his posse, the appearance of the state's adjutant-general, the eventual arrest of the bounty hunter in a scheme he himself designed so he could claim the reward, a failed indictment, and the bounty hunter's faked marriage to a teenager in an attempt to ferret out additional suspects.

Hearing that he had been secretly indicted and alarmed by the possibility of arrest and confinement, the bounty hunter fled by rail toward the Black Hills, but he was caught near Yankton and hauled back to Missouri in chains. The girl he had "married" attempted to kill him when he was in custody. By this time, the highest authorities in Missouri's government were involved with the case against the bounty hunter. But his lawyer (Felix Hughes, the grandfather of Howard Hughes, Jr.) appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, the law under which the bounty hunter was indicted was nullified, and he walked away scot-free. Although the original murders were never solved, Innocent as the Angels argues that two suspects, together by chance or design, committed the crime.

Although the book is easy to classify as true crime and unsolved mystery, historical value inheres in its illumination of post-Civil War rural America, especially among modest farmers and tradesmen during a multi-year depression. Other threads are also evident: the woefully inadequate state of rural criminal investigation, for example, and the shifting criminal world of bounty hunters masquerading as private detectives--a subject to which historians have given scant attention.