A Troubled Branch: More Stories from the Blackburn Family

Nearly every week, a mystery is solved or some interesting twig (or nut) appears somewhere on the family tree. Here is a little news of recent findings. Not every story is happy. Some carry stories of trouble, tragedy, and unanswered questions. In the Blackburn family of Callaway County, Missouri, several siblings lived lives that would leave behind newspaper headlines, court records, and difficult memories.

My last post introduced us to Ruth Blanche Blackburn, a “cousin” on the McCall family tree. This post continues our exploration of the Blackburn branch of the family with a look at four of Ruth’s brothers who also had troubled lives.

Catherine “Kate” Virginia Meadows and William Henry Blackburn had nine children between 1894 and 1911. The oldest two, daughters Zana and Mamie, and the fifth child, son Vollie, had what in our family history are considered normal lives. They married. They had children. They died. Youngest child, William Larkin, served in the US Army Air Force during World War II and returned home to farm. He never married.

Family Group Sheet for William Henry Blackburn.

The dad, William Henry Blackburn was a grandson of Robert Henry McCall and Elizabeth Middleton Gilbert and great-grandson of William S. McCall and Mildred Holland. William Henry Blackburn was a 2^nd cousin of our ancestor Zelpha Lou McCall. William and Kate’s children were third cousins of our ancestor Thomas Leland Estes. The Blackburns lived their lives in Callaway County Missouri, so it is likely that our people knew them or at least knew of them.

While four of the children seem to have lived their lives with only common issues, the other five had lives that were more dramatic than those of the average relative.

The third child was their daughter Ruth Blanche who was born in 1897. As I mentioned, I’ve already written about her and what I described as her “Stormy Life.” But Ruth was not the only one in her immediate family with trouble. Four of her younger brothers, namely Jack Robert, Patrick Lyons, Joseph Meadows, and Elmo Lute all had problems of their own.

Pat

Patrick Lyons “Pat” was the sixth child in the family. He was born 15 November 1906 in Readsville, Callaway County, Missouri.¹ He grew up in Auxvasse Township in Callaway County. His trouble came first.

In July 1929, Pat was a farm laborer working near Readsville in Callaway County, Missouri, when he found himself in serious legal trouble. He was arrested on a charge described in the newspapers as “assault with intent to rape with force” involving a local teenage girl. The complaint was filed by her father, who sought a “vigorous prosecution.” The alleged incident was said to have occurred on Sunday, July 14, between six and seven o’clock in the evening near the girl’s home.

The reporting of Pat’s arrest reminds us that things were handled somewhat differently in 1929. Sheriff Owen and his deputy drove out late at night to the Arnold Bedsworth farm where Blackburn worked, arriving around 1:00 a.m. Rather than waking the household immediately, they reportedly waited in their car until about 4:30 in the morning. Pat was found asleep in the hayloft. In a detail that feels distinctly 1929, Mrs. Bedsworth asked that he be allowed to complete the morning chores before being taken away, explaining that she would otherwise be left to handle the farm work alone. She then prepared breakfast for the men before the officers returned with Pat to Fulton after 9:00 a.m.²

The arrest of Pat Blackburn.

Unlike today, the newspapers freely printed the name of the underage victim and her parents. Her father made it clear that he was intent on pursuing charges. He engaged a State Senator to assist the Prosecuting Attorney with the case. A preliminary hearing was set for Friday, 19 July 1929, with the judge setting bail at $1,000.

At that preliminary hearing, Pat was bound over to the September term of the circuit court, and his bond was increased to $3,000. The formal charge at that point was that he had “carnally known and abused” the victim, described in the legal language of the time as “an unmarried female of previous chaste character” between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.³

The case was resolved in September 1929, when Pat Blackburn entered a plea of guilty to a statutory charge. He was sentenced to six months in the Callaway County Jail. After sentencing, he was taken into custody by the sheriff. All other charges were dismissed.⁴

We only know what we can read in the newspaper. Whether this was a case of youthful recklessness, a relationship that crossed legal boundaries, or something far more serious, the articles do not tell us. In any case, his arrest and subsequent time in jail likely affected the remainder of his life. He did not marry until he was at least in his fifties and left no children. He died in 1968 at the age of sixty-one.

Pat’s arrest and imprisonment marked the first serious legal trouble among the Blackburn brothers. Unfortunately, it would not be the last. Within a few years, another brother would become involved in a far more tragic episode.

Jodie

The story of Jodie Blackburn was far more tragic. Joseph Meadows Blackburn, the seventh child of William Henry Blackburn and Catherine Virginia Meadows, was born 03 February 1908 in Callaway County, Missouri. He was known as Jodie. On Christmas Eve 1932, he was murdered.

Like his older brother Pat, Jodie had earlier trouble with the law. In April 1929, he and a friend were charged with burglary (unlawful entry) and larceny (unlawful taking) after a ham was taken from a smokehouse. The charges were later dropped.⁵ ⁶ ⁷ In the summer of 1932, he was charged with fighting at a dance. That minor offense escalated when, on 04 August 1932, the door of the Callaway County jail was reportedly left open, allowing Jodie to escape. He remained away from the county for several months and, according to newspaper accounts, returned only days before Christmas.

On Christmas Eve 1932, Jodie was at a home near Yucatan in Auxvasse Township, eastern Callaway County. The home belonged to the Miller family. Rosey Miller, born in 1902 and about thirty years old at the time, was living there. His full name was Arthur Roosevelt Miller, though some newspaper accounts referred to him as Arthur Theodore Miller. Jodie, Rosey, and a hired man named Willie Scott were together at the house spending the evening together and listening to the radio.

Christmas Eve, 1932.

Sometime around midnight, Jodie was shot in the back of the head.

Newspaper accounts reported that he was twenty-two years old. His official death certificate, however, records his age as twenty-four years, ten months, and twenty-one days at the time of his death. He was just weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. The certificate lists his occupation as farm laborer.

His body was found about 150 yards from the Miller house on Christmas morning.

At first, suspicion fell on Willie Scott, an eighteen-year-old Black farmhand who lived and worked at the Miller place. In rural Missouri in 1932, such an initial focus would not have been unusual. Scott initially claimed that Jodie had demanded Rosey Miller’s pocketbook and fired at him first, and that he had returned fire. An inquest followed.

Within days, however, the case shifted.

On Monday, 26 December 1932, the day after Jodie’s body was discovered, a group of local men went to the Miller home to examine the premises. Among them were Jodie’s brothers, Vollie, Pat, and Elmo Blackburn, along with community members such as S. G. Barth, Jesse Hayes, and Ralph Gilman. The search appears to have been conducted by a small group of local residents rather than by a specialized investigative team. In rural Callaway County in 1932, such community involvement in an investigation was probably not unusual.

Inside the house, they reported finding blood traces, overalls bearing dried stains, shoes marked with ashes, and a newspaper that appeared to have been used to wipe bloody hands.

Officers questioned inconsistencies in Scott’s account, and on 28 December 1932 Rosey Miller was arrested at Kingdom City and charged with first-degree murder. The shift suggests investigators were not fully satisfied with the original explanation, and physical evidence did not clearly support a simple exchange of gunfire.

Testimony at the coroner’s inquest also revealed that a whiskey still was operating in a cave near the Miller home. Dr. R. G. Hall, who conducted the inquest, later testified that Willie Scott stated Jodie Blackburn had suggested they go to the cave where the still was located. Scott said he went there to tend the fire used in making the liquor before returning to the house later that night.

In December 1932, national Prohibition was still in effect, though enforcement in many rural areas had grown uneven. Small stills and informal liquor production were not uncommon in the countryside, particularly in isolated places where neighbors knew one another and law enforcement presence was limited.

Rosey Miller maintained that he had returned home late Saturday evening from Mexico, Missouri, given Scott his pocketbook to keep, and gone to bed. He stated that he heard nothing unusual during the night and that he and Scott discovered Jodie’s body the following morning. He denied any involvement in the shooting.

At the preliminary hearing in early January 1933, Willie Scott changed his story.

He testified that although he had first admitted the shooting, that statement was false. He now stated that Rosey Miller had shot Jodie and had threatened him into accepting blame. Scott said he had been frightened and had repeated the version Miller instructed him to tell.

In 1933, the testimony of an eighteen-year-old Black farm laborer accusing a thirty-year-old white farmer carried complicated weight. His credibility was immediately vulnerable — yet his earlier confession also complicated matters. The jury would ultimately have to decide whether his first statement or his second was the truth.

Physical evidence added further uncertainty. Blood was reportedly found inside the house. Overalls hanging in a corner showed dried blood spots. Ashes were found on shoes beneath them. A cap Jodie had reportedly been wearing lay in brush near where his body was found. A shotgun was discovered beneath him, and several cartridges were recovered from the pistol Scott had used. None of it provided a clear, uncontested narrative of events.

After the hearing, Rosey Miller was committed to jail without bond and transferred to the jail in Mexico, Missouri, for safekeeping. Scott remained in the Callaway County jail as a material witness.

By early March 1933, the case moved to trial before the judge in the Callaway County Circuit Court. Interest was intense, and the courtroom was filled to capacity.

Dr. R. G. Hall testified regarding the inquest and confirmed that the fatal wound appeared to have been caused by a .32 caliber pistol. Willie Scott took the stand and again accused Miller of firing the fatal shot and pressuring him to confess. Under cross-examination, his earlier conflicting statements were examined in detail.

When the defense presented its case, Rosey Miller testified in his own behalf. He denied shooting Jodie and stated that Scott had admitted the killing to him the following morning. The case came down largely to two conflicting accounts, neither fully supported nor fully disproven by the physical evidence presented.

After several hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict on Friday evening.

Rosey Miller was found not guilty.

Newspaper coverage of the case centered largely on the accused and the shifting testimony between Miller and Scott. Jodie’s family appeared only briefly in the reporting. Beyond identifying him as the son of William H. Blackburn, little attention was given to the Blackburn family during the investigation or trial.

In criminal cases, the burden rested on the State to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Faced with inconsistent testimony and competing narratives, the jury declined to convict.

No one stood convicted in the killing of Joseph Meadows “Jodie” Blackburn.

Immediately after the acquittal, Rosey Miller was re-arrested on unrelated pistol charges stemming from incidents the previous autumn. He was later bound over to circuit court on those matters. Willie Scott, who had been held in custody as a witness, was released.⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³

In November 1935, Miller’s name again appeared in the newspapers when federal agents arrested a man for operating a still at the Miller property. The article briefly recalled the earlier Blackburn case.²⁴ Although national Prohibition had ended in 1933, unlicensed distilling remained illegal, and liquor-related activity in rural Callaway County did not disappear overnight.

By then, nearly three years had passed since Christmas morning 1932. What had once filled the courtroom and newspaper columns had become a reference in other stories. For the Blackburn family, however, it was not simply a reference in an old newspaper story. It was the unresolved death of a twenty-four-year-old son and brother.

The tragedy of Jodie’s death was not the only sorrow that would touch the Blackburn brothers.

Jack

Another brother, Jack, died by suicide in 1955, shooting himself in the head.²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷

Jack Robert Blackburn was born on 27 January 1900 in Readsville, Callaway, Missouri. He was the fourth child and first son in the family. He married in 1921 to Allie Mae Davis who was a descendant of our ancestors Thomas C. O’Donnell and Martha Canterbury. Jack and Allie had nine children between 1922 and 1943. Jack farmed and raised his family in Callaway County.

The family appeared in the newspaper through the years in the local reports of who was visiting who. The only noteworthy report was in 1937 when the house they were renting burned.²⁸

On 23 March 1955, At age 55, he died by suicide. A teenage daughter found him in bed with a gunshot wound and a .22 caliber rifle when she got home after school. “Relatives said he had suffered spells of despondence.”²⁹ ³⁰

Jack Blackburn suffered spells of despondence.

Jack’s life had a tragic end, though sadly not as rare as we might hope.

While compiling The McCall Family book, I identified sixteen suicides among 10,458 documented descendants and their spouses. Half were McCall descendants; the other half were spouses who had married into the family. These deaths occurred between 1927 and 2010, showing that suicide has affected every generation in modern times.

The ages ranged from eighteen to seventy-nine, with an average age of about forty-three. Most occurred in early and middle adulthood, though no age group appears entirely untouched.

Unfortunately, the records show only the bare facts, and we have no way of knowing the personal struggles that led these people to die.

Elmo

The last tragedy in this branch of the family involved Elmo Lute Blackburn. Born on 21 June 1909, he was the second youngest of the nine children. He married Wilma Grace Bunker in 1933 but had no children. He did, however, help raise his nephew John Henry Hoover after John’s parents split up and his mother, Ruth Blanche Blackburn Hoover Manning, moved to Oklahoma. Elmo was the one who received a telegram from the War Department with the news that John had been killed in action in France during World War II.³¹

Elmo spent his life in Callaway County and earned his living as a farmer.

Sadly, he died in a hunting accident on 10 February 1965. His death certificate listed the cause of death as “Gunshot wound of the abdomen” and stated that the “12 gage shotgun accidently discharged while climbing over fence, charge striking him in abdomen.” [sic] A newspaper account claimed that the gun discharged as he tried to pull it though a fence.²⁷ ³³ ³⁴

His death was ruled accidental, another difficult chapter in the story of the Blackburn siblings.