Have you ever wondered where the skeletons are buried in your hometown? Gruesome Missouri is a collection of murder mysteries from St. Louis, St, Joseph, Catawissa, Kirbyville, Bull Creek, and more. "I had to do it, and I'd do it again," said the jilted lover.
Myrtle was a pretty young girl, just 17-years-old, with wavy black hair, cut just above the ear. She weighed 130 pounds and had what reporters called "a well set-up figure." What detectives at Four Courts couldn't understand was that she didn't think she'd done anything wrong. Myrtle kept referring to some unwritten law that said if he promised to marry her and didn't, it was only right that she should kill him. She knew it was against the law to kill him, "but it was right, and I had to do it."
She'd known Ed Leonard for three months. Two weeks ago, Ed asked Myrtle to marry him. He said they'd get married right away. He'd meet Myrtle Friday to make plans. Come Friday, "the best suggestion he had to make was he would get a blank marriage certificate from him and fill it out, and I could show it to my folks, and they would think we had been married."
She said no. He said they would get married the next night. Myrtle didn't believe him. She warned him that if he didn't marry her, she would kill him.
Saturday night, as they walked down Jefferson Avenue and Walnut Street, she concealed a pistol under her shawl. Ed mocked her. He laughed at her and said he had no intention of getting married. Before Myrtle knew it, the gun was in her hand. She shot him twice. "I knew in my heart that it was right for me to kill him for the wrong he had done me."
"Was I in love with him?" said Myrtle. "Well, now, that is hard to answer. Sometimes I think I was, and sometimes I think not. I was not Saturday night when I shot him."
Gruesome Missouri is a collection of true-life stories - most of them rescued from old newspaper accounts published over 100 years ago. Only a few of the events in this book have ever made it into print. Except maybe in musky-old county histories. Even then, they are lucky to rate a paragraph.
Read them now, if you dare!
