Winchester News-Gazette, November, 1978
by William Jackson.
In the spring of 1891 Randolph County, and particularly Greensfork Township, was in the grip
of something of a reign of terror as a pair of unsolved murders was climaxed by the shooting death of James Oliver Morgan, a farmer who lived east of Lynn and the father of Frank Morgan, who now lives in Winchester. In May of 1891, and had been married for 11 years. He had two sons.
The murder was well covered in the newspapers of the time, and excited a great deal of public interest because of the unsolved killings which had preceded it. Public interest was so great, in fact, that it nearly resulted in the lynching of the man who was accused and eventually convicted of the crime.
James Oliver Morgan, known by the familiar abbreviation of the time as Ol Morgan, was 35 years old in May of 1891 and had been married for 11 years. He had two sons, one five years old, and another, Frank, who was only 10 months old. Morgan was well liked and respected and his neighbors were shocked to see the headlines which greeted them in the May 6 edition of the Winchester Herald:
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| Headstone of James O. Morgan located in Spartanburg Cemetery, Randolph County, Indiana. |
" Last Thursday evening Winchester was startled, for the third time within the past year, by the announcement that Oliver Morgan had been murdered by a tramp," the article stated.
The murder had occurred during the afternoon of April 30, while the rest of the Morgan family was away. The Morgans had set down to their noon meal together as normal, and after eating Ol played for awhile with his two sons before returning to his field on the farm east of Lynn which he was plowing. His wife, the former Mary Etta Moore, then took the children and went with her mother, Mrs. Thomas Moore, to shop in Lynn. She returned home shortly after 5 p.m., and as the Herald describes it:
"She tripped gaily up the stairs, opened the bedroom door, stepped lightly into it when, God in Mercy! the sight that met her eyes almost hushed the breath and froze her very blood. Before her, on the floor, in a pool of blood, lay her husband, dead by the hand of some fernal devil."
Morgan had been shot shortly before in the left side of the chest, near the fourth rib. His wife thought she could detect a faint heartbeat, but he died soon after the discovery.
The inhabitants of the area began a search for the culprit as soon as the murder was known, and it was soon discovered that J. F. Cloyd, a section foreman on the IB&W railroad, had noticed a tramp pass along the track westward toward Lynn. The description was circulated, and when a southbound freight train on the Grand Rapids & Indiana railroad pulled into Lynn that evening, a brakeman reported having seen the tramp walking northward along the tracks.
Lynn's Marshal Stewart took Cloyd and several other men who could identify the stranger and started north along the tracks on a handcar. The party passed the man and then waited for him to catch up. When he did the marshal leveled a gun on him and told him he was under arrest. When the tramp asked what he was being arrested for, the marshal replied, "A man has been shot east of Lynn and we think you are the man that did it."
The stranger then gave a fatal answer: "Is he dead yet?"
He was taken back to Lynn, and from there to the jail in Winchester. The suspect was identified as Charles Kenney, and was described as "A wicked looking man, about five feet two inches high with a downcast countenance."
Morgan, who was born in Spartanburg and spent his entire life in the area was buried on the next Saturday, May 2. The infuriated people of Lynn talked of lynching the tramp and went so far as to hold a meeting to take some type of formal action in the matter. Some of the relatively cooler heads prevailed, however, and they decided that they would give the court and jury a chance and if they failed in their duty the people would take the matter into their own hands and see that justice is done.
The attitude of the people was understandable, considering the murders which had preceded Morgan's within a years time. The first, referred to as The Hinshaw Tragedy was still wrapt in impenetrable mystery at the time of Morgan's death and there did not seem to be much hope of the mystery ever being solved. The second murder, which occurred within weeks of Morgan's, was in many ways even more frustrating than the first, since the murderer was known, and was even in custody for a few seconds at one time, and yet he had not been brought to justice.
Carrie Bass was a black woman, part of a black community which was thriving in Greensfork Township at that time. Carrie and her husband William and the couple's five children lived on the boundary road some distance from Bartonia, near the "Dismal Swamp and a dreary, dismal place it is." The murder occurred on the night of February 19, 1891, while William Bass was away and Anderson Bosswell, also a black and a friend of the couple, was visiting. Public feeling over the incident was increased, no doubt, by the colorful journalistic style of the day, which announced in the headlines of the Winchester Herald on February 25:
A Cold Blooded Murder-The Colored Population Of This County Are One Less Than A Week Ago
Anderson Bosswell Uses The Knife And Almost Severs The Head Of Carrie Bass From Her Body With One Stroke
The article then went on to describe in anatomical detail the cause and effects of the horrible wound, "ear to ear," which Bosswell had inflicted. "It is not the first cutting he has ever done," the paper stated. Bosswell had apparently fled his home in Grant County for carving a couple of men there, and there was also an incident in Union City involving a razor which was attributed to him.
What really angered the people, however, was the comedy of errors which followed in the case. It was soon discovered that Bosswell, after leaving the county, had been hanging out in the bars of South Marion in Grant County. The local sheriff, hearing that a $50 reward was being offered for his capture, determined to round him up and set out one day with several deputies. The deputies were apparently to do the work while the sheriff stayed a safe distance away in a buggy.
Bosswell was tracked to a house where he was cornered and Deputy Sheriff John Daugherty called on the man to come out. "You come in. I won't hurt you," Bosswell replied. Daugherty however was understandably dubious of the man's word and seemed in no hurry to beard the lion in his den. Bosswell refused to come out and Daugherty finally entered the house covering Bosswell with his gun and demanding his surrender.
Bosswell replied that he was ready to give up and Daugherty then turned his back to leave the house, trusting the gentle soul behind him to follow him out. Bosswell, however, had other ideas and immediately pulling two revolvers marched Daugherty and two other deputies out into the road. Bosswell then ordered them to take the straight road for town and to get of Lynn were not well disposed towards the accused, the paper said. They got.
The last that was heard in that case was a telegram from Marion County's Sheriff Sanders to Randolph County's Sheriff Buck Fletcher which read, "Bosswell is in the county, if you want him, please bring a company of men to catch him." Bosswell got clean away, as they say, before anyone went to catch him.
With this fresh on their minds, it is no wonder that the people of Lynn were not well disposed towards the accused murderer of Ol Morgan. The editor of the Herald, in a plea to allow justice to run its course without the interference of mobs, described the people of Lynn as not the ones to lead mobs or themselves violate the law in order to vindicate the law.
In spite of the editor's faith in the people the case was venued to the Wayne Superior Court in Richmond, fearing that he would not receive a fair trial in Randolph County. Said the Richmond Evening Item of May 13, "Fearing the effect which the change would have on the people, the tramp was placed on the first train and brought here immediately. The prompt action probably saved him from being mobbed and surely lynched."
If the people of the Lynn area were already in a lynching mood over the murder of Ol Morgan, the rumors concerning the confession of Charles Kenney did not improve the situation any. Soon after his arrest the rumor began to spread that Kenney had confessed, although the police consistently denied it for reasons of their own. The reason that this confession had an irritating affect on the people was that it presumably showed him guilty of a crime less than first degree murder, and the people would settle for nothing less than a death sentence.
It was finally revealed in the Richmond Evening Item of May 22 that Kenney had indeed confessed to authorities, and that he intended to plead guilty to second degree murder at his trial. No doubt the people of Lynn will be greatly aggravated at Kenney's escaping the hangman, the paper stated, but there was little that could be done in the case and the text of the confession was published the following week in Winchester, showed why.
Kenney had confessed to Sheriff Buck Fletcher on Sunday following the crime, stating that he had gone to the Morgan house while Ol was in the fields in the hope of getting some food as he was terribly hungry. When he discovered that no one was home, he went in to steal a suit of clothes, taking in the process a gun of Morgan's in the kitchen and loading up a gun of his own with some of Morgan's ammunition.
He was upstairs in the bedroom when Morgan, who had seen him enter the house, came in to find him with a stone for a weapon. Hiding under the bed, Kenney almost escaped detection until the last moment when Morgan researched the room. Finding Kenney under the bed he called for him to come out, threatening to kill him. A fight ensued, with Kenney taking the worst of it since Morgan had the stone, and Kenney then drew his own gun from his pocket, an American Bull-Dog .32 caliber revolver, and shot Morgan once.
According to the confession, Kenney was guilty not of first degree murder, which required that the deed be premeditated, but of second degree murder. His plea of guilty to this charge was accepted because of the lack of any concrete evidence to refute his confession and prove premeditation.
Kenney entered his guilty plea on Saturday, May 23, and was immediately sentenced to life in prison. By 9:30 he was aboard a train with Sheriff Marlatt on his way to Jeffersonville, where he would serve his sentence in Southern Penitentiary. The move was made quickly, in order to save Kenney's life, the sheriff having received word from Lynn that "If you people down here at Richmond don't kill him we will."
Shortly before the sentencing and removal from the area of Kenney, the Richmond paper observed, "There is no doubt that if Kenney was in jail there (Randolph County) he would be lynched. That he deserves it there is no room for doubt, but in a trial at law a tramp, even, has rights that cannot be ignored. To plead guilty was one of those rights and by availing himself of it he has escaped the hands of the hangman.
Kenney spent many years in prison, finally being paroled in the 1920's. It was learned later that he had violated his parole and finished his days in prison in Michigan City.
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