Buchanan County bulletin. [volume] (Independence, Iowa) 1869-1891, 1877-08-17

| QueS ana DuDOScq, ana Otnef. west a
few years ago, in which man was SEN
fenced to twenty years Imprisonment,
as the end of chain Of events Of which
he knew nothing. Yhe circumstances
were that one Capt. w. H. Stout ac-
companied from Texas to Illinois mi
gratory party; that the moneyed man
Of the party was found dead; that
Stouts way was traced while by his
selling the team and equipments, and
that, finally he himself, or some one
whom everyone swore to as the identi-
cal actor in these transactions, was
caught in Nevada. He exhibited the
most singular concurrence of physical
peculiarlties, such as spot of perfect
ly white hair above the temple, unlike
ly in the extreme to be the property Of
two individuals. It was so, however, in
this case, absolute evidence being pro-
duced that the real Capt. Stout, who
had been arrested, was accounted for in
other places than the line of migration
and the scene of murder, during the
period in which these things took place;
and so, after some years of imprison-
ment and disgrace, Stout was "par-
dOned' for the crime he had not com
mitted. Who personated him in so
marvellous way has never been found
out; but it is plain that, if hanging had
been the sentence Of Stouts trial, there
would have been an irreparable wrong
DONE
The latest story which brings circum-
stantial evidence into doubt is located
in Livingston county, III. A young
woman named Mary Murphy started
from her fathers house one Sunday af-
ternoon to walk to her place of service
in Pontiac, by way of the railroad track
A fortnight or so later her outraged and
murdered body was found. A negro
named Morris was fixed upon as the
criminal, because he had been seen walk
ing on the railroad the day Mary Muir
ply disappeared, about mile behind
| her, and because his clothes were bloody
This was the whole of the evidence
against him. He proved that he had
been in fight at Bloomington the Sat
urday previous, and in that obtained
the suspicious blood stains. 1t is said
that the fact that the first war news
was then exciting the public mind told
against the negro, as somehow personi-
flying the cause of the whole national
trouble. At all events, Morris, on no
better evidence than we have mentioned,
was found guilty, sentenced and hanged
in May, 1861 He died protesting his
innocence to the last, his final words be-
ing, "You murder mel" This of course,
does not indicate his innocence, for the
blackest and bloodiest of criminals
would have been just as likely to have
said it.
But recently, in singular way, Nor
ris has been exonerated from the stigma
of guilt. A young scapegrace, who
joined gang Of desperadoes in 1861,
is now in the prison at Jeffersonville,
Ind, and has given the Louisville COur-
ier Journal an account of this band S
evil deeds, and among them specifies,
with details which carry conviction Of
the story's truth, the outrage and mur-
der of Mary Murphy.
Nothing can be done to make up to
poor Morris, the negro, for his murdered
life; but the facts make heavily against
pronouncing the irreversable doom of
death on such merely circumstantial
grounds Had he been sentenced to
life imprisonment, with no chance of re-
lease except proof of innocence, he
would doubtless now soon be set free.