State v. Crabtree

• Citation: 71 S.W. 127,170 Mo. 642
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Missouri
• Decision Date: 16 December 1902
• Parties: STATE v. CRABTREE.

71 S.W. 127

170 Mo. 642

STATE v. CRABTREE.

Supreme Court of Missouri, Division No. 2.

December 16, 1902.

MURDER—EVIDENCE—SUFFICIENCY&mdashCORPUS DELICTI—MOTIVE—CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.

1. In a prosecution for murder, the evidence examined, and held that, while it sufficiently established the corpus delicti, it was insufficient to connect defendant with the crime, and did not sustain a conviction.

2. A defendant may be convicted of murder, though no motive for the crime is shown.

3. It is a fundamental principle of the law of circumstantial evidence that each independent fact must be proved in the same satisfactory manner as if the whole issue rested on proof thereof.

Appeal from circuit court, Stone county; Hy. C. Pepper, Judge.

James Crabtree was convicted of murder in the second degree, and appeals. Reversed.

T. L. Viles and Harrington & Wadlow, for appellant. The Attorney General and Jerry M. Jeffries, for the State.

GANTT, J.

At the October term, 1901, of the circuit court of Stone county, the prosecuting attorney of said county, under his official oath, filed an information charging William Crabtree, Thomas Crabtree, James Crabtree, and Mattie Stallions with the murder of Alice Stallions on the 27th day of May, 1901, at the county of Stone, with a certain blunt instrument, the dimensions of which were to said informant unknown. The Honorable George H. Thornberry, the regular judge of that circuit, being disqualified because he had been of counsel for defendant prior to his appointment, the Honorable Henry Clay Pepper, the regular judge of the Twenty-Fourth judicial circuit, was regularly called and requested to try the case on the 5th day of November, 1901, at the October adjourned term of the Stone circuit court. Judge Pepper agreed to try the cause, and appeared at the appointed day. The prosecuting attorney elected to prosecute for murder in the second degree, and on the motion of defendants a severance was granted, and James Crabtree was put on his trial. A plea of not guilty was duly entered, and a jury impaneled. No objections were made to the panel. The jury found the defendant James Crabtree guilty of murder in the second degree, and assessed his punishment at 10 years in the state penitentiary. From the sentence imposed on that verdict he appeals to this court. Two grounds are assigned for reversal,—an error in an instruction on the law of alibi, and the insufficiency of the evidence to sustain the conviction.

The state relied entirely upon circumstantial evidence. The proofs developed the following facts: Miss Alice Stallions resided with her father's family in Stone county, Mo., above five or six miles below Cape Fair, near what is locally known as "Cedar Hollow," near Stallions' Ford, on the James river. Alice Stallions was a girl about 16 years old. John Stallions, her father, lived on a bluff above the river, and was a farmer. His family, on the 27th of May, 1901, consisted of himself, his wife, Mrs. Mattie Stallions, Alice Stallions, his daughter, two twin babies about 3 months old, Lulu Stallions, a daughter, and Alex Stallions, a son, a young boy. John Stallions' wife, Mattie Stallions, was and is the daughter of Thomas Crabtree, and a sister of defendants James Crabtree and William Crabtree, all codefendants in the information. Thomas Crabtree and his sons and their families all resided in the immediate neighborhood of John Stallions. The record is silent as to whether Alice Stallions was the daughter of Mattie Stallions. On March 27, 1901, John Stallions, the father, was absent from his home, working for Byron Carr, who lived about four miles distant. On that day Thomas Crabtree, William Crabtree, James Crabtree, Ben Morris (commonly known as Ben Crabtree), and Luke, Alice, and Lulu Stallions, were all at work in a field of John Stallions, planting corn. Thomas Crabtree drove a harrow, with two mules. James Crabtree laid off the corn ground. Alice dropped corn, and William covered it. Ben Morris, Luke, and Lulu pulled weeds. All that day Alice had worked in that field. In the morning she worked in a potato patch. They all ate dinner at John Stallions' house. After dinner she dropped corn. About 6 o'clock that evening they all quit work. When they quit work the evidence tends to show that William Crabtree, Ben Morris, and George Stallions went to the river under the bluff to water their teams. William Crabtree was riding one of the plow horses and leading another, and Ben rode one. Thomas Crabtree, James Crabtree, and Lulu and Alice Stallions all walked up to the house of John Stallions, where Mattie, his wife, and little children were. After Alice reached the house, she immediately got two buckets, and went to the spring, some 200 yards distant, and brought two buckets of water, and then returned and got another bucket. After bringing this water, there was evidence that she hung up her bonnet, and went out of the rear door of the house, and, as she started, said, "Mattie, I will go and get an armful of wood," and started to the bluff overhanging the James river. As she left, she smiled at Ben Morris, alias Crabtree, as she passed him in the yard. The state was unable to produce any witness who ever saw her alive after she started for the wood. This was Monday evening, May 27, 1901. On Tuesday morning information was given out through the neighborhood that Alice was missing. This was reported at her uncle Rube Stallions' at breakfast time that morning. John Stallions, her father, testified that the word reached him on the night of May 27th, after he had gone to sleep at Byron Carr's. He could not tell the exact time. Carr lived four miles distant from John Stallions. He says that William Crabtree and Albert Edwards brought him the information. Edwards testified that William Crabtree came to his house and told him at five minutes after 10 o'clock that night. He lived 1½ miles from James Crabtree's. They reached Byron Carr's about 11 o'clock that night. Unavailing search was made on Tuesday for the missing girl. The James river was dragged with hooks and poles Tuesday and Tuesday night till about midnight, when all parties quit until next day. On Wednesday, about noon, her dead body was found in the James, a short distance from the end of the path which led down the bluff from the house of John Stallions on the hill above. When found, her arms were folded across her breast. Her eyes and mouth were closed, and her neck was broken. Dr. L. Henson, a physician of Galena, a graduate of the Missouri Medical College of St. Louis of the year 1883, testified that he was called to examine her dead body, and found her neck dislocated or broken between the axis and the atlas, or the first and second vertebræ. Dr. Donaldson, a practicing physician of Cape Fair, but not a graduate, also examined the body, and testified the neck was broken at the second cervical vertebra. Her eyes were closed, and her lips slightly parted. From the examination made by these physicians, and upon hypothetical questions based upon the position of her arms, her mouth, and her eyes, and the other facts developed by those who lifted her out of the water, these physicians both gave it as their opinion that she was dead when she was placed in the water, and her death had not been caused by drowning. The evidence was that the water was five or six feet deep where she was found, and the highest point from which she could have thrown herself in the river near there was the top of a rock, which stood about 12 inches above the water. That she could have broken her neck by jumping off this rock into water as deep as that was at that place was incredible. She had no gravel, stone, or trash in her hands, but her arms were folded over her breast. On her neck was found a bruised place an inch or two in width, but the skin was not broken. Their evidence was that a blow at that point could have broken her neck. Her lower limbs were slightly drawn upward. On her lip was found some dry blood, which only yielded to hard rubbing with a wet cloth. The physicians were of opinion that, had this blood resulted from a fall against a rock after she fell or was placed in the river, it would not have coagulated, but would have been dissolved and washed away by the natural action of the water in which she was submerged. There was evidence that blood spots were found in the path near the river and on rocks in the path leading down from the house of John Stallions to the river. There was also testimony that blood and imprints answering to the size of a human body were found in the sandy loam under a ledge of rock under that bluff. There was also positive evidence by two at least of those who searched the river on Tuesday for her body that they sounded the exact spot in the river, which was in an eddy of still water between the rocks on the left side of the river, with poles and hooks, and that, if her body had been in there then, they would have discovered it. The nonexpert witnesses—the neighbors who assisted in taking the body out of the river, and the ladies who washed and prepared the body for burial—all testified the neck was broken, and the crepitation palpable when they moved her head in washing and dressing her.

Without recapitulating at length all the evidence, we may say that the testimony most satisfactorily established that Alice Stallions was not drowned, but came to her death by violence, and that rigor mortis had intervened before she was placed in the river. In a word, the corpus delicti was clearly proven. The evidence amply justified the jury in finding that the girl had been murdered, and placed by her murderer or murderers in the river after she was killed. The theory of suicide was rebutted by all the facts and circumstances in evidence. There was no reasonable hypothesis upon which to conclude that this apparently happy, smiling, young girl had gone from her home that evening, and, without any conceivable motive or...