Innocent As The Angels

Innocent as the Angels is the only comprehensive retelling of the unsolved ax murders of the entire Spencer family, including children, in rural Missouri in 1877. Completely researched and extensively documented, Innocent as the Angels recounts the true story of these heinous murders and the interlocking narratives that played out over three years, two murder trials, and featured an almost unbelievable cast of characters. This book highlights the following: --The Spencer murders represent the most neglected unsolved mass murder in American domestic history. --The book includes the only detailed, in-depth portrait of a bounty hunter/ con man in post-Civil-War America. --Among its characters is a promiscuous country girl willing to do anything to snag a rich husband and who takes desperate vengeance when thwarted. --It features a boastful, arrogant, and widely hated farmer who worked to make money as fast as possible and who was lynched by a mob only three days following his acquittal for the original murders. --It includes a wide-ranging conspiracy of locals willing to commit perjury and manufacture evidence to frame an innocent man for the Spencer murders. --It features a lynch-mob of desperadoes and bad men recruited from three states. --It recounts four separate judicial proceedings which feature a county prosecutor who would later sit as a circuit judge, Howard Hughes, Jr's grandfather, a future and former state attorney general and a future state governor on the defense team, and Missouri's supreme court. --It features the seduction and faked marriage of a 17-year-old girl by an unscrupulous con man in search of clues to the real murderer. --It includes the bounty hunter's flight to the West, his capture, his return in chains, and his temporary jailing before being released by the Missouri supreme court on a technicality. --It plausibly suggests who the real murderer was. Few true crime books open such a huge illuminating window into 19th-century rural America and its amazing cast of n'er-do-wells while recounting a truly epic saga.