A murder in the family


By Jacqueline White Kochak

Justice family





I can’t forget the story. On the hot afternoon of June 25, 1927—a Saturday—my grandmother’s cousin William Payton Justice was out cultivating corn in a distant field with his older brother, John Junior. Neighbors described him as mechanically inclined and said he could handle a tractor as well as a man.

The boys’ father, John Justice Sr., had driven to the grain elevator four miles away for some machinery repairs. The day was stifling hot and humid, with no shade and no relief from the sun, so the two boys had just gone to the house to get a drink, returning to the cornfield together. The 13-year-old boy—I suppose they called him Billy—was a row ahead of his brother when he paused, shaded his eyes as he looked at the vast blue sky, and announced he was going to back to the house.


At the house, Billy went to the well and gulped down more water. Going into the house, he grabbed a handful of shotgun shells. When his older sister Mary Evelyn asked him why, Billy just grinned. Then he got his gun, but there was nothing so unusual about that; neighbors often saw Billy shooting birds on the farm. This time, though, Billy shot his family.

First he killed his 45-year-old mother, Minnie Elda Oglesby Justice, as she sat mending clothes in a rocking chair on a screened-in porch. Shot in the back, Minnie crumpled forward onto the floor. The local coroner said Billy’s mother died “in the line of duty for her family,” noting that he removed a thimble from her finger. Then the boy shot his 8-year-old sister, Emogene, at close range over the right eye. The position of her body suggested Emogene was trying to escape her brother. Billy’s older sister, 16-year-old Mary Evelyn, was bending over the icebox on the back porch, and her younger brother’s assault was so rapid and unexpected that she didn’t have time to straighten herself or react. Billy’s shot glanced off her spine, causing her to limp the rest of her life.

Then Billy shot himself in the gut. An area physician speculated that drinking the cold water might have had some damaging effect on the boy’s brain, given the day’s smoldering heat. The newspaper headline refers to Billy “running amok” (although the editor spelled it “amuck”) and more than once the reporter opines that the boy must have suffered from temporary insanity. Three dead, a senseless family massacre that today would be reported in newspapers all over the country.

One odd detail caught the attention of the newspaper’s editor, a Mr. N.W. Huston. “It is said that during his recent illness, the boy was annoyed by a woodpecker on the house,”  Huston wrote. “He picked up the shotgun with which he committed the tragedy this afternoon and killed the bird.”





I try to imagine Cherokee County, Kansas, in the late 1920s, before Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression engulfed the country. I know from experience that the June heat is searing and the humidity is oppressive. The local newspaper also speculated young Billy “went crazy from the sun,” a diagnosis that makes some sense if you’re familiar with the region. Billy also suffered from measles just a few weeks before, the newspaper explained, but his brother described him as “jovial” on the day of the murders. 






I know exactly what young Billy’s life on the farm was like because of my Uncle Joe’s recollections about his grandparents. My great-grandfather, Joe Justice, was John Justice Jr.’s younger brother by four years. I can see my great-grandparents in my mind’s eye, and I know that they—Joe Justice and his wife Laura—must have been very similar to John Justice Sr. and his wife Minnie. They were country people, deeply rooted in their place and deeply connected to their people.

Joe Justice was about 5-foot-10, lean and hard, and I expect his brother was the same. He had sandy hair, chewed plug tobacco and smoked a pipe. He sat in a rocker by the window to watch people go by on the road outside, so my Grandma Justice put paper under the rocker along with a bucket full of sand for her husband to spit in. For her part, my great-grandmother Laura Justice was small and lean and wore long dresses. Her hair, which she wore in a knot on the back of her head, nearly touched the floor when unbound. Might Minnie Elda have been cut from the same template?

The Justices, all of them, worked from daylight until dusk, keeping so busy they almost ran from chore to chore. Laura Justice got up first and started a wood fire in the big steel stove equipped with water storage on each side so they had hot water. I’m sure Billy’s mother, Minnie Elda, did the same. My Grandpa Justice replenished the water every night as well as filling the wood bin, and I expect John Sr. also did the same. Their wives would make biscuits every morning to accompany fried eggs, gravy, ham or bacon, and coffee. On my great-grandparents’ farm, they milked as many as 10 cows each morning; Laura always milked two, while my Joe and Houston, the only child left at home by the time Uncle Joe made his debut, milked the rest.




At the time Billy was working in the field with his older brother, though, they were still dealing with balky, smelly mules. Billy’s life wasn’t easy, no question, but why would he turn on his mother and sisters?


Joe Justice was a good man and well-respected, but my Grandmother White described him as a man who was very serious and not given to smiling or enjoying himself. My grandmother was much the same, and that has made me wonder about the dark stain of depression that runs through my family and might have touched young Billy, the boy who killed his family. Yet they were a “happy, contented family of farm people,” neighbors told the newspaper.


Most children today never experience the discomfort, high temperature and spreading red rash of measles, but in Billy’s day almost every child succumbed. As childhood illnesses that were so common they were expected, diseases like measles and chicken pox don’t sound very scary at all. Even today, however, medical books note the existence of a rare disease of the central nervous system called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which may develops after a person has measles, even though the person seems to have returned to good health. The healthy interim is usually many years but can be as short as a month. Adolescent or younger boys are most vulnerable to the progressive brain inflammation, which in its earliest stage causes personality changes, mood swings, or depression. The prognosis is bleak.

When I dug a little deeper, I learned that in the late 1800s, infection was accepted as one of the causes of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Emil Kraepelin—the German physician who is considered the founder of modern psychiatry—described rare cases of insanity following such once-common diseases as chicken pox, scarlet fever and measles, with the aforementioned brain inflammation the suspected cause. By Billy’s time thinking had swung around to the belief that insanity was caused only by experiences or by genetics, and only recently is infection once again being considered as a cause.


I have pored over what records I can find, trying to reconstruct that place and that time in my mind. I imagine Billy’s father and older brother returning to the house to find a bloodbath on a hot June afternoon. From census records, it looks entirely possible the shattered family continued to live in the rural farmhouse, located on a dirt road in the county’s northwest corner. Billy’s father lived just six more years, dying in 1933. His older brother Junior and his surviving sister Evelyn lived out the rest of their lives in the area; Junior was buried in the county seat of Columbus some 40 years later.

I have wondered how a secret of this magnitude could be kept for so many years. My father never knew until I told him, although my Uncle Joe heard some of the story from his uncle Houston, an inveterate gossip. Far more puzzling, Billy’s older brother Junior—the one left alive in the field when his mother and sister were slaughtered, the one who discovered the bodies when he heard gunshots—went on to raise a family. That family was completely unaware of the tragedy.

As best I can determine, Junior’s two sons and one daughter grew up in southeast Kansas, in close proximity to the murder site, attending high school in nearby West Mineral. Yet no one ever breathed a word of the family shame. At the time of the crime, some 30,000 people resided in the county, but just a handful of them—a few hundred—lived in the rural townships where my family members lived. Perhaps the murders were just a quickly forgotten curiosity, or perhaps in a rural neighborhood where many people were related to one another, silence was kindness. Perhaps the silence was like a scab covering an open wound, allowing healing to occur.

Mary Evelyn and her brother Junior apparently grew apart. She had no children herself, and Junior’s sons did not know they had an aunt named Evelyn until one of them—another John Justice—got bit by the genealogy bug. Seeking information about his father’s family, he ventured into a public genealogy forum and learned of the tragedy via an email from a distant cousin. Even then, in 2001—more than 70 years after the murders—the subject was deemed too difficult to share with a family member on a public message board.
