Recently the Barry County Museum received a donation from the Seitz family of a Smith & Wesson .32 caliber model 2 revolver reported to be the one used in the notorious murder of Jackson Carney and his wife Cordelia on December 4, 1869 by George Moore at their Shell Knob store.

A letter accompanying the firearm written by Hettie Seitz Locke to her son Joe in 1955 proclaims “The tale of the gun” and lists Jackson Carney as a cousin. Born in 1888, Hettie was the daughter of Henry Carney and Hannah Clark. Her father was a brother to John Carney, Jackson Carney’s father.

Hettie was first married to Willard Seitz and then to L.D. Locke. She died a few years after the letter in 1962. The informant on the death certificate from the Missouri Digital Heritage website was Hettie’s daughter Nona Swearingen, wife of Monroe Swearingen, who was the brother of my great-grand father Walter Swearingen, proving again in the Ozarks, wherever you turn, a family connection is always right around the corner.

According to family sources, George Moore was also connected with the Carney family, with his mother being Mariah Carney, sister to the murdered Jackson’s father John Carney. George was orphaned around the age of five by the death of his mother and father, Harrison Moore, around 1847 and subsequently raised by the Carney relatives in Barry County.

This seems to make the murder even more disturbing since it was not just a store robbery, but Moore shot his own cousin, a person he had known since he was a boy. People speculated that the real motive for the murder involved Jackson’s wife Cordelia, who George Moore was supposedly sweet on, but she chose Jack Carney instead.

Mary Cordelia Williams was married to Jackson Carney on January 3, 1869 in Barry County by Justice of the Peace John Reeves. The couple had been married less than a year at the time of their murder.

According to Emory Melton’s account of the murder published in the White River Valley Historical Quarterly in the summer of 1971 (available online in the Springfield-Greene County Library Digital Archive), Jack and Cordelia operated their store out of a double log building located near the current location of the Shell Knob school. The couple lived on one side of the building and had their store on the opposite end.

One can imagine the optimistic future of the couple just starting out as a new family with small business entrepreneurial dreams in the post-Civil War era. Moore had spent most of the Saturday of the murder hanging around the store, which probably wasn’t suspicious, as they knew one another, and George had worked for Jack’s father John Carney. Plus, being December, it was likely a little chilly outside and the store probably had a stove or fireplace providing heat.

But, at some point that evening, the warmth of familiar relations turned into cold-blooded murder. The next day, a store patron found Jack Carney with two bullet holes in his head and Cordelia with one in the chest below her chin. According to a St. Louis newspaper from 1869, Moore had fired so close to Cordelia that a portion of her clothing had caught fire.

The murder made news around the country as papers in Pittsburg and Cincinnati picked up the story, along with the Carney family’s reaction.

George Moore was arrested by Barry County Sheriff John H. Moore, unrelated, the following Monday. In an interesting note, George had attended church at the Horner school house near Cassville the Sunday after the murders. Although most of the evidence pointed at George Moore and a conviction at trial would have been a likely outcome, the Carneys were impatient at the speed of justice.

That Monday evening the Sheriff got wind of the Carneys plan to bust Moore out of the jail and execute him, so the Sheriff brought him out to the country. On Tuesday Jack and Cordelia were buried in the Old Carney Cemetery near Jenkins. On Wednesday the Carney mob took the Sheriff by surprise and demanded the keys to the jail.

After receiving them, the mob removed George Moore from the log jail next to the courthouse and placed him on a stack of wooden crates beneath the bell post with a rope around his neck. George was allowed a few words, which he used to proclaim his innocence.

According to Hettie, her grandfather was the one who kicked the boxes out from underneath George Moore, but other accounts say it was one of Jackson’s brothers, either way it was undoubtedly a member of the Carney clan.

In December 1869, George Moore was lynched in front of a crowd of 200 spectators in front the Barry County Courthouse on the Cassville Square by his own kin. Emory Melton adds that the bell that hung on the post at that time was later given to the Cassville School in 1877 and was used until 1939.

In 1966, a monument of the bell was placed on the relocated school grounds.

This brings to mind the famous poem by John Donne “For Whom the Bell Tolls” that suggests a funeral bell’s ringing tolls not only for the individual but also for the community as a whole, as the loss of one diminishes us all.

Likewise, we must remember a shot fired at one family member is a shot fired at a whole family, and injustice done to one is injustice to the whole.

I hope all of those who listened to the bell learned this lesson ringing throughout our connected history.

Jeremiah Buntin is a historian at the Barry County Museum. He may be reached at jbuntin@barrycomuseum.org.