It Was Only Right That I Should Kill Him

 

Myrtle Eberly with her dog

“I had to do it, and I’d do it again,” said the jilted lover. 

 

Thomas Lane (aka Edward Leonard) promised to marry Myrtle Eberly, then kept making excuses not to do it. “In two or three weeks, he would have grown tired of me, turned me out, and then— “

 

They met at Dreamland, an attraction at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Myrtle worked as a waitress, and Ed tended the bar. The place had a reputation, but the money was good. She made $8.50 a week salary and almost as much in tips.

 

She’d worked at Dreamland for three months and was still a good girl. At first, Myrtle didn’t know what kind of place it was. When she found out, she asked her mother what she should do. Her mother told her if she could continue to work there without becoming “contaminated,” to do it.

 

So she stayed.

Myrtle was a pretty young girl, just 17-years-old, with wavy black hair cut just above the ear. She weighed 130 pounds and had what reporters called “a well set-up figure.” She had black eyes and a smile that lit up the room. 

 

Detectives at Four Courts couldn’t understand that she didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. Myrtle kept referring to some unwritten law that said if he promised to marry her and didn’t, it was only fitting she should kill him. 

 

Myrtle said she’d been a waitress for three years and was saving money to become an actress. 

 

She knew it was against the law to kill him, “but it was right, and I had to do it.”

 

She’d known Ed Leonard for three months. They’d gone for walks and to shows, the usual things lovers do. Once, he came to her parent’s house.

Two weeks ago, Ed asked Myrtle to marry him. 

 

He said they’d get married right away. He’d meet Myrtle Friday to make plans. Then, come Friday, “the best suggestion he had to make was he would get a blank marriage certificate from him and fill it out, and I could show it to my folks, and they would think we had been married.”

 

She said no, and he said they would get married the next night. Myrtle didn’t believe him. She warned him that she would kill him if he didn’t marry her.

 

Saturday night, as they walked down Jefferson Avenue and Walnut Street, she concealed a pistol under her shawl. 

 

Ed mocked her, laughed at her, and said he had no intention of getting married. They were just words. 

Before Myrtle knew it, the gun was in her hand. She shot him twice. 

 

“I knew in my heart that it was right for me to kill him for the wrong he had done me.”

 

“Was I in love with him?” said Myrtle. “Well, now, that is hard to answer. Sometimes I think I was, and sometimes I think not. I was not [on] Saturday night when I shot him.”

 

As it turned out, Ed Leonard was married. He had a wife and daughter who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He abandoned them four years before this and became an itinerant traveler, visiting Alaska, the Philippines, and Asia, among other places.

 

Myrtle didn’t plan on making any defense. “I shall just tell the judge what I did and why I did it,” she said. “They can do with me what they like.”

 

Myrtle gained her release on October 15 after her parents posted a $20,000 bond. 

 

She won her freedom just days before Christmas in 1905. 

 

Circuit Attorney Sager filed a nolle prosequi. Sager thought the circumstances in the case rendered a conviction impossible. 

 

“It appears that the defendant was a virtuous, hard-working girl; that she was wronged under a promise of marriage and was then brutally taunted by the man who had disgraced her when she appealed to him to carry out his engagement.

 

“Believing these facts—and they must be believed—I could not convict her, and what I would not do, I will not ask a jury to do.”

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