On December 17, 1897, child murderer William Carr was publicly hanged by about 800 people inside the Clay County Courthouse in Liberty, Kansas City, Missouri. As Carr was taken to the gallows for the last time, he made a pitiful appearance. He raised himself convulsively and climbed the gallows with relative strength. It was 10:34 a.m. when the sheriff pulled the trigger on the gallows. Two minutes later, the life of the killer of his own child ended. His neck snapped and there was the sound of a whip being used. In the split second after the gallows fell, about eight hundred spectators, screaming, crying, shrieking, laughing, as if driven by a single impulse, crowded under the gallows, close to the dangling corpse. They were not satisfied until they got a close look at the hanging man's body. The crowd angrily cursed at each other, tried to force their way up the gallows steps, and cried and howled at the sheriff.
Finally, the crowd tried to break down the barricade surrounding the scaffold. Sheriff Hymer rushed in from the first breakthrough and excitedly warned the crowd not to engage in further violence. The crowd paused for a moment as the sheriff's guards surrounded the body. Suddenly, all at once, there was a loud shout and the crowd shook off the guards and broke through the sturdy fort. Inside the gallows, there was more shouting and emotional outbursts. Finally, after the concluding execution, which was safely dismissed and settled into a small riot of a few minutes, a photographer entered the enclosure to capture the final events of this abominable tragedy in horrific detail. The filming machine operated for the duration of the time Carr was in the enclosure until the bodies were mutilated. About 1,800 pictures were taken on about 1,000 feet of film. The same gang that had been in prison when Carr was a prisoner in the county jail in Kansas City exhibited these photos around the country.
The same gang convinced Carr to recite the story of the murder to a phonograph while he was a prisoner in the county jail in Kansas City. William Carr's crime was one of the most brutal in Missouri history: on October 15, 1896, the body of Belle Carr, a three-year-old child born to the killer William Carr's first wife, was found on a sandbar in the Missouri River near Kansas City. Carr was arrested at his home in Liberty on October 2 for the incident. Carr initially denied the crime. Later, Carr, a skinny 37-year-old country boy, told how he carried his child out of the house, tied his hands and feet tightly, tied a heavy rock to the child's chest, and asked, "What are you going to do, Daddy? " and admitted that Mrs. Carr had told her to get rid of the child. It also turned out that she had been brutal to Bell. Carr stubbornly insisted that his wife had nothing to do with it. For a while, Carr invited his notoriety and told his visitors plainly about his crime. But then he begged to be wiped off the face of the earth as soon as possible; at his trial on November 16, Carr was immediately convicted. Carr became increasingly weak, and on Sunday, a week before his execution, he attempted suicide by swallowing a piece of glass he had struck. Carr spent a restless night the day before his hanging, and when breakfast was brought to him, he cut it off in disgust, lit a cigar, and looked out the window for a long time. Eventually, the mortician asked Kerr if he wanted to dispose of the body. My wife will take care of it," he said. Oh, let my wife take care of it," he said, sobbing. The priest then appeared and urged him to face his fate like a man. 'I will try. It's the best I can do," Carr said. The Bible was read and hymns were sung, all the while Carr was crying and shaking like a child.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the frontier towns of the Old West were a lawless land of gun battle combat, fought to the death in a vacant lot near the OK Corral in the American West in October 1881. The duel was brief, as men of low morals reached for their six-shooters when they disagreed or had a problem to solve. It became a lawless region where law and order lagged behind, and the frontier was settled by all kinds of people: itinerant cowboys, prospectors, railroaders, hot-tempered young men from the East, fugitives, and swindlers. Wealth of gold and silver flowed out of the mines in the surrounding hills. Life in the open air, rides at night, the spice of danger, domination over humans, and the pride of keeping the mob at bay became wild adventures that made the veins tingle. As a saloon keeper, he was found drugging customers and robbing them of their money, and citizens hanged a police officer. The sheriff of Ada County, Idaho, was found to be a horse thief, and the vigilantes hanged him. Justice in the courtrooms of those days was just as bland as justice in the prisons and on the streets. Many of the early judges had not studied law and were working on the sidelines. Without courts and tribunals, they rendered their verdicts in stores and taverns, where informality reigned.
