Brother Billie Is Dead!
Idyllic existence of Taylor Kingsbury family is shattered by a shocking tragedy in 1932.
We have had an unbroken family circle for an unusually long time, but tragedy stalked in last night. Billie is gone.
His body, revolver clasped in his right hand, was found under a towering oak tree in Valhalla Cemetery in Overland Park near St. Louis.
His partner, Leo Meistrell’s, body was found in the locked vault of their offices. He had been shot once in the head, twice in the chest.
So wrote Lilburn Kingsbury to his Cousin Lillian Kingsbury Agnew in Great Falls, Montana on April 8, 1932. The letter continues:
Billie was taking Julia home about 7:25 p.m. She asked him to let her out of the car so she could go see Mrs. Nelson. Billie asked her how long she wanted to stay so he could come by for her on his way home from the office. She thought about ten o’clock. Billie said he would not be long. Julia had wanted to go with him but he told her she’d better not, as it might be cold up there.
Jere called me at six this morning asking that Horace and I come over immediately. We got there as quickly as possible. We learned Billie had not been seen since he left Julia, and his former partner, Leo Meistrell, was also missing. Mrs. Meistrell had talked to her husband at eight o’clock and had called again and had no reply. Julia had gone home earlier with Jere and had also called to tell Billie, but got no answer.
Mrs. Meistrell was quite frantic and so was Julia. The police were called out after midnight, combing country roads and searching for clues in the office and found Leo’s hat. Billie had gone up to open his mail, having been away a couple of days. The mail on his desk was unopened. I was in the office with several others and we rattled the vault door, but it never occurred to me it might hold a tragedy. The door was locked from the outside. Mrs. Meistrell and others thought someone should go to the cabin in the Ozarks so Jere and I with others made the 200-mile round trip in less than five hours, but when we got there to the store [at the bridge up the lake from the cabin] we found a message. Horace had phoned and said Leo had been found shot to death in the vault. Leo Meistrell was shot twice in the face and once in the chest, and had fallen on his face. The door was closed and locked.
We found no sign of Billie’s car at the lake nor anyone who had seen Billie, so we hurried back (to Boonville). By the time we got there, word had come from St. Louis that a body had been found in a cemetery at Overland Park, as No. 40 enters St. Louis, with a note pinned to it, asking that Mr. J.W. Jamison, a lifelong friend of Billie’s, could identify the body, and that H.M. Kingsbury be notified. Details were hard to get, but I think they said the body with two shots through it, had not long been there. Request was made in the note that the body be cremated. Horace, Ernest and two close friends of Billie’s have gone to St. Louis. None of the rest of the family will go. The remains or ashes will be returned to Boonville. I do not know what disposition will be made of them.
Mother and Father are bearing up bravely. We are all crushed, but we have been so fortunate through the years. I feel we can only accept this blow in a humble spirit or else be ungrateful for the blessings of the years. All of Billie’s children will be home as quickly as transportation can bring them. Julia is wonderfully brave. I think she has feared something like this for a long time.
April 9, 1932:
Dear Cousin Lillian,
An envelope addressed to Horace, mailed from St. Louis, came this morning. It enclosed a parking garage check for Billie’s car which Horace and the others had been unable to locate.
There was a short service at the crematory this morning at 11 o’clock attended by Horace, William, and a few close family friends.
It is still undecided just when burial services will be. If there is a service, it will be the Episcopal as Bill would like it, and Billie always thought that burial service was fitting. He didn’t care for music at funerals and there will be none. Service, if held, will be at our home. Julia feels she would like to place his ashes in Mount Pleasant, as the lot used to be a part of the farm which Billie always loved. No service before Monday. And then only for family and closest friends.
Father feels terrible and when I came to town a while ago he had gone to bed. We had tried to comfort him with the thought that Billie’s mental suffering is all over, but Dad says, “Mine isn’t.” We know the sympathy of the community is with us for sake of the parents if nothing else.
April 13, 1932:
Dear Cousin Lillian,
And the world goes on! The wheels of our mentalities have spun so fast lately it seems weeks must have elapsed. But we have nothing to do now except settle down to normalcy as much as possible and adjust ourselves to the living without dear old Billie.
Major Irvine was in St. Louis on business Monday and phoned he would bring Billie’s ashes as he returned that evening. I suppose you will be interested in every detail which I can think of to enumerate. I don’t know why it is so long before the ashes can be sent out after the service which precedes the cremation. They come in a rectangular copper box, 5 x 5 x 9. On one end was engraved the name and date, April 9, 1932. I don’t know whether that was to indicate the day of death or date of cremation. He died on the 8th. If it was in error, I kept it to myself, thinking nobody else noticed it. While it makes no difference, I always feel if a date is of any consequence at all in a case of this kind, it should be correct.
William placed the receptacle on top of the desk in the northeast corner of the parlor. There it reposed until yesterday afternoon. Some men and women who had just buried their mother that afternoon had brought in a large hydrangea with pink blossoms and this was placed on the desk also. On the back of the piano I had placed a large decoration of red buds with a few of the richest peach blossoms I ever saw, and it made that corner very attractive. Elsewhere in the house we used the spring garden flowers, narcissi and jonquils. We all live so close together we were in and out of the home constantly. Julia got so tired of seeing callers in Boonville that she found relief in coming over to our house.
Yesterday, all our family were present at noon. The sisters-in-law brought in and served lunch of ham sandwiches, fruit salad, watermelon and crabapple pickle, stuffed eggs, coffee, custard and cake. It was just the same kind of old family party except... Billie was absent. Not another person but family was present. We had all thought perhaps we wouldn’t feel like eating anything, but you know what good cooks the girls are, and the food was most tempting. It seemed a long afternoon when most of us were not able to sit down for long, nor could we find satisfaction in walking about. The whole family just shifted around from place to place in the house and yard except Father and Horace, who sat in the latter’s car and talked the whole time.
In the morning while I was downtown, Rosie and Margaret found Mother leaning over the little copper box crying her heart out and saying she just wanted to hold it in her lap. Of course, there was no reason why she shouldn’t and she did. It was a comfort to her. She heard Father coming into the house and told them to take it and put it back as she wouldn’t have him seeing her for anything. When the hour came to go over to the cemetery, she asked Horace if she could carry it over there and he told her “of course you can.” I knew Julia desired to do the same thing, and it was all planned she should. They told me to iron out the situation. I went in and heard Mother telling Father they were going to let her carry the box to the cemetery and asking him if he didn’t think that was nice of them. Mother was looking so pleased, I could hardly tell her Julia wanted to do the same thing, but I did and was pleased when Mother said, “Of course she should.” And after Julia and William got in the car to go, I carried the little box out and gave it to them and the procession started.
The lot to which the ashes were committed is right on the driveway, so they stopped the car with Mother and Father in it immediately beside the spot. Father wanted to get out, but finally was persuaded to stay inside.
The place prepared for the box was simply the base upon which will be placed a modest marker. A space for the box was prepared inside the base and a blanket of pink roses, pinkish brown snapdragons and different shaded pyrethus, not very large, perhaps four feet by three, was spread out over it. As the undertaker advanced with his little box, his assistant folded back a part of the flowers so the ashes could be put in place. The flowers fell back in place, and Rev. Gregg used the shortest service he knew. He delivered it very eloquently and I liked it very much.
In spite of the fact it was a private service, there were a great many people and we were glad to have them, or anyone who felt really impelled by love for Billie to come. Julia had said she wanted just his immediate friends and I told her that would include quite a large circle, for there were people who were his friends of whom we knew little. We have learned as the days have passed, people have said Billie had done this or that for them.
Everybody came back to the house, but all of Julia’s family returned to Boonville late in the afternoon. I think all of the others stayed for supper and dwindled away gradually until nine o’clock when we went to bed feeling like we had been beaten over the shoulders with a club.
Mother said this morning she and Father felt more reconciled, and I believe all of us are going to be able to get up before the “count of ten” and fight the second round. For a lot of us this is the first round with sorrow we have had.
A safety box, with the name Kingsbury and Meistrel on it was found under the bed in a room at a motel on Highway 66, 30 miles west of Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis. Sheriff Groom and a young attorney named Martin went down to recover it. They found it empty except for three documents which were under a secret flap, and in the stove in the room there were charred remains of papers, a few unburned edges indicating the papers were of a legal nature.
From Jefferson City, Billie had mailed a dollar bill to a girl friend of Julia’s, who had done some stenographic work for him in Boonville a few days previous. He was fond of her and she of him and she was just crushed to have received it from him in that way. He mailed some sort of paper to Albert Smith [a cousin] and a purse containing some money to Judge Fisher, Leo’s father-in-law. This was money which belonged to the Meistrell children from sales of the Saturday Evening Post. No doubt Leo had pitched it in the box and Billie found it and returned it. Presumably everything in the box was burned except the three concealed items. Obviously, Billie felt Leo had cheated him and would proceed to cheat others who had dealt with them as partners.
Surely something must have arisen of great provocation to Billie. There had been a failure on Leo’s part to live up to the agreement of last August to care for certain obligations he was assuming. Such a lot we don’t know and can’t understand, but Billie was a fine man. I have always been proud of him and I am proud of him yet. Think what a man he was to have the courage to go through with his suicide after all these hours following Leo’s removal from this planet.
Stops in Jefferson City to go through Leo’s deposit box and return certain things, doubtless a sorting of the papers at the motel, where he arrived at 1 a.m. and remained until 7 a.m. He arrived at the St. Louis downtown garage, where he parked the car at six after ten, got the check for it and mailed it back to Horace, then took a street car, from which he had to transfer to the Wellston Line leading to Valhalla, and the remainder of the time was consumed in the ride to that destination. At the Boonville filling station where he had his car serviced, at the motel near St. Louis, and at the garage, the attendants noted nothing a bit unusual about him. I can almost see him dropping off the car at the Valhalla entrance and walking briskly along to the great sycamore tree under which he passed into the great unknown, about 200 feet from the gate.
I wonder if Billie didn’t have the old Viking legends in mind when he planned all this avenging destruction by fire and entrance to Valhalla.
When he was missing last Friday morning, Mother cried and prayed he might be spared the sufferings which would be involved if he was apprehended. He did not finish the job any too soon, for people would have begun to look for him as soon as the broadcast of nine o’clock became generally known. And by the time he was leaving the car at the garage, requests for his arrest were being radioed.
Well, he was a sweet old thing, and we shall miss him; but if he were terribly unhappy in this life, perhaps it is well it is all over...
I wouldn’t feel free to send this sort of detailed letter to anyone except the dearest to us. I felt the exhibitions of mother love were almost too sacred to mention, but you are such an understanding person.
This was Billie’s note:
“Have no regrets except for family - all of whom I love dearly. This is the first time my mind has been clear for months. I could feel myself slipping and I do not care to be a drooling lunatic on my family’s hands regardless of their affection for me.
“Julia certainly deserved better than this for she was all that could be asked of a wife and more. If I had only listened to her, Leo would never have had a chance to put me where he did. So I square my account with him and take mine. I thought he was afraid to cheat me. I was wrong. He thought I was afraid to kill him. He was wrong.
“Am not writing Julia or any of the children. There is nothing to say which could do any good and I can’t say I would not do it again under the same conditions. Will mail receipt for car which is to go to Jere, with his mother’s consent.”
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