Mike King
Mike L. King (1872-1895) was a Winfield man convicted of murdering a school teacher in 1895. He was the only person to ever be legally hanged in Scott County.
Biography
Born in 1872, Mike King grew up in the Winfield area of Scott County. He was the son of Thomas Braxton King and Nancy Blevins, of McCreary County, Ky. He married China Cordell, the daughter of Joseph “Mart” Cordell and Nancy Elizabeth Strunk, on May 3, 1892. They had one daughter, Essie, born on July 29, 1894.
Murder of W.A. Beck
On Dec. 23, 1894, King killed W.A. (Aaron) Beck, a schoolteacher who was boarding in the King home that night.
According to historian H. Clay Smith, in Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past, Beck was a music teacher, and King believed him to have a large sum of money. Smith wrote that Beck was startled out of his sleep one night just in time to see King’s hand closing on his throat.
“Mr. Beck pleaded with his murderous attacker, saying that if the latter would let him live he, Beck, would give him everything he had,” Smith wrote. “But it was all to no avail: King kept on striking and choking until the school teacher was dead.”
The Chattanooga Daily Times reported that King said: “I made up my mind to kill Beck about Dec. 20. I went to the tunnel on the Oneida and Paint Rock railroad, armed with a Winchester rifle and watched for Beck all day, intending to kill him for his money. He did not come. I then went back to Isham and came to Oneida on Tuesday, Dec. 23; met Beck and persuaded him to accompany me home, at Isham, where we arrived about 10 o’clock at night and went to bed without supper. About 11 o’clock I got up, shot Beck through the head with a 38-calibre pistol. He flounced a little and I hit him in the head with a hatchet. He died at once. I rifled his pockets, getting $54 in cash. I carried and dragged his body to the woods and covered it up.”
While Smith wrote that Beck was an “elderly” school teacher, the Chattanooga newspaper reported that he was about 45 years old, and that he had come to Scott County for a year. He taught at the Almy School in the Paint Rock mining community east of Oneida.
King — who only had one hand — dragged Beck’s body into the forest, to a spot where a chestnut tree had uprooted and left a large hole in the earth. He rolled the teacher’s body into the hole and covered it with dirt.
Nearly a month later, on Jan. 20, 1885, a small boy was in the woods with his mother and another woman, gathering firewood. The boy saw a small sapling and thought it would make a good bow for his ox yoke, according to Smith’s book. When he went to retrieve it, he discovered a hand sticking out of the hole. Together, the two women pulled Beck’s body out of the hole.
Beck pleaded guilty to the crime, admitting to Sheriff John Goad that he had killed Beck. He was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to hang. The case was prosecuted by Judge W.H. Potter and General Owings, and presided over by a judge from Loudon. King was housed at the jail in Morgan County to avoid his death at the hands of a mob.
The hanging
Although there had been several lynchings in Scott County prior to 1895, there had never been a legal execution. However, the court ordered Sheriff Goad to hang King. Reportedly, Goad was reluctant to carry out the order and even considered resigning his office to avoid having to perform the duty. However, King was said to have told Goad: “This is your duty and you must perform it.”
Historian Esther Sharp Sanderson wrote in her book, County Scott and its Mountain Fork, that “men, women and children had been pouring into Huntsville since daybreak in order to have a point of vantage from which they could see and hear plainly” on the day of the hanging. The historian Smith wrote that people rented horses and wagons to make the trip into town to see the hanging. Among them were Smith’s father and mother, who rented a wagon from their neighbor and drove themselves and some other neighbors into town to witness the execution. Smith said they regretted making the trip. The Chattanooga Daily Times estimated the crowd to be about 2,000 people.
George Cecil, a well known pastor in Scott County, preached King’s funeral from the gallows. His message was entitled “The Way of the Transgressor is Hard.” King is said to have given a stirring speech to the crowd that had gathered, telling them to let him stand as an example “that crime does not pay.”
The Daily Times reported: “King then spoke briefly, saying in substance that God had forgiven his sins and that he was ready to die. He advised all young men in the sound of his voice to avoid the ways of sin and dissipation, and advised them to take warning by his sad end and conduct themselves according to the laws of the land and the teachings of the church. After which he bad the sheriff and his deputies good bye, as well as all who were present.
“He was then placed on the trap, his feet and legs were strapped together, his hands fastened behind his back, the black cap was drawn over his face and the rope carefully adjusted about his neck. The trap was sprung and the first legal execution in the history of Scott County was consummated.”
Sanderson wrote that women and children cried and fainted as the hanging took place.
The Daily Times wrote that King’s wife and child were on hand, adding, “it was the saddest scene ever witnessed and there was not a dry eye in the jail enclosure, and many wept copiously at the piteous moans and cries of the poor woman and the innocent tears of the poor child.”
Aftermath
King was buried at Isham Cemetery near his home in Winfield. His widow, China, remarried to John Anderson and moved to Whitley County, Ky.
Essie, Mike King’s only child, married Rev. George King of Whitley County, Ky. She died in 1979 in McCreary County, Ky. She had five children, the last of whom died in 2005.
Goad did, indeed, resign as Scott County’s sheriff at the end of his term, and later held office in other capacities.