Between the Frontier and the Big City: Sixty Years of Small-Town Murder Prosecution
Guthrie, Chris
:
1994
Abstract
This article examines small-town murder in Johnson County, Kansas, from 1880
to 1939. While providing lurid details of the murders committed over a sixty-year
period in the county's small towns and villages, this article concludes that smalltown
murder was slightly different from murder elsewhere. The overwhelming
impression one gets from reviewing these rural murder cases is that small-town
murder - though criminal and violent - was more a matter of inept dispute
resolution than a matter of violent crime. True, the frontier and the big cities saw their share of petty disputes "resolved" through murder. But the small-town murders, at least those in Johnson County, were almost exclusively of this type; by and large, stranger murders, serial killers, random homicide, and felony murder were not part of the small-town landscape.
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