SHOCKING MURDER.

While all Kewanee and vicinity were in the throes of excitement and the preliminary examination of the bank robbers was going on before Esq. Wood, there came the still more startling news that Mrs. Maggie A. Copeland, wife of Joseph L. Copeland, living on a farm four miles south of Kewanee, had been brutally murdered at her home in broad daylight. It was said or supposed to have been done by tramps for the purpose of robbery.

When found the body lay with the head toward the door, just outside the house, and in the kitchen and in the main house were evidences of the struggle she had made for life. She had been horribly beaten, and shot three times; the fiend commencing the attack in the kitchen, followed her into the house, and she had jumped through a screen door and still pursued had turned to go again into the house, when she. fell on her face and expired. The trunk in which was nearly a hundred dollars had been rifled, but the other furniture had not been disturbed.

Mrs. Copeland was young, accomplished and very intelligent and handsome, beloved and greatly esteemed by a large circle of friends. Her husband had left her, taking, most fortunately, their bright-eyed, sweet-faced little boy with him, going to town with a load of corn. To the people of Kewanee and vicinity, particularly, here were horrors on horror's head accumulated.

It soon turned out that the murderer was a man named Mockinson, a wretch who had come from near the same place in Ohio the Copelands were from. He had come into the neighborhood, and had no acquaintance except a hired man who worked for a neighbor of Copeland. In the kindness of their hearts, Copeland and wife had allowed Mockinson to make their house his home, and had treated him more as a brother than a stranger. He got work at a near neighbor's, but would frequently go to Copeland's, visit and eat and sleep there and be entertained, and in return for this great kindness, in his black heart he hatched and nursed his hideous crime.

He confessed his guilt, told the sickening details of his story, and was duly hanged, as he most richly deserved to be. He was a depraved, vile and wretched human beast, without a redeeming trait or quality in the world, and it is hoped that there was not a healthy-minded man, woman or child in the world but that, when told the story, was really rejoiced when his neck was broken by the hangman's rope.

 

History of Henry County

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