A PRAIRIE MONSTER TELLS HIS STORY
In UNDER A FULL MOON The Last Lynching in Kansas the primary victim is Dorothy Eileen Hunter, an eight-year-old child who never came home. But there are other victims as well: the sheriff from whose custody Pleasant Richardson Read, the fifty-three-year-old perpetrator, was forcibly removed by a raging mob; the farmers and ranchers who watched him hang and who carried that image with them into their graves, bound by silence; the entire northwest Kansas area whose very foundations were rocked by this brutal event.
Perhaps the saddest victim of all was Pleasant Richardson Read.
That is the real story behind UNDER A FULL MOON.
This twist on the sensational headlines of April 1932, headlines that spanned the country and were carried into the homes of America, took fire when I received the intake photo of Richard Read from the Colorado State Penitentiary via the Colorado Archives. His eyes begged me to tell his story.
In April of 1916, Richard Read, a bachelor farmer, was living in Eastern Colorado, Kit Carson County, near a German Russian settlement. His neighbors, the Weisshaars, had a daughter, fifteen-year-old Pauline. In that spring month, when the farming community was watching the prairie grasses return to life after a tough winter, while the Great War took hold of Europe, Pleasant Richardson Read viscously raped and nearly killed Pauline. He barely escaped being hung.
In short order, justice being a simpler thing in those days, Richard Read found himself in the Canon City, Colorado penitentiary sentenced to fifteen to twenty years. Through reforms based on prison overcrowding he only served six before being returned to his hometown of Rexford, KS.
What chain of events placed Dorothy in his path ten years later?
What brought the son of a well-respected Kansas farmer to carry the title of PRAIRIE MONSTER, APEMAN, FIEND?
There is the real story behind UNDER A FULL MOON.
Title: Under a Full Moon by Alice Kay Hill
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Genre: True Crime
Length: 356 pages
Summary:
UNDER A FULL MOON: The Last Lynching in Kansas tells of the tragic abduction and death of an eight-year-old girl at the hands of a repeat offender in 1932. This crime stands apart as the last mob lynching in Kansas. Based on true events, this account takes a deep dive into the psycho-social complexities of pioneer times and their impact on this particular crime and the justice meted out to the perpetrator.
Beginning in the year 1881, and written in a chronological narrative non-fiction format, author Alice Kay Hill vividly weaves the stories of the victims and the families involved. She reveals how mental and physical abuse, social isolation, privations of homesteading, strong dreams and even stronger personalities all factored into the criminal and his crimes.
Spanning the years of settlement to the beginnings of the Dust Bowl, historic events are lived as daily news by the seven families whose lives become intertwined. Historically accurate and written with an intimate knowledge of the area, UNDER A FULL MOON is as personal as a family diary, as vivid as a photo album found in an attic trunk, and will remain with the reader long after the book is closed.
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Purchase Links: Amazon * B&N (Paperback) * Wild Blue Press
Excerpt
Their son Addison Alanson (A.A.) is born on a spring day in 1889. Children are one crop that can be counted on. Drought, grasshoppers, late freezes and early frosts might take out fields and gardens, but the babies are persistent in their regular arrival. Mary is thirty-eight years old.
In rural homes a girl is trained for motherhood and learns the basics of house management through helping to raise younger siblings. Typically, not long after puberty, she will be married and delivering or nursing babies without let up for most of her life. Often her first daughters have children before she herself is done.
Mary gazes into her squalling newborn’s face and knows that his life can be taken in a moment. Though she would never know the numbers, she was clearly aware of childhood mortality. In 1870, two years after her marriage to Alanson and while they were living in Nebraska, 114 deaths occurred in their county. Nearly 100 of those were children, most less than five years of age.
Cholera infantum had taken their little boy, John. Mary would never forget his extreme distress as vomiting and diarrhea drained his life so quickly, his feverish lips cracking like parchment, his skin becoming translucent until she could trace his veins and see his heart thumping below his heaving chest.
Not long after John was buried a near neighbor lost her not quite one-year-old when he choked on a piece of seed corn. The frantic mother carried his lifeless body from home to home while screaming for someone to save her purple faced child. Anything and everything could happen to these defenseless babies. As she puts Addison Alanson to her breast Mary shivers, teeth chattering from childbirth strain and fatigue without hope or expectation of relief.
Author Bio
Alice Kay Hill is passionate about her Kansas heritage. She has published in Hobby Farms magazine and written an instruction manual title GROW TOPLESS: A Modified High Tunnel Design for Headache Free Extended-Season Gardening which is available on Amazon. UNDER A FULL MOON: The Last Lynching in Kansas is her first narrative non-fiction work.