By Gregg Andrews

A jury in November 1895 convicted Noble Shepard for the brutal shantyboat slayings of Lizzy Leahy and Thomas Morton (Gilroy) near the foot of Potomac Street at Christmas 1894, but the families and friends of the victims were denied justice. Shepard was sentenced to hang on April 22, 1896, but he appealed his conviction to the Missouri Supreme Court. While awaiting the outcome of his appeal, he occupied cell number 33 in the ground tier of cells in the notorious St. Louis jail. If Shepard needed an additional incentive to attempt an escape, one soon presented itself. From his window on February 21, 1896, he witnessed the gruesome, botched hanging of James Fitzgerald, who was convicted of murdering Anna Naessens, his sweetheart. When the rope broke, nearly 200 spectators gasped and pressed forward in horror, as if to free Fitzgerald from his tortured predicament. Police pushed them back while the team of executioners carried the half-strangled, shaking, hooded victim from the freezing temperatures of February into the morgue. Shortly, Fitzgerald raised up from the cold slab and calmly asked for a drink of water. Stunned authorities removed the hood, gave him water, and sent for a new rope. The second attempt to hang Fitzgerald, who proclaimed his innocence to the very end, was successful, but his heart did not stop beating until thirteen agonizing minutes after he dangled in the air with a rope around his neck.

Shaken by what he saw, Shepard hatched a plan to escape. The devastating cyclone that blew through St. Louis on May 27, 1896, damaged a wall of the jail and clogged the sewer system. Workers who were repairing the damage failed to secure a metal plate adequately in his cell that covered an old pipe to the sewer. They also neglected to cover the sewer manhole in the yard after finishing work at the end of the day. Somehow, Shepard managed to smuggle a fine saw into his cell. The noisy hammering by workers in the yard kept guards from hearing the grating sounds as Shepard sawed off the rivets from the metal plate in his cell wall. Someone tipped him off that the workers left the sewer manhole uncovered in the yard. About three o’clock in the morning on June 22, 1896, Shepard decided it was time for the escape. He removed the last of the rivets from the metal plate in his cell and squeezed himself into the sewer pipe. He wriggled through the pipe, which led into the yard. Then he climbed up out of the uncovered manhole and onto the scaffold. From the scaffold, Shepard leaped onto the roof of the morgue and down onto the street. Off he fled in a change of clothes left for him by friends on the river.

St. Louis city jailer Louis “Butch” Wagner became the butt of jokes and the focus of anger as newspapers and the public speculated about how Shepard pulled off the dramatic jailbreak. The jail was notorious for corruption on the part of its guards. Bribes, extortion, and brutality were quite common. Despite reported sightings of Shepard, reports of his recapture, a reward offered by the governor of Missouri, and anonymous tips from time to time, the confessed murderer of Leahy and Morton evaded the authorities. On October 2, 1924, the first of two letters claiming to be from Shepard reached the office of Missouri Governor Arthur M. Hyde. The fugitive offered to turn himself in if Hyde would promise not to hang him. After Hyde publicly refused, a second letter followed in which Shepard declined to turn himself in without the governor’s assurances. The double murderer went unpunished for two of the most brutal and shocking homicides in St. Louis history.