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| Jerry Boyd and his wife were offered a good paying job in Iowa City |
How does that old saying go? If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
Jerry Boyd learned that lesson the hard way back in 1860. Boyd, a free man of color, and his wife, Mary, lived in Galena, Illinois. From all accounts, Jerry was a hardworking man. Twenty years before that, he saved his money and purchased Mary from her previous owner, a man named Vandeventer in St. Louis.
Two men, George
Goodwin (also known as Wilder) and Peter Boulton offered them good paying jobs
if they would move to Iowa City.
A few days later,
Jerry and Mary Boyd, a fourteen-year-old mulatto girl who lived with them, a
younger white girl whom Mrs. Boyd was nursing, and Goodwin and Boulton were
headed west in a covered wagon.
On the third day out of Galena, they made camp about sixteen miles outside of Iowa City. Something about Goodwin and Boulton triggered Boyd’s suspicions. He grabbed a revolver and loaded it while the two men watched.
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| Something about Goodwin and Boulton triggered Jerry's suspicions. so he grabbed his gun |
The next morning, Goodwin and Boulton went off on their own to talk. When they got back, Goodwin walked up to Jerry, looked down at him, and whispered, “Jerry, I am afraid of you.” Then he pulled out a pistol and shot him in the chest, and again in the head, while his wife and the mulatto girl watched. That was on September 30, 1860.
After they killed
Jerry Boyd, the men took the three women south to St. Louis, where they
attempted to sell them into slavery. The deal for Mrs. Boyd and the
fourteen-year-old mulatto girl who traveled with them was $1700. Before the
transaction could be completed, Mary told the slave trader that the men
kidnapped them and killed her husband. Luckily for her, he was an honest man.
He delayed the transaction long enough to check with the authorities in Galena.
The Mayor of Galena
sent Mr. Weigley and Mr. Hughlett to identify the women. Goodwin and Boulton
were held in the jail at St. Charles pending the arrival of the men from
Galena.
About the same time
this was happening, Jerry Boyd’s body was discovered along the roadside, three
miles west of Solon, near the residence of Shroeder De Vault. The body was
severely decayed and well chewed by Mr.
De Vault’s hogs. The skull was badly
fractured, and other portions of the remains showed signs of a violent end.
Goodwin shot Jerry in the chest and head, killing him instantly
It turned out the Boyds weren’t the people kidnapped by Goodwin and Boulton. In August 1860, they kidnapped Mary Baker of Dubuque using the same ploy. They told her they had a good-paying job for her in Iowa City.
The men from Galena
identified Mary Boyd and the two girls and took them back to Galena. They also
took Mary Baker back to her home in Dubuque.
The authorities in
Missouri tossed Boulton in the caboose in
St. Charles. Goodwin was taken to
Hannibal, Missouri, by train. He bided his time and escaped by jumping out the
window of a train car moving at thirteen miles per hour.
From the sound of
it, both men escaped justice. By law, Negroes were property in 1860, not
people, and as such, they had no standing in the legal system.
Abraham Lincoln
would soon change that.
Stuff like this is what I always end up chasing—the little lines in old newspapers and magazines, the parts most books skip over.
I pulled a bunch of those stories together into Iowa Crime Time if you want more of it.
And if you just like reading this kind of thing, Buy me a Big Gulp / Support Retro Iowa
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