MURDER, EXECUTION, AND AFTERMATH

Ron Allen

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Punishment for crimes has obviously changed when compared to the early days in Knoxville, at least in terms of severity. One early example is found in John Sevier's journal, where it is mentioned that a man named Robert Parker was executed on February 27, 1797, "for the crime of burglary". Certainly that seems to have been a severe punishment for the type of crime committed. Another example appears later in Sevier's journal, where the crime was of a more dastardly nature. While any punishment that results in the death of the convicted party obviously results in finality, the methodology in those days seems rather cruel, if not ghastly, by most standards today. Sevier recorded that on August 4, 1801, a black man who had been convicted of murder was burned to death, "agreeable to the sentence of yesterday", and that the execution had taken place "in the presence of a great number of witnesses".

Such types of punishment were thankfully a thing of the past in Knoxville by the late nineteenth century. But sometimes illegal executions occurred, when mobs took the law into their own hands, and sometimes a lynching would take place. This is the story of one such incident that occurred in Knoxville in 1885, and the belated aftermath, several years later.

George Maines worked for Cowan, McClung and Company. He had returned from a business trip to Knoxville on a night train on September 1, 1885. At the suggestion of a traveling companion, he stopped off a local tavern for a drink or two. However, he become inebriated and decided to make a night of it on the town. He met and hooked up with three local reportedly unsavory characters -- Lee Sellers, Sam Doggett and Sam Hartley. The foursome went to another bar, probably in the Bowery or the Cripple Creek district, where they ate, drank, and played pool. Maines paid the entire bill, flashing a large roll of cash and twenty dollar gold pieces in the process. Somewhere along the way, a local woman named Lizzie Hickman joined the group, and at some point they wandered into East Knoxville. Later information made it obvious that at some time another man named Ike Wright had joined the group. The following afternoon at about three PM, Maines' lifeless body was found, about a mile and a half east of the city, near the McCammon place.

Police arrested Lizzie Hickman, who witnesses said had been with Maines the previous night. Later that day, based on additional tips, the police took Lee Sellers into custody, from the home of his parents in Shieldstown, in East Knoxville. The following day both Hickman and Sellers waived a preliminary examination and were remanded to jail awaiting the action of the criminal court. That same day, tips revealed that another local character named Ike Wright had also been involved in the murder, and the next day a warrant was issued and Wright was arrested. Wright pleaded not guilty at a preliminary hearing, when it was determined that insufficient evidence had been found to bind him over, and he was released.

That night, excitement filled the downtown area, instigated by a number of friends of George Maines. Soon a sizeable congregation of angry men had gathered at Market Square and they began marching down to the Knoxville jail, where Lee Sellers was confined. The jail was located near Hill Avenue, in what was known as Jail Alley, between Hill and Main. Becoming louder as they approached the jail, a few of the men who were leading the mob stepped towards the jail house gate. They were told by the sheriff and his officers to stand back and disband, but instead several men came into the yard, then rushed inside the sheriff's office with drawn revolvers, secured the keys, and rushed into the jail house, directly to the cell where Sellers was being held. After a brief but futile resistance from Sellers, he was dragged from the jail house. The mob marched with the prisoner up Hill Avenue to the county bridge. Throwing a rope over one of the cross beams, they tightened the rope. Sellers was asked if he had anything to say. He first replied "No, I ain't got a damned word", he first said, but then added "I will tell you the fact, that I did not do the killing or get that money. Ike Wright is the man who shot him. I know you are going to kill me, but all I hate about that is that I have to die for something I didn't do". In the meantime, Sellers had managed to free himself from a makeshift handkerchief tied around his wrists and quickly lunged toward the bridge and scurried up the tightened rope. As soon as he made it to the top of the bridge shots rang out. Soon bullets filled the air. Sellers fell on top of the bridge and asked for water, but the mob kept firing until he fell or jumped into the river. His lifeless body was later found at the foot of a bridge pier.

Following the killing of Sellers, an inquest was held, resulting in the rather obvious verdict that Lee Sellers had met his death through mob violence. None of the men who were in the mob were accused of any crime. Apparently, "mob justice" had prevailed, and the murder of George Maines had been avenged. Or had it ?

Approximately ten years later, on the night of January 31, 1896, Lizzie Hickman was bedridden in Knoxville, her body wrecked with disease. Her remaining time on this sphere was in terms of hours, or at best a few days. Following the murder of Maines and the lynching of Sellers by the frenzied mob in Knoxville in 1885, she had given the confession that implicated Lee Sellers as the killer of George Maines. But she then had quickly left town for Kentucky. While there, she had lived in Williamsburg, where she made her living as a lady of the evening. She had returned to Knoxville, after reportedly killing a fellow prostitute during an argument. After returning to Knoxville, she continued to ply her trade as a prostitute, in addition to becoming a full fledged alcoholic. Her normal place of operation was on Central street, in the Bowery district, the primary location of Knoxville's houses of ill repute in those times.

On that night in January, 1896, Lizzie continuously ranted and raved about the murder of George Maines, claiming that Lee Sellers had not been the guilty party, and said that she should have originally told the truth and maybe could have saved Lee Sellers' life. Even so, for reasons known only to her, then on what soon would be her death bed early on the following cold February morning, she remained steadfast in her resolve not to reveal the name of the true murderer.

Lizzie Hickman died at three o'clock AM on the morning, on February 1, 1896, at a Central street brothel. She never revealed the name of the person she claimed had murdered George Maines. But in a revelation of events that had previously been unreported locally, it was learned that Sam Doggett, who had been one of the men with Maines on the night of the murder and claimed to have witnessed the crime, had confessed to a relative on his own death bed eight months earlier that it had been Ike Wright, not Lee Sellers, who had killed George Maines. According to newspaper reports, at the time of the murder several persons in town had suspected that Wright had committed the crime all along. That revelation, together with the statement made by Lee Sellers just before he was killed by the Knoxville mob, and Lizzie Hickman's dying utterances, obviously cast doubt on the case. In view of those new developments, it seems likely that perhaps some of the men in town who had been a part of the mob back in 1885 were more than a bit uneasy about such revelations.

Various reports were circulated concerning the whereabouts of Ike Wright in 1896. Some sources said he had moved to Kentucky following the murder. Others said that he had since died. Yet another source reported that Wright was then living in Memphis, Tennessee. The reporter in the Journal suggested "proper investigation might yet bring the guilty one to justice, since both deceased parties said that Lee Sellers was not the guilty one".

I have made no attempt to search through later newspapers to determine whether or not any attempt was ever made to question Ike Wright -- assuming that he was actually alive and living in Memphis in 1896 -- concerning the 1885 murder of George Maines, either by officials from Knoxville or those in Memphis. In any event, the information revealed in 1896 obviously seem to reveal the distinct possibility that Lee Sellers was killed by a Knoxville mob in 1885 for a crime that he didn't commit.

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