State v. Adams

339 Mo. 926 (1936)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

D and two accomplices broke into a gas station at 11 p.m. and had carried out and deposited on the ground certain articles of property which they were stealing, and had gone back presumably for more loot when the Officer Green, together with Rodney Brown, city marshal, and two other men, drove up to the filling station. The three burglars fled across lots into a wooded section behind the station. Green and Brown followed in pursuit. Brown testified that Green was about twenty feet ahead of him and some fifty feet from what the witnesses called 'the fourth fence' when suddenly one gunshot was fired by someone straight ahead of Green who sagged down and then started to straighten up. Several more shots came from an oblique direction. From their rapid succession, it appeared they had been fired from an automatic shotgun. Green reeled in a semicircle for about fifteen feet, fell, and died without uttering a word. The burglars eluded pursuit, and D several miles further on threw the rifle and revolver he was carrying into a river. Green had numerous wounds upon the corpse caused by shot from a shotgun. There were some fifty of these across the chest from the lower ribs up to the shoulders, and half as many more over the face. They were mortal wounds from which death would result almost instantaneously. D was arrested in Arkansas, a few days later. D made a statement on his way back to Missouri. De volunteered to, and did, accompany the officers to the scene of the homicide and showed how it occurred. D told of the burglary of the filling station, of the approach of the officers, of his giving the alarm, and of the flight of the burglars. D admitted he carried a single-barrel shotgun and that when he was near the fourth fence he turned back and shot once, but said he elevated his gun and fired high, his purpose being merely to frighten whoever it was coming. In an actual recreation of the scene with D present, a single, fired shotgun shell was found. Over to the right some forty-five feet, four similar shells were found close together. All five were of the same size and kind. D said they came out of the same box and that all were loaded with No. 4 shot. Two or three trees at the place of the shooting had shot embedded in them. One of these was on a line from the point where the D told the officers he was standing when he fired, to the point where the deceased was at that time. The tree was not between the two men but was behind the deceased, and the shot were about three or four feet up the tree trunk. Another small sapling close to where Green fell had shot in it but they extended only several inches above the ground. D was convicted and appealed in part that the homicide was not committed in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of the burglary.