Murder, Vengeance, and Castration in 1850s Kentucky
Accusations led to horrific retribution.
In September 1854, James O. Frazer returned home to his farm in Lexington, Kentucky. The Irish-born, thirty-year-old farmer had spent the previous five months in New York, selling cattle. That journey would be his last.
“Mr. Frazer was in fine health and in the full vigor of middle age,” the New York Times reported, “but he had not been under his own roof more than about half an hour before he was a corpse. What is most extraordinary, he came to his death suddenly and by unnatural means.”
Lewis Castleman, who was Frazer’s neighbor and business partner, had taken Frazer home that evening. There, the two men met George Gregg, a twenty-four-year-old overseer who had been running the farm during Frazer’s absence.
Castleman said goodbye and returned home. Forty minutes later, Castleman’s brother appeared on horseback. Frazer had shot himself, his brother exclaimed. Castleman immediately leapt on his brother’s horse and galloped to Frazer’s farm.
When Castleman arrived, Gregg met him on the property. Inside the house, Castleman found Frazer’s bloody corpse lying “upon a lounge.” The dead man’s blood was also spattered across several walls.
Gregg told Castleman that Frazer, Frazer’s wife Elizabeth, and the Frazer’s ten-year-old daughter, Anna, had been sitting on the front porch when they saw rats scurry across the yard. Gregg said that Frazer went inside to get a gun to shoot the rodents. When Frazer returned to the porch, Gregg claimed, Frazer tripped and fell. The gun accidently fired, and the bullet passed through Frazer’s hand before ranging into his left side. A newspaper later reported that “Frazer was shot through the wrist and stomach and liver.”
Grievously injured, Frazer nearly toppled off the porch. Gregg caught him, and, a medical report later explained, “supported him through the hall, and into the dining room, where the struggles of the dying man became so frantic that [Gregg] let him go and left the room.” Frazer died within minutes.
When a coroner’s jury investigated the shooting, Gregg, Elizabeth Frazer, and Frazer’s daughter all told the same story: Frazer had fallen and shot himself. When news of Frazer’s death spread around Lexington, however, residents grew suspicious. “The public mind, in the meantime, became much excited;” the New York Times reported, “rumor was rife.”
Local gossip contended that Gregg and Elizabeth Frazer had engaged in an affair. “Previous to this time the neighbors had suspected improper intimacies between the two,” a newspaper reported, “and it is supposed that it was for the purpose of getting Frazer out of the way, so as to render a marriage feasible, that the awful deed was accomplished.”
Neighborhood chatter aside, grand jury testimony made authorities wary of the circumstances surrounding Frazer’s death. First, Castleman said that Gregg had changed clothes after the shooting. When Castleman had left Frazer at the farm, Gregg was wearing work clothes. When Castleman returned immediately after Frazer’s death, however, Gregg “was dressed in clean clothes — his pants being white and perfectly clean, with the ironing marks plain upon them.” The burned remnants of clothing, including charred buttons, were later found in the fireplace of a slave cabin on the property. It was suspected that Gregg had burned his bloody clothes.
Frazer had supposedly shot himself on the porch, yet there was no blood found outside. There were, however, suspicious bloodstains in the house, which Gregg claimed were caused when Frazer dragged his injured hand across interior walls when Gregg carried the dying man inside. The carpet was also missing from the dining room floor, and a postmortem examination revealed contusions on Frazer’s corpse. The dead man’s forehead was badly bruised, as if someone had struck him, and his neck showed possible signs of having been choked.
The acrobatics involved with Frazer supposedly shooting himself also bred mistrust. “Frazer was a fine sportsman,” a reporter wrote, “and the story of his stumble and accidental shot involves the idea that he had caught the gun near the muzzle with his right hand and had the muzzle pointing toward his left side, with his left hand pressed to his side. A more improbable story never was invented.” It was a nineteenth century magic bullet theory.
With evidence mounting against Gregg and Elizabeth, and with rumors of an affair persisting, authorities arrested the suspected lovers and accused them of murder. “Public opinion with almost entire unanimity pronounced them guilty,” a reporter wrote.
Bond was set at $500. Elizabeth paid and was released to await trial. Gregg, however, remained in jail. Five months later, they were tried together in the Fayette County Circuit Court.
“The case excited intense interest from the commencement to the close,” a Kentucky newspaper explained, “and during its argument to the jury the court house was crowded to its utmost capacity, the larger portion of the audience being ladies. The utmost decorum pervaded the vast throng during the entire trial.”
When evidence was presented, however, the jury could not reach a decision. Seven jurors voted to acquit Gregg while five found him guilty. Elizabeth’s verdict was also divided. Four jurors voted to convict, while eight chose to acquit.
The hung jury meant that Gregg and Elizabeth faced a second trial, which commenced in June 1855. Because the proceedings “excited great attention,” the court had to find unbiased jurors from nearby Bourbon County.
Although the prosecution made a strong case that Gregg and Elizabeth had murdered James Frazer, a critical witness appeared for the defense. During the second trial, the Frazers’ eleven-year-old daughter, Anna, testified that her father had fallen and shot himself. With this testimony, the jury found Gregg and Elizabeth not guilty. Were it not for Anna Frazer’s testimony, the accused would have likely been found guilty of murder and hanged.
While African American men were more likely to be condemned in Kentucky during the 1850s, the public execution of whites was not unknown. Lexington was no exception, and those found guilty of premeditated murder, regardless of race, could be put to death for their crimes.
In 1851, for example, Joseph Lyon of Lexington disappeared while he was on his way to south-central Kentucky to buy cattle. Four enslaved men were later implicated, and authorities were led to Lyon’s corpse, which was buried near a cornfield. Found guilty, the enslaved men were hanged in Lexington during the summer of 1851.
Three years later, an insult led to another Lexington hanging. In 1854, a married woman was shopping at a confectionary store when a young clerk patted her on the back and asked, “What will you have, pretty?” When she turned around, the clerk realized his error — he had mistaken her for someone else. Although he apologized profusely for his familiarity, the woman was offended. She left the store and told her husband. Determined “to avenge her insult,” her husband returned to the store and shot and killed the worker, who was hiding behind the counter. The husband was arrested for murder and found guilty. The Louisville Daily Courier noted that although killings sometimes went unpunished, “the Lexington jury was awake to the necessity of arresting the flowing tide of lawless violence which has streamed too long . . . and the furious avenger has been sentenced to be hung.” Executed in front of a large crowd, the condemned man “sung and prayed” on the scaffold before his sentence was carried out. One reporter wrote that he “died penitent for the past and hopeful for the future.”
While the four enslaved men and the clerk’s murderer were condemned, the testimony of young Anna Frazer saved Gregg and Elizabeth from the hangman’s noose. After the trial, Elizabeth and Anna returned to the farm where James Frazer had died. Gregg, however, disappeared. While some Lexington residents believed that Gregg had left town, others suspected that he was living secretly at Frazer’s farm.
Other than the accused killers, Anna was the only person who knew what had really happened to her father. Was James’s death a horrible accident, or did Elizabeth lie on the witness stand to save her mother from the scaffold?
The girl, however, would never again repeat the tale. In the winter of 1856, less than a year after the second trial, tragedy struck. “Her clothes took fire,” a newspaper wrote, “and before assistance could be rendered she was burnt so badly that she died in thirty-six hours after the accident.”
With the second member of the Frazer family dead — and this one the young witness to her father’s likely murder — residents immediately became suspicious. “Little Anna was burned to death last winter by her clothes taking fire,” a reporter remarked, “and many persons do not hesitate to express their belief that the murderers of the father had something to do with the untimely death of the daughter.”
In Gregg and Elizabeth’s defense, however, deaths caused by clothes catching fire were not necessarily uncommon. In December 22, 1871, for example, fifteen years after Anna’s death, an issue of the Kentucky Advocate published three articles about people suffering similar injuries. This included a woman from Danville, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy from Mt. Vernon, and an eighty-year-old woman from Lexington. Sadly, the boy and the elderly victim both died from their burns.
All eyes were again on Elizabeth Frazer and George Gregg. A newspaper contended that “we presume there are few who now entertain any doubt as to who were guilty of the murder of the unfortunate Frazer.”
Shortly after Anna’s death, Gregg miraculously resurfaced. Elizabeth then sold the farm where her husband and daughter had both died. She and Gregg promptly moved to Maysville, Kentucky, a town along the Ohio River, where they married.
The matrimony of the accused murderers — whose actions had bred rumors that they had killed James so that they could wed — enraged many people in Lexington. For area residents, the verdict was clear: Gregg and Elizabeth had escaped justice.
“The public sentiment was shocked with this remarkable recklessness,” one writer noted, “which seemed to amply confirm the suspicions that were so common in 1854. But, as the law could not punish these supposed offenders, they should have been unmolested by violence.”
They did not, however, remain unmolested. James Frazer’s friends and family remembered his brutal, untimely death. They held Gregg responsible, and they would make him pay.
In his landmark book Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes that “revenge against familial and community enemies” was a major facet of “the formulation of Southern evaluations of conduct.” Taking the law into one’s own hands, some Kentuckians believed, was necessary when justice had been abrogated. Especially when the crime involved one’s own kin.
The lynching of accused criminals or men who had dodged a sentence was familiar to Kentuckians from this period, especially when the accused were enslaved African Americans.
In my latest book, Murder on the Ohio Belle, I highlight several examples of mob rule and vigilante justice that occurred in the Bluegrass State during the 1850s. One of the most horrific instances occurred in Louisville in 1857, when three enslaved men were acquitted of murdering a family.
Although the slaves had been found not guilty, authorities confined them to the Louisville jail to protect them from an angry mob. The jail, however, was overrun. One enslaved man cut his own throat to avoid the wrath of the mob. The other three slaves were dragged outside and hanged before their corpses were burned. The Louisville Daily Courier lamented that “Louisville was disgraced yesterday by another mob, which triumphantly rode over the laws, and satiated their vengeance . . . It is a fearful state of things, and conclusively shows the inefficiency of the public authorities.”
The newlywed Greggs would have also been familiar with vigilantism. While they were living in Maysville, mob violence took place ten miles up the Ohio River in Manchester, Ohio. In December 1856, an African American man named Bill reputedly raped a white woman named Morris. The attacker, who had been injured during the assault, was recognized and seized by a mob. They hanged him on an island on the Ohio River. The rope, however, snapped, and Bill survived. Although he was placed in jail, another mob broke in, returned him to the island, and hanged him “until he was dead.” They buried Bill in an unmarked grave on the island.
Mob violence also took hold in Lexington. In January 1856, residents “seized and gagged” a school principal named Brady after he wrote a letter to an Ohio newspaper that condemned local slavery. Called “calumnious in its character,” the letter was supposedly “filled with unwarranted and coarse allusions to some of our most esteemed citizens.” To punish Brady, Lexingtonians shaved his head and covered his face with “tar and varnish.” Because the varnish was black, this punishment was surely planned to cause both extreme discomfort and to cover Brady with a ghoulish blackface to mock his abolitionist sentiments. The Louisville Daily Courier said that they were not supportive of extralegal violence, yet “the action of those who engaged in this matter cannot be condemned.” Lexington residents, therefore, could be prone to mob rule. This propensity ultimately disfigured George Gregg.
In April 1857, a writer proclaimed that “In an evil hour, some misguided persons entered the premises of Mr. and Mrs. Grigg [sic], and inflicted upon him that penalty which Origen, the great Christian writer, inflicted upon himself through a mistaken reading of Matthew xix:12. We deeply regret that any one conceived himself the avenger of that, for the punishment of which the law felt itself powerless, through lack of proof.”
Origen, a third century theologian from Alexandria, reputedly castrated himself after a misreading of the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19, verse 12. It reads, “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”
Origen, therefore, castrated himself “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Gregg, however, suffered this fate at the hands of an angry mob. Newspapers across the country reported that “a few days ago Gregg was taken out of his house and thoroughly castrated, by a party of men supposed to be from Lexington.”
James Frazer had likely been murdered by a man who desired his wife. Frazer’s eleven-year-old daughter, Anna, died tragically — and some said suspiciously — from a fire. A mob emasculated the man whom they suspected of causing both of those deaths.
While it is unknown what ultimately happened to Elizabeth and George Gregg, census records reveal that a couple of that name lived in northern Kentucky in the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1880 census, however, this couple had a sixteen-year-old daughter named Elizabeth. Had this George Gregg — listed as a laborer — been the one who was castrated, having a daughter of this age would have been impossible, unless they had adopted the child. Otherwise, he may not have been so “thoroughly castrated” after all.
George Gregg’s tombstone, however, reveals that Covington, Kentucky, is likely the final resting place of the accused murderer. Although census records from 1870 and 1880 list contradictory ages (he is listed as being 45 years old in 1870 and 46 in 1880), census takers were not always accurate. They could make mistakes or had to estimate ages if they could not speak with anyone living in the household. Because it is likely that a man who had once been attacked by a mob wished to remain anonymous, Gregg probably did not answer questions from census takers. Therefore, a neighbor may have provided Gregg’s age. Inaccuracies are not surprising in this instance. Twice tried for murder and mutilated by vigilantes, Gregg would have kept to himself and been wary of strangers.
Regardless of these census discrepancies, when this George Gregg died in Covington in February 1903 of heart failure, his death certificate lists him as a widower. Buried in Covington’s Linden Grove Cemetery, his tombstone lists his birth year as 1831, making him twenty-four-years old in 1854, the year that James Frazer died. When George Gregg was accused of murdering Frazer, he was the exact same age. It is unknown what happened to Elizabeth Frazer Gregg.
Although Elizabeth’s fate is unclear, one writer correctly summarized the events surrounding her first husband’s death and the subsequent violence. It was “a tragedy . . . which almost transcends belief, it is of so horrid a nature.” So was the fate of many of the participants in this brutal episode.
Stuart W. Sanders is the author of four books, including Murder on the Ohio Belle, published by the University Press of Kentucky.
