First Posted: 2/16/2015
HARDIN COUNTY — As a boy in the mid-19th century, Alpheus Minerd was judged “peculiar” by some of his Wood County neighbors.
After the Civil War, during which he was captured and imprisoned, Minerd became increasingly peculiar. He would spend most of two decades in asylums — from which he routinely escaped — and eventually become estranged from his family.
The summer of 1903 found him living with another Civil War veteran in a shack near the northwest corner of the Scioto Marsh in Hardin County.
His companion, William Nichols, was from the mixed-race Melungeon community of Carmel in Highland County. Newspapers of the day described him variously as colored, or negro, or half-breed or mulatto. Carl Drumm in his “Complete History of the Scioto Marsh” said Nichols was one of the marsh’s “more colorful disturbers of the peace.”
Like Minerd, Nichols had done his share of wandering since leaving his wife a quarter century earlier. Minerd and Nichols got by on a Civil War pension, which Minerd won after a long legal battle centered on exactly when Minerd went crazy, and by collecting ginseng in the marsh. In their spare time, they drank — a lot.
Drinking is what they were doing in Alger on July 28, 1903. Around mid-morning that day they started walking east along the Erie railroad tracks. “About two miles out of McGuffey, at the edge of Shadley Woods, the two men stopped to rest. Both were drunk,” Drumm wrote. “A card game was started and when Nichols won Minerd’s gold watch, a fight ensued. When it was over Minerd lay dead on the ground, stabbed and shot.” His body was found several days later.
On Aug. 1, 1903, under the headline “The Time Was Ripe — And a Half-Breed Took the Life of His Boon Companion,” the Lima Times-Democrat wrote, “Today the sheriff and marshal of McGuffey, with a posse, are scouring the county in hopes of surrounding the suspected murderer, and if he is caught, he may have to face the vengeance of an offended community.”
The newspaper speculated that Nichols “was of a temperament, probably owing to his mixed blood, which kept men aloof from him and he had few associates. Minard (sic) was 65 years of age and took kindly to Nichols who was only five years his senior. They lived together in the cabin, and seldom saw other people, but it appears now that Nichols was only waiting for a chance to play the Mr. Hyde.”
On Aug. 5, 1903, the Times-Democrat reported Nichols had been “run to earth” at the home of a niece in Highland County and was being held in the Kenton Jail. He almost didn’t make it.
“There was considerable excitement on the return as the news of Nichols arrest spread and he narrowly escaped lynching at Belle Center, where a mob of 200 had gathered,” the Times-Democrat reported. “The train pulled out amid the yells of ‘shoot him,’ ‘hang him,’ but Nichols did not flinch, even going so far as to fling a profane epithet at an old acquaintance who yelled to the prisoner that they had a rope outside for him.”
Once in Kenton, “He was marched up through town under the curious gaze of many people. He walked along steadily though, and the only uneasiness expressed by him was that he kept winding his clinched hands in the handcuffs. He spoke pleasantly to those he recognized. Many people from the marsh came to see him taken up.”
On Aug. 12, 1903, Hardin County Coroner E.S. Protzman issued a report on Minerd’s death. After describing a pistol wound to the right side of his face, a stab wound to the left lung cavity and numerous lacerations produced by “some blunt instrument,” Protzman wrote that, after hearing testimony, “I further find that Alphus Minard (sic) came to his death by violence inflicted by one Wm. Nichols.”
The coroner’s report, according to the Times-Democrat, seemed to “downhearten” Nichols, who told the paper, “Well, that man writin’ it that way can’t make it so, can it. He says something that ain’t so. It’s a pile of lies. No man saw me kill that man.”
The jury believed the coroner. “William Nichols, the negro charged with the murder of A. Minerd, at McGuffey, along in the summer, was found guilty in the Hardin county courts in the first degree, the jury being out sixteen hours and making no recommendation of mercy,” the Allen County Republican Gazette reported Oct. 30, 1903.
The following day, the Mansfield News Journal reported that Nichols “who awaits death in the electric chair, tried to commit suicide by drinking a solution of match heads and water. … He will probably recover.” He did and spent an eventful 13 months on death row at the Ohio Penitentiary.
On May 7, 1904, the Emporia Gazette in Kansas ran a story on Nichols’ reunion with a daughter, Mamie, he had not seen in 30 years. “She recently read a newspaper reference to her father’s sad fate and at once wrote,” the Gazette reported. “Then, at the invitation of the father, she visited him in the annex (death row).”
The Newark Advocate reported Aug. 16, 1904, that another death row inmate, “Dutch” Miller, was “awakened by screams from Nichols, who cried, ‘For God’s sake take Knapp off, he is trying to choke me.’” Not surprising behavior from a man nicknamed “Strangler” Knapp, who was sentenced from Hamilton County for “multi-wife” murders. In mid-September, it was Nichols who attacked another death row inmate, Hermann Hamilton.
In early December 1904, the state board of pardons rejected Nichols’ appeal for a commutation of sentence. Ohio Gov. Myron T. Herrick followed suit.
On Dec. 6, 1904, the Republican Gazette ran a story in which Nichols admitted killing Minerd. Nichols said he and Minerd “gambled every day” and were “pretty drunk” on July 28, 1903. After winning Minerd’s watch in the card game, he said, Minerd “picked a quarrel.”
“He hit me on the left arm with a club — here you can feel for yourself — and then pulled a gun. Four times he shot at me, one bullet going through my shirt sleeve. The others went wide. To save myself I hit him in the head with a big rock and then shot at him. The first bullet missed but the second killed him. I left him there on the ground and never saw the body again.”
Nichols was accused of killing Minerd for the gold watch and $100 in pension money.
“I tell you it was self-defense. He would have killed me,” Nichols told the newspaper.
On Dec. 9, 1904, Nichols was executed. “No slip or untoward happening attended the execution of William Nichols in the execution chamber at midnight,” the Times Democrat wrote. “Like its prototype, the thunderbolt, the artificial current drove life out of his brain in an infinitesimal period of time death resulting instantaneously.
“Nichols was led into the chamber at two minutes past midnight. It was clear that the unfortunate man had no conception of his horrible situation. Long confinement and horrid practical joking on the part of his fellow murderers had shattered a mentality that was of low order.”
Nichols only request on entering the death chamber was “for whisky enough to drive the ghosts of fear out of his mind,” the Times Democrat wrote. He was pronounced dead at 12:12 a.m.
