When Mr. Swope Met Dr. Hyde

Thomas Swope

A classic plot device in murder mystery novels is when the rich, elderly head of a family announces that he or she is updating their will.  Naturally, all hell subsequently breaks loose.

It is a great pity that Thomas Swope was evidently not a connoisseur of such books.  It might have saved him from disaster.

Swope was born in Kentucky in 1827.  When he was thirty, he moved to Kansas City, where he immediately saw the area’s potential for growth.  He snapped up every bit of real estate he could get his hands on, eventually owning most of the land which is modern Kansas City.  From subdividing his land and reselling it to others, his prescience soon made him an extremely rich man.  As so many wealthy entrepreneurs do, he “gave back” to the community--and got himself good publicity in the bargain--by donating generously to hospitals, civic organizations, and the local Humane Society.  He gave the city 1,300 acres of land which became the massive Swope Park, which still remains one of the largest municipal parks in the country.  (It must be said that cynics mutter that Swope’s motive for this particular gift was a desire to avoid paying property taxes on the undeveloped land.)

Swope was a shy, reserved man who never married.  He lived alone for much of his life until, in his later years, he moved into the Independence, Missouri mansion which had been owned by his late brother Logan Swope.  There, he had plenty of companionship in the form of Logan’s widow Margaret and her seven children.  (However, he spent much of his time alone in his upstairs bedroom, drinking and smoking cigars.)

The Swope mansion

As Swope aged, his thoughts naturally turned to how he would dispose of his $3.6 million estate.  He drew up a will leaving generous bequests of $140,000 (about $4 million in 2024 money) to each of his nieces and nephews, with the rest of his money going to various charities.  If any of the beneficiaries died unmarried and childless, their share of the estate would be divided among the survivors.  However, late in 1909, just a few years after writing this will, Swope began expressing a change of heart.  He made no secret of the fact that he was now thinking that the charities should be getting a greater share of his fortune, with his nearest and dearest accordingly getting much less.

If you wish to find a reason for Swope’s sudden reversal, it might be wise to look at the other major figure in our little tale:  31-year-old Kansas City physician Bennett Clark Hyde.  Hyde was a good-looking fellow, with a suave manner that delighted the ladies.  He sang beautifully and was fond of reciting Shakespeare’s soliloquies.  Alas, Bennett balanced out these attractive qualities by being a complete dirtbag.  He had a history of charming elderly women out of their life savings.  In 1898, he was arrested on the charge of hiring a gang of grave-robbers to procure corpses for the local medical college.  (He somehow managed to talk his way out of that trouble.)  When serving as Kansas City’s police surgeon, he was accused of physically abusing Annie Clemmons, a woman he was supposedly treating for a morphine overdose.  (The scandal caused him to be discharged from his position.)

In 1903, Hyde met Thomas Swope’s 23-year-old niece Frances.  Frances apparently didn’t know or didn’t care about Hyde’s unfragrant past, because before long, Frances was hopelessly infatuated.  When Margaret Swope--evidently a better judge of character than her daughter--refused to allow Frances to marry Hyde, the young couple eloped to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they were wed in June 1905.  The infuriated Margaret cut off all communication with her errant daughter.

The newlyweds remained family outcasts until October 1907, when Margaret’s brother was badly injured in a mining accident.  For reasons that frankly completely escape me, it was Hyde that Margaret turned to for her sibling’s medical care.  After that, Mr. and Mrs. Hyde were both accepted back into the family fold.  Thomas Swope bought the young couple a house, and thanks to his influence, Hyde was made president of the Jackson County Medical Society.

After the prodigal couple’s return, things seemed to jog along quietly for the Swope clan.  And then Thomas Swope began dropping those comments about revising his will.  Soon afterwards, on October 1, 1909, Swope’s cousin and closest friend, J. Moss Hunton, suffered a stroke.  Hyde and the family doctor, George Twyman, were immediately summoned.  The two physicians decided on a course of bloodletting--a slightly antiquated practice even then, but still occasionally used.  Hyde made the incision, and Hunton’s blood began to flow.

That was not considered the alarming part.  The alarming part was that once Hyde began bleeding his patient, he did not seem inclined to stop.  Even though the Swopes--including Frances--began to express unease about the amount of blood Hunton was losing, Hyde did not bandage his patient until about two quarts of blood had been removed.  Minutes later, Hunton died.  Tragic, of course, very tragic, but, well, these things happen.

Two days after Hunton’s demise, Thomas Swope’s personal nurse, Pearl Virginia Keller, brought Swope his breakfast, along with a digestive pill Hyde had prescribed.  About twenty minutes after finishing his meal, Swope suddenly broke into a cold sweat, and began shaking violently.  He told Keller, “Oh my God, I wish I were dead.  I wish I had not taken that medicine.”

Those were his last words.  Swope fell into a coma, from which he never emerged.  The 81-year-old died that night.

Two sudden deaths in a family within 48 hours is unusual enough for people’s minds to wander in some uncomfortable directions.  Swope’s kinfolk recalled Thomas’ plans to change his will.  They reflected on the fact that J. Moss Hunton had been the executor of Swope’s current will, the one leaving his fortune firmly in the hands of his family.  Nurse Keller found herself dwelling on how, before Hunton’s body had turned cold, Hyde was volunteering to be Swope’s new executor.

And then it emerged that, two weeks before Thomas Swope ate his final breakfast, Hyde made two calls to a local drugstore.  In the first call, he put in an order for Fairchild’s Holadin, a common digestive compound.  In the second, he asked for several capsules of potassium cyanide.

Despite all this interesting information, the Swopes--apparently not fond of making a fuss over life’s little issues--went on as usual.  Then, just one month after Hunton and Swope died, tragedy again struck the family.  Two of Margaret Swope’s children, Margaret and Chrisman, fell ill with typhoid.  The dread disease quickly spread throughout the whole household, including the servants.  The family was so afflicted, they were forced to bring in not just doctors Hyde and Twyman, but five nurses.  No one else in Independence had come down with typhoid for many months.  The outbreak was exclusive to the Swopes.  Odd, that.  The family's water supply was uncontaminated, so it was a mystery how everyone became sickened.

31-year-old Chrisman was the sickest of the family, with a high fever.  On December 5, Hyde gave him a pill that he said would control the fever.  In a sense, it did.  Within half-an-hour, Chrisman went into convulsions and fell into a coma.  By the following night, he was dead.

When a bacteriologist named Dr. Edward Stewart heard of the plague striking the Swope family, he felt uneasy.  Typhoid was a common ailment at the time, but it was rarely fatal, especially for young people like Chrisman.  Dr. Stewart had not forgotten that in early November 1909, Hyde had requested his help in setting up his own laboratory.  To get Hyde started on his research, Stewart gave him samples of common bacteria--including salmonella typhi, which causes…typhoid fever.  One day when he knew Hyde was out of town, Stewart went into Hyde’s lab, just to see what he could see.  He was appalled to find that Hyde’s entire supply of typhoid culture had disappeared.

While Stewart was playing amateur detective, Nurse Keller was becoming increasingly unnerved by Dr. Hyde’s way with a sickbed.  She, as well as the other nurses, were particularly troubled by Hyde giving the patients frequent shots of strychnine.  In those days, strychnine was given in small doses as a stimulant, but the nurses felt that with the Swope invalids, such measures were unnecessary.  Keller and the other nurses went to Margaret Swope and stated flatly that if Dr. Hyde was not banished from the house, they were quitting en masse.  Margaret agreed to their terms.  It did not go unnoticed that as soon as the patients ceased to be treated by Hyde, they began to recover.

The Swopes had been hoping to avoid a public scandal, but after what must have been a singularly grim Christmas, the family decided they had no choice but to have Chrisman and Thomas Swope exhumed and autopsied.  These examinations found that both bodies were chock-full of strychnine.  When this news reached the ears of the public, along with the revelation that Thomas’ nephew-in-law was the prime suspect in their deaths, newspaper editors across the country wept with joy and slept with sweet dreams of lurid headlines and booming circulations.

In February 1910, a coroner’s jury affirmed that both Swope men had died of strychnine poisoning.  The following month, a grand jury indicted Hyde on eleven charges, including first degree murder and (in the case of J. Moss Hunton) manslaughter.  He was also accused of poisoning a number of other Swopes with typhoid germs.  

Hyde during his trial

Hyde’s trial--solely for the alleged murder of Thomas Swope--began in April, 1910.  The prosecution’s argument was exquisitely simple and glaringly obvious: Hyde wanted wife Frances to split the Swope loot with as few people as possible.  Accordingly, he plotted a wholesale massacre of his in-laws.  The defense was equally straightforward.  Hyde--with his wife remaining loyally at his side--asserted his complete innocence.  He declared that all the incriminating testimony against him was either taken out of context or a simple pack of lies.  He explained that he had bought capsules full of poison solely to kill some dogs.  After deliberating for less than three days, the jury found him guilty.  However, his lawyer immediately filed an appeal with the Missouri Supreme Court.  The Court overturned the verdict, ruling that the prosecution had not found “causation” (that is to say, they failed to prove that Hyde’s actions directly and deliberately led to Thomas Swope’s death.)  The Court also disapproved of the fact that, although Hyde was essentially on trial only for the demise of Thomas Swope, evidence relating to the other deaths was allowed to be presented to the jury.

The state of Missouri resolved to try, try again.  However, the second effort to convict Hyde abruptly ended on a bizarre note, when a juror became homesick and fled the hotel where the jury was sequestered.  The judge declared the escapee to be "mentally unsound" and declared a mistrial.  Trial number three had a hung jury.  After that, Margaret Swope--who had spent $250,000 trying to get Hyde convicted--threw up her hands and gave up.  Early in 1917, Hyde was officially a free man.

Frances divorced Hyde in 1920.  She gained full custody of their two children, and reconciled with her family.  She told her divorce attorney that she wanted nothing more to do with her husband, as he had become increasingly “sullen and irritable.”  However, she maintained her conviction that he was not a murderer.  Hyde moved back to his hometown of Lexington, Missouri, where he worked as a truck driver and mechanic before returning to the practice of medicine until his death in 1934.  As far as is known, he left no further suspicious body counts in his wake.

The Swope Mystery has remained a well-known part of Kansas City history, with a solid number of people willing to argue that Hyde was an innocent man who unfairly suffered a seven-year legal ordeal.  However, I suspect that Frances Swope Hyde made a very fatal elopement.