Mollie Korbel and John Gordon: North Dakota & Rhode Island

In 1888 in Wahpeton, Dakota Territory, 19-year-old Mollie Korbel was shot in a kitchen after refusing a deputy, and a mob hanged him. In Rhode Island, John Gordon was hanged in 1845 for the murder of mill owner Amasa Sprague; the state pardoned him in 2011.

Mollie Korbel, from an immigrant family, worked as a hired girl in the Richland County sheriff's house. Deputy Lee Elmer shot her on July 25, 1888, after she refused his proposal, and masked men took him from the jail past a crowd of about 1,000 and hanged him from a railroad bridge. No one in the mob was charged.

Amasa Sprague, a Rhode Island mill owner, was killed on a footbridge in Cranston on New Year's Eve 1843. John Gordon was tried before Chief Justice Job Durfee, who told the jury to weigh Yankee testimony above Irish testimony, and was hanged on February 14, 1845, the last execution in Rhode Island. Durfee's own notes surfaced in 2008 and the state pardoned Gordon in 2011.

Content note: a lynching, a young woman shot for saying no, a man beaten to death on a footbridge, and an execution.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 13.

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