Nebraska & Oregon: When the Wrong Man Was Punished

Season 40: America's 250th — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years. Tonight is a double feature:

Nebraska and Oregon. Two frontier murder convictions. Two men the justice system got wrong.

May 1876. A horse breeder is found killed with an axe in a barn loft in Seward, Nebraska. His brother Warren

Clough stands over the body — the first murder victim in Seward County history. Within weeks, the community

convicts Warren on nothing but circumstance. He is sentenced to hang. Fifteen years later, the prosecutor, the

judge, and the jurors who condemned him all petition for his release, admitting they punished the wrong man.

Then, in Portland, Oregon, 1894: a waterfront murder pins on "Bunko" Kelly, the city's most notorious shanghaier

— convicted not on evidence, but on a bow tie found near the body and a reputation too convenient to ignore.

The Victims

**Nathan Clough** was a horse breeder from Postville, Allamakee County, Iowa. He had followed homestead

land westward after the Civil War, building a trade that gave him standing among farmers and ranchers across

the Nebraska plains. Nathan arrived at the Blue Valley House hotel in Seward carrying a large sum from horse

sales. He slept near his animals in the barn, as he always did. That routine cost him his life. Nathan was killed with

an axe in the barn loft. His money was gone. He was the first murder victim in Seward County history.

**George W. Sayres** was an opium smuggler working Portland's waterfront. His background, origins, family, and

age at death are undocumented. He exists in the historical record only as a victim and a criminal. In 1894, Sayres

was hacked to death and his body thrown into the Willamette River. Whatever his crimes, he was murdered —

and if historians are right that the man convicted of killing him was framed, then Sayres's actual killer was never

identified.

The Crime

In Nebraska, suspicion fell on Warren Clough immediately. He discovered Nathan's body. He knew about the

money. There was an acknowledged tension between the brothers. No physical evidence connected Warren

to the killing. None. Warren employed at least two hired men — Jacob Trent and Charles Wilcox — who had

equal access to the barn and potential knowledge of Nathan's money. The investigation never examined either

of them.

In Oregon, the prosecution argued Kelly lured Sayres from his home with a scheme to sell fake opium to members

of Portland's Chinese community. The take would have been around two hundred dollars. Instead, Sayres was

killed. The key physical evidence linking Kelly to the murder: a bow tie found at or near the scene that resembled

a style Kelly was known to wear. Beyond the bow tie, the case was circumstantial — built on Kelly's reputation

as a shanghaier, not proof of this specific crime.

The Investigation

Warren Clough was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death by hanging at a trial moved thirty

miles west to York, Nebraska, because prejudice in Seward was too deep. The night before execution, Governor

Silas Garber commuted the sentence to life. Warren entered the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln and spent

nearly fifteen years inside its limestone walls. During that time, Jacob Trent told Warren's former defense attorney

that Warren was innocent — then died of heart disease in the penitentiary before he could formally confess. The

original prosecutor, the sentencing judge, and surviving jurors all petitioned Governor John M. Thayer for Warren's

release. The Omaha Daily Bee reported it plainly: the evidence was circumstantial only, but somebody had to be

punished for the crime, and on the brother of the murdered man the blame was laid. Warren was pardoned on

January 1, 1891. He was never exonerated.

Kelly was convicted of second-degree murder in March 1895 after twelve hours of deliberation and sentenced

to life at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. He served thirteen years. Historian Barney Blalock, whose

2014 study The Oregon Shanghaiers was the first rigorously sourced account of Portland's crimping trade,

assessed the case as politically motivated — likely engineered to remove Kelly after he broke from Larry Sullivan's

shanghaiing syndicate. Kelly was released in 1908, wrote a memoir nobody bought, conducted a book tour in

Seattle in 1909, and disappeared from the historical record entirely.

Historical Context

These cases span America's frontier and Gilded Age justice systems. In 1876 Nebraska, there was no forensic

science, no fingerprinting, no detective force. A coroner's jury of local men served as both investigators and grand

jury. In 1890s Portland, Andrew Furuseth — president of the International Seamen's Union — testified before

Congress that the city was the greatest crimping den in America, where boarding house keepers kidnapped men

off the streets and sold them to ships for thirty to one hundred dollars per head. Both convictions were built on

community suspicion, political convenience, and the demand for punishment — not proof.

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