James T. Scott

James T. Scott, a World War I veteran, firefighter, and janitor at the University of Missouri, was lynched from Stewart Bridge in Columbia in the early hours of April 29, 1923, in front of more than a thousand onlookers. He had been arrested a week earlier after Regina Almstedt, the 14-year-old daughter of a university professor, identified him as the man who assaulted her on the same bridge, though two white coworkers were prepared to testify that Scott had been working alongside them at the time of the attack. A mob used a blowtorch to break into his jail cell while police and county officials looked on without intervening by force, then hanged him. The night he died, Scott named his cellmate, Ollie Watson, as the actual attacker; bloodhounds had independently tracked a scent from the crime scene to where Watson normally parked, and Watson was separately found to have raped another girl the week before the Almstedt assault. A grand jury indicted five men suspected of leading the mob, but only one, George Barkwell, was tried; despite eyewitness testimony from two student journalists that they saw him push Scott from the bridge, a jury acquitted Barkwell after eleven minutes of deliberation, and charges against the other four men were dropped the same day.

Columbia, MO · Boone County

• 1923: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• Victim identity, background, and the April 28–29, 1923 date and circumstances, per the State Historical Society of Missouri.
• George Barkwell was tried for murder and acquitted; charges against four other indicted men were dropped the same day, per the same source.

• No one was ever convicted in Scott's killing.
• Whether Scott or his cellmate Ollie Watson actually assaulted Regina Almstedt was never resolved in any court, though contemporaneous evidence pointed toward Watson.

• State Historical Society of Missouri — “The Lynching of James T. Scott”
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs