Murder & Lynching
in Willisville

Willisville, Illinois, sits roughly ninety miles southeast of St. Louis in Perry County. Incorporated in 1901, this coal mining town, strung along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, soon had a population of about 1,500 people. By 1914, half of its population were Italian immigrants who had come over in the preceding two decades to work the coal mines. It was not, by any measure, a quiet place. One local history put it bluntly: gambling, drinking, and fighting were facts of life in Willisville, and the Murphysboro newspaper had taken to calling the town "a bloody thumb print on Perry County."

What made October 1914 different from the years before it was not that violence arrived in Willisville, it was already there, but that it finally spilled out in a way that could no longer be ignored. Four men died in the space of four days. Two were Americans. Two were Italian. And the events set off a chain of consequences that reached as far west as the mining town of Butte, Montana, east to the Yale Law Journal, and of course across the Atlantic to Italy.

The Italian immigrants of Willisville were not a monolith. They were, as one local history put it, "at the forefront both as perpetrators as well as victims", and understanding both sides of that is essential to understanding what happened in 1914.

One of the most persistent sources of friction was theft. Farmers coming to town to trade would leave their wagons unattended while they stepped into the tavern or ice cream parlor, and find goods missing when they returned. A local law officer insisted he had seen Italians stealing, but could never quite catch or identify anyone. The truth eventually came out: the officer himself had been doing the stealing and blaming it on the Italians. The real thieves were never the community he had accused.

Many Italian immigrants had grown up in genuine poverty, places where feeding a family sometimes meant taking what you could find. Some had carried those habits to America before realizing they no longer needed to. But the stigma outlasted the behavior, and it was easy for anyone with a grudge to keep the accusation alive.

For the Italians who had nothing to do with any of this, daily life in Willisville could be quietly terrifying. One evening in 1914, a couple were sitting on their front porch when two men came walking toward the house. They went inside and didn't answer the door. The men kept knocking until the husband finally opened it. They seized him and took him away. His body turned up later on the railroad tracks. His wife said nothing to the authorities, and shortly afterward she left Willisville and was never heard from again. A man named Frank Heine was said to have witnessed what happened. No one was ever charged.

A local butcher named Mr. Costa had developed his own system for staying alive. Every evening after closing his shop, he walked straight home, bolted his door, and pulled down the window shades. He would open the door for exactly one person: his neighbor, Mr. Adolph Schmidt. If anyone else wanted to speak with him, they had to go find Schmidt first, bring him to the door, and wait while Schmidt identified himself by voice. Only then would Costa open up. It was not paranoia, it was a rational response to a town where men disappeared.

In the years before 1914, bodies had been turning up in Willisville with alarming regularity and always within the Italian community. At one point, three were found in a single week. Some had been placed on the railroad tracks just beyond a curve, where they would be found mangled by passing trains. One was discovered on an empty car siding, with stab wounds and facial mutilations. When authorities questioned Italians about these deaths, no one said a word.

The silence was not stubbornness. Anyone who talked risked becoming the next body on the tracks. And that silence, in turn, fed the growing suspicion among the American half of town that the Italians operated by their own law, a suspicion that would make mob justice feel, to those who carried it out, almost like a reasonable thing.

The "Black Hand" was real enough in this era, though not quite what the newspapers made it sound. It was not a single organized crime society but a loosely practiced form of extortion, typically Italian criminals preying on fellow immigrants who feared the police too much to seek help. Anonymous letters signed with a black handprint, threatening death unless money was paid, had become common enough that everyone had heard of them.

Willisville had its own brush with the Black Hand in January 1911, when the town's young Italian priest, Father E. Senese, received a letter on Christmas Day: "Beware: Unless you leave Willisville shortly after Christmas you must die. You are at our mercy. Go!" The letter included drawings of skulls, black hands, and a cardboard dagger. Father Senese refused to leave. Federal and state authorities investigated. The culprit turned out to be a local man named Lorenzo Marino, who confessed he had written it while drunk, as a joke. He was jailed for safekeeping in Pinckneyville, as feelings against Moreno at Willisville were high, and it was deemed best to get him out of town. The episode showed how charged the atmosphere had become, and how quickly fear could spread.

By 1913, open conflict between Americans and Italians had broken into a multi-day street riot, leaving several men shot and slashed. The following year, the women's suffrage vote closed seven Willisville saloons, adding another layer of bitterness to a town already running short of goodwill. When Andy Adams and the Piazza brothers met on Main Street in October 1914, they were not strangers who happened to quarrel. They were the products of years of accumulated tension, distrust, and violence on both sides.

On the evening of Sunday, October 11, 1914, Jimmy Edwards and Bill Cooper had been to church together. Afterward they set out to walk to the railroad depot to watch the 10 p.m. train pass through, a common way to spend a Sunday evening. Edwards smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and was out of papers, so the two headed downtown to find some.

Walking along, they came across Andy Adams coming out of an ice cream parlor. Edwards asked if Adams had any cigarette papers. Adams said no, but offered a Camel. Edwards turned it down, he preferred to roll his own, and headed off toward Pete's Place to buy papers. As he went, Cooper called out to Adams with a grin: "Jim is particular in what he smokes."

Adams walked on toward Main Street. Cooper followed at a short distance. Then Cooper saw two men step out of the shadows in front of Adams. One of them asked Adams for cigarette papers. Adams said he had none. He turned and called across the street to Cooper: "Hey Bill." That was when the shooting started.

The two men were brothers, Sam and Albert Piazza. According to the local history of Willisville, Adams had already told Ezra Cooper, Bill's brother, that he believed the Piazzas were behind the string of unsolved killings in the Italian community. They were well-dressed, spent freely, and had no visible work. Adams thought they were hired killers. He had also recently received a letter bearing a black handprint, after he and a man named Harry Keller had roughed up a group of Italians in a bar. He knew he had made dangerous enemies. Whether the encounter on Main Street that night was chance or something the Piazzas had arranged is not known for certain, but Albert had been waiting in the darkness when the shooting began.

Cooper ran across the street toward his friend. Albert shot him, the impact, Cooper later said from his hospital bed, spun him halfway around. He kept going. He grabbed Albert's gun hand and forced him back against a storefront window, holding the barrel down while Albert kept firing into the ground. Cooper held on until the gun was empty. Then he collapsed. He had been shot multiple times, including once in the stomach.

During the struggle, Sam Piazza shot Adams. Adams shot Sam in the head. Sam fell dead at the scene. Adams fled into the night, badly wounded. Albert Piazza was taken into custody. Cooper and Adams were loaded onto a train and rushed to the hospital in Murphysboro. Adams died about 24 hours later. Cooper lasted 52 hours, long enough to tell his brother Ezra everything.

Andy Adams was 23 years old. He had been due to marry a Willisville woman named Bessie Kerr the following month.

The next morning, a coroner's inquest recommended that Albert Piazza, still held in the village jail, be sent to the county jail in Pinckneyville to await the grand jury. The coroner called the county sheriff and told him the streets of Willisville were already filling up with people and he feared what might happen. The sheriff said to bring the prisoner over. But when the coroner went to the acting mayor to arrange it, Marshal Henry Beisner refused. He would handle the transfer himself.

That afternoon, Beisner deputized his son Ed and his son-in-law Charles Peeples. He rented a surrey from Joe McDonald's Livery Stable, driven by McDonald's son Lyman, known to everyone as Blackie, who rode with a shotgun. Albert Piazza, handcuffed, was loaded into the carriage.

There was a standard route for taking prisoners to Percy. Beisner did not take it. Instead, the surrey went west on the dirt road, turned onto a lane called Burling Trail, and about three quarters of a mile in, crossed the county line from Perry into Randolph County.

The crowd that had been gathered outside the jail had not gone home. They moved down the railroad tracks, a more direct path, and got there first. Twelve armed men stepped out from behind a barn near the road and surrounded the carriage. They ordered Beisner to hand over the prisoner. Albert Piazza was told to get out of the surrey and run north toward Percy.

He ran. They fired. By the time it was over, Albert Piazza had more than 100 bullet wounds in his body. Even his shoes had been shot through. He was still handcuffed.

His brother Sam was buried at St. Joseph's in Willisville the previous day. Albert was buried there the day after.

Willisville came close to a full ethnic war in the days that followed. Italian families packed up and left for Murphysboro in groups, leaving their families behind until they could find work and send for them. Deputies were sworn in around town. The Italian Consul in Chicago wired Governor Edward Dunne directly, asking for state protection. Dunne dispatched the state's adjutant general and put the National Guard company at Carbondale on standby.

In the end the mayor wired the governor that troops weren't needed. The two coal mines, shut down immediately after the violence, reopened within a few weeks, with both Americans and Italians getting their old jobs back. But by November, the Willis Coal and Mining Company announced it was closing its Willisville operations indefinitely, putting nearly 400 men out of work all the same.

By December, five men had been charged with the murder of Albert Piazza. Allen Russell, a local labor leader, along with Ed Beisner, Nelson Osborne, Charles Dillday, and Thomas Browning were jailed at Chester in Randolph County. Russell had been tracked down in Henrietta, Oklahoma.

What finally brought lasting peace to Willisville, according to local memory, was not the law. Two residents — the Reverend Laurence Bird and Mr. Ira Jarrett — both later said it was the Ku Klux Klan that restored order to the community. Neither man was a member. The Klan's 1920s revival was active throughout southern Illinois, and in a town that had seen years of unsolved killings and one acquitted lynch mob, its swift and violent methods apparently filled a gap the courts had left open. For the Italian families who remained, this was cold comfort — it meant trading one form of terror for another.

There was one last incident. At some point after the lynching, a shot was fired at a man known as Shoemaker Fararah in the city park. He was hit in the neck but survived. When the sheriff found the men responsible hiding under a bed in a nearby house, Fararah refused to press charges. He knew the people involved, and he knew what pressing charges would mean. After that, things were finally quiet.

The coroner's inquest had gone nowhere. The marshal and his deputies admitted under oath that the mob were unmasked — yet claimed not to recognize a single face. A proper investigation, led by the state's attorney of Randolph County and a Chicago attorney named Charles Watson who was working on behalf of the Italian consul, eventually turned up a witness: a young man named Kilgrove who admitted he had been there. He said armed members of the mob had threatened to shoot him if he didn't go along. He described what happened, and said that afterward the mob gathered in a grove near the railroad tracks where every man raised his hand and swore never to name another member.

Five men were indicted on the strength of Kilgrove's testimony. The trial opened in Chester in March 1915. From the first day, Kilgrove was surrounded by friends of the defendants who pressured him to say nothing. When the state's attorney appealed to the judge to intervene, the judge said it was a recess and he had no authority. Defense lawyers openly told Kilgrove in open court to keep quiet. By the next morning, Kilgrove was gone — slipped across the Mississippi River into Missouri, it was believed.

The state pressed on with what it had. The marshal had refused to hand over the prisoner despite the sheriff's direct orders. He had taken a surrey on an unusual road when a train was available and would have been faster and safer. Four of the five defendants had been seen moving with the mob along the railroad tracks. A farm wife who lived 167 yards from the scene had watched men run from behind a barn and then heard shots. It wasn't enough. The judge directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. When the decision came, the courtroom erupted. The judge was up for re-election that June and won easily.

Kilgrove eventually came back. He was jailed for 90 days for contempt of court. He was the only person ever punished for killing Albert Piazza.

Albert's mother, Maria Antonia Valenti Piazza, was an elderly woman living in Italy who had depended on her son's income to survive. She sued Randolph County in federal court for $5,000, Illinois law allowed relatives of lynching victims to sue the county where the killing happened. Her deposition, taken overseas and passed through military censors, said Albert had sent her money a few days before he died and that she had received nothing since. Randolph County argued the mob was from Perry County and Perry County should be held responsible. What the court ultimately decided is not recorded.

What happened in Willisville was not as unusual as it might seem. Between 1880 and 1921, more than fifty Italian Americans were lynched across nine states. Italians were, in that era, the most frequently lynched group in the United States after Black Americans. They were Catholic, often darker-complexioned, and in many communities were not considered fully "white", which made them targets.

In the Illinois coalfields, conflict between American-born and immigrant miners was common throughout this period. Coal companies had imported Italian laborers partly because they were cheaper and partly because a workforce divided by language and culture was harder to organize. The United Mine Workers tried to bridge that divide, but it was slow going. Allen Russell, the man accused of leading the lynch mob, was himself a union labor leade, a reminder that ethnic hostility and working-class solidarity could sit side by side in the same person.

The Willisville case drew unusual attention because the Italian government pushed hard for it. Italy had been demanding justice for its citizens killed by American mobs since the mass lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891, an event that nearly broke diplomatic relations between the two countries. By 1914, the Italian consul knew exactly how to apply pressure, and that pressure produced the investigation, the indictments, and ultimately Charles Watson's Yale Law Journal article arguing for a federal anti-lynching law. That law was not passed in Watson's lifetime. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act finally made lynching a federal crime in 2022, 108 years after Albert Piazza was shot to death on Burling Trail.

Willisville moved on. The saloons reopened. The mines opened and closed and opened again. The Italian families who had fled in October 1914 did not all come back. The town that had been half Italian was somewhat less so afterward. The "bloody thumb print on Perry County" had left a permanent mark.