16-year-old Jacob Smith and his neighbor Henry Craig were best friends who lived in Carrington, Kentucky, east of Lexington, back in 1877. That year, though, saw the end of their friendship.
The two had met a girl and they both fell in love with her. The love they both had for her soon turned into hatred for each other as jealousy reared its ugly head. The two became bitter enemies and on September 14, 1877, Henry’s body was found by the side of a footpath, killed in a stabbing.
Suspicion immediately fell on Jacob, who fled Carrington, first to Seymour, Indiana, then to Kansas, later to Missouri and finally to Martinsville, Illinois, in 1886. During his time on the run, he made his living as a farm hand at one farm or another. In Martinsville he was working for a farmer named Martin Tarble and it was there that his life completely changed.
A very wealthy widow, about three or four years older than he was, saw Jacob on Mr. Tarble’s farm and she became smitten with him. This woman, Roxana Soward, and Jacob Smith began dating and within a year they were married.
After the two were married the new Mrs. Smith decided that any husband of hers shouldn’t be doing lowly farmhand work, so she paid for him to go to college to become a doctor. Dr. and Mrs. Smith settled down to a nice life in nearby Marshall, Illinois, with Mrs. Smith’s son, Guy. Dr. Smith was prominent in the medical profession there in Illinois, establishing a sanitarium at Marshall.
Then it all came crashing down.
You see, Mrs. Smith was the jealous type, and she soon became upset at the good doctor’s relationship with his female patients. In 1898 she become very jealous of one particular patient and she and the doctor began arguing about her, Guy joining in to defend his mother. These arguments soon caused Guy to leave the house and travel out west for some peace.
On New Year’s Eve, 1898, Guy Soward returned home and immediately started to again quarrel with Dr. Smith. One thing led to another until Guy grabbed his Winchester rifle and proceeded to shoot his stepfather four times, twice in the neck, once in the arm and once in the hand. Smith managed to walk from the residence part of the building to the practice part before he collapsed from the wounds to the neck. After treatment at the hospital, he stabilized and recovered from his wounds.
Guy was arrested, along with his mother who had apparently egged him on in the argument that ended in the shooting. Both were indicted for attempted murder and released on bail. Mrs. Smith, having at one time heard the story of the stabbing death of Henry Craig from her husband, headed to Carrington in August, 1899, and registered at the local hotel as “Mrs. Jones,” telling a story that she was in town to purchase real estate. Instead, she looked through the court records and found the original indictment of her husband for the murder of his friend all those years before. Mrs. Smith went to the Carrington Chief of Police, A. N. Denton, and told her that she was married to Jacob Smith and that she knew where he was. In September Denton arrived in Marshall and placed Dr. Smith under arrest and transported him back to Owingsville, Kentucky, to face trial for the murder of Henry Craig twenty years before.
Smith went on trial and his attorneys argued that he had acted in self-defense, stating that Mr. Craig had been the aggressor and that his brother had been present, ready to help him in his attack on Jacob Smith.
And it was on this day in 1899 that the jury, after six hours of deliberation, found Dr. Jacob Smith not guilty of the murder of his one-time best friend in 1877.
We could locate no news reports of what happened to Guy Soward and his mother in their attempted murder case.