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It was enough. O’Neil was convicted on March 12, 1885, and sentenced to swing. A few weeks later, another inmate claimed O’Neil had confessed to him that he’d done the deed under the precise direction of Amanda — who wanted her husband out of the way so that she could formalize her affair with O’Neil and so that she could inherit his grocery store. On the strength of this conversation, Amanda McDaniel was arrested. But jailhouse confessions aren’t very solid evidence, and the jury just wasn’t convinced. She was acquitted.
AS THE HANGING day loomed ever closer, a series of remarkable letters started going out from the Jackson County Jail, where O’Neil was being held. The first and most egregious one went to Amanda McDaniel. It was a proposal, essentially, that she take the rap for him. He prefaced it by assuring her that if her court case had gone badly, he would have “come to your relief and clear(ed) you by taking the whole responsibility on myself, though I am innocent, but ... if you were found guilty you should never hang or go to the penitentiary for I would save you. Now you have been tried and come clear, and it is in your power to save my life.” Since she had been cleared of all charges in her trial, he continued, she could now confess to the murder with total impunity — clearing him. He would then sue the state for heavy damages and split the proceeds with her. “I hope you will not delay,” he wrote, “as I know you can save my life and the disgrace will be no worse on you than it is now.” Amanda did not reply. Other letters went out as well, to other friends and relatives, with various other schemes for someone else to take the rap for him. The last one went to his brother George, the one who gave him the shotgun; and it was an open request for his brother to “confess” to the killing and take his place on the gallows. “The most trying feature,” the condemned man wrote, “is leaving my six children to the mercy of a world without protection and the disgrace of their father being hanged. ... As for you, you have lived to be a very old man, and in the natural course of events you can expect to live but a very few years more and are liable to drop off at any time. If you had one hour to live it would be a hard request to ask you to come and state that you had done the killing and that I had not had any hand, act or part in it or any knowledge of it. That would clear me, and spare me to my children, and only on their account could I ever think of making such a request of you.” Of course, O’Neil hadn’t thought so much of the children when he’d abandoned them and their mother four years earlier; but a looming death sentence does tend to remind one of family and friends. Ironically, the letter never reached the “very old man”; George had, shortly before, died of typhoid fever. And so, on March 12, 1886, still maintaining his innocence, Lewis O’Neil was hanged.
AS FOR AMANDA, after liquidating her late husband’s estate and paying off his taxes and debts, she cleared $2,000 (worth $55,000 in 2017 dollars). She took this and left Ashland the night before the hanging, settling in Talent, where she opened a café. And so the story ends. Except, there is just one question still hanging out there in the air, a question that never was fully answered: Where exactly was Amanda McDaniel, a few minutes after her husband had been murdered, when the town watchmen were pounding on her door?
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