Alumni Gazette

Did ‘Kansas Charley’ Deserve to Hang?

Brumberg

As 18-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo waited this winter for a Virginia jury to decide whether he should be executed for his role in the Washington, D.C., area sniper spree, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg ’65 couldn't help but see parallels with another episode of youth violence that once riveted the nation.

In 1892, a 17-year-old orphan from New York City named Charles Miller, who liked to go by the name “Kansas Charley,” waited for a Wyoming jury to decide whether he should be hanged for shooting to death two young men in a boxcar that the three were riding west.

Brumberg, whose previous books Fasting Girls and The Body Project earned several awards for their insights into the social history of American girlhood, reconstructs the orphan’s troubled life in her new book, Kansas Charley: The Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer.

Miller’s life, which included a history of emotional and physical abuse, provides an eerily contemporary example of why the death penalty for juveniles should be prohibited, says Brumberg, a professor of history, human development, and gender studies at Cornell University.

“We’ve been struggling with this for more than a century, and it’s about time we got it right,” says Brumberg, who is part of an interdisciplinary group that includes behavioral scientists at Cornell.

Calling upon skills honed at Rochester—the book is dedicated to former history professor Bernard Weisberger—Brumberg combed archives and newspaper accounts, and traveled to many places where Miller roamed in his short life. (He spent about eight months in Rochester, where his older sister was living.)

While she doesn’t excuse Miller’s actions, Brumberg says children’s emotional and mental development should be considered in judging them.

She notes one state that is considering banning the juvenile death penalty is Wyoming, where Miller was hanged more than 100 years ago.