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By Root 1315 0

efforts to talk them out of it, Molly gunmen shot a man named Bully Bill Thomas as he stood tending his horse in a stable. But they botched the job, and Thomas survived. Then they turned their attention to Benjamin Yost, a night watchman who had earned their enmity by arresting several Mollies for minor infractions. The Molly killers Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, and James Kerrigan lay in wait for Yost at two o’clock in the morning, when they knew he’d emerge from his house to climb a ladder on the sidewalk and put out the street lamp. McGehan fired his pistol in the darkness, and Yost collapsed. A man working nearby rushed to his side, and Yost, dying from the gunshot wounds, was able to tell him that the killers were Irish. What’s more, he’d seen them in a saloon earlier in the night. He even ruled out some suspects before he died at 9 A.M.

McParland didn’t know who the killers were, but he thought he could figure it out. He carefully gathered evidence. He asked to borrow a pistol, and was given one that matched the caliber of the murder weapon. He pulled together bits and pieces of information about who had been on the scene at the time of the shooting. He also picked up word of yet another planned killing, this time of the mine boss J. P. Jones, and was able to get word to the Pinkertons to spirit Jones out of town until the danger passed.

McParland bided his time even as Molly gunmen killed one man at a fire department picnic and engaged in a gunfight with another target. Soon after that, Mollies proposed killing a mine boss, Tom Sanger. There were getting to be so many murder plots that McParland, still undercover as “James McKenna,” couldn’t warn the Pinkertons in time to head off each one. Molly assassins hit Sanger before McParland could do anything about it. When the mine boss Jones, thinking that the threat to his life had passed, returned to the area, three Mollies shot and killed him on a train platform in front of 100 witnesses. They got away.

McParland wrote up a detailed report for his Pinkerton bosses about each murder, listing the killers and their accomplices. He was convinced he was doing the right thing. After all, the reports would be evidence for eventual court proceedings against the murderers.

Allan Pinkerton, writing from Chicago to his lieutenants on the scene, worried that the local authorities would never be able to get a conviction in counties heavily populated by Irish Catholics who supported the Mollies. Pinkerton advised his men to put together a vigilante party of their own to murder the Mollies and be done with them. That plan was too overt, and the Pinkertons in Pennsylvania developed a more hands-off solution. They printed up a handbill with the names of 374 Mollies and began circulating the document among the population. On December 10, a crowd of masked men broke into a home and opened fire on Mollies living there, killing Charles O’Donnell and his sister, Ellen McAllister, and wounding two others who escaped during the firefight. It’s clear that the Pinkertons hoped someone would take the law into his own hands and start killing Mollies, but it’s not clear if they arranged these particular killings.

McParland may not have known all the details, but he suspected that his own organization had somehow provoked the killings. He was horrified that his work had led to the killing of an innocent woman. He dashed off an angry letter to his boss: “As for the O’Donnells, I am satisfied they got their just deserving,” he wrote. “I reported what those men were…. Now I wake up this morning to find that I am the murderer of Mrs. McAllister. What had a woman to do with the case[?]” McParland tendered his immediate resignation. “I am not going to be an accessory to the murder of women and children.”

Allan Pinkerton convinced his valuable agent that the detective agency had nothing to do with the murders, and talked McParland into staying in his undercover position. Suspicion was swirling. The Mollies wanted to know who had circulated the handbill. How did that person get a list of Mollies? There