On Christmas Day, 1883, Christian Riebling, age 32, shot a young man, Albert Lucia, age 19, in the village of Lyndon. He .had been drinking-he claimed later to ease a recurring pain that he had in his head. The shooting followed two arguments. The youth was wounded in the thigh and died 12 days later from infection.
Christian Riebling was arrested and tried for murder before Judge Eustace. He was found guilty and sentenced to die by hanging on May 6, 1884. The judge refused a plea for a new trial. Some people considered the sentence a harsh one. The condemned man resigned himself and sought comfort in religion.
Early in May, Sheriff T. S. Beach started to prepare for the grim event. He obtained a trap or drop from Peoria. Just northeast of the county jail, he built an enclosure 35 feet square and 18 feet high. Within the tight-board fence, he planted a gallows-tree from which he suspended an one-half inch rope. Careful preparations included testing of the trap with a bag of sand. There was a larger rope hanging nearby in case the first one broke. Sheriff Beach performed his onerous duties with great but secret distress.
The sentenced man met his fate bravely but quietly. His conduct was certainly better than that of many of the spectators. Attired in a white gown or robe and with a black cap covering his face, he was dropped six feet to what he was sure was a "better life." About 150 spectators-newsmen, doctors, officials and prominent citizens-were crowded into the small enclosure. Outside a crowd of about 200 milled about and boys climbed nearby trees to see the execution.
After the doctor declared him dead, the body was placed in the coffin which was waiting under the platform; the sheriff's wife placed a posy of pansies, geraniums and daisies on the dead man's breast; and the sheriff opened the fence. The crowd, including many women, pushed in to see that the debt had been paid properly. The doomed man left his body to the clergymen who had ministered to him. They disowned it in haste and it was taken to the poor farm to lie in an unknown grave.
In May, 1873, Joseph O'Neil paid his debt to society for the murder the previous fall of Hiram Rexford on the island south of Fulton. The murder was a brutal one and a change of venue took the case to Mount Carroll where feeling was not so high. The death sentence was given and the murderer was hanged in the courtyard on a gallows tree which had been planted between two poplar trees. .
The Carroll County History issued in 1878 reviewed the trial and discussed a strange happening subsequent to the hanging. The following spring, according to the book, though all the other trees in the courtyard leafed out properly, the poplars stood leafless and apparently dead-proof of the old belief that "naught will grow where the gallows grow." The author of the book believed that the trees were slow in foliating because of the cold weather but he also wrote that a learned man, a judge, claimed that the attending priests cursed them.
The Carroll County sheriff, George P. Sutton, dug the gallowstree from the ground. It was stored in the top floor of the county building where it lay dormant, needing only to be re-planted to reach fruition again. It was there as late as 1960.
In August, 1873, Carroll County presented a bill for the trial and execution of Joseph O'Neil and it totalled $501.55. Later it was reported that the complete cost for the capture, incarceration, trial and hanging of the murderer and the conviction of Thomas O'Neil as an accessory was $1,567.95. A county newspaper commented that it was a heavy bill but cheap when one considered the kind of man that was put out of the way.
From the History of Whiteside Co. by Wayne Bastian
