Lynching of Benjamin and Mollie French

In Warsaw, Gallatin County, Kentucky, Lake Jones, an elderly African American man who had faithfully served a white family named Howard both before and after his emancipation, lived with his cousin Mollie French and her husband Benjamin French. According to contemporaneous newspaper accounts, after Jones moved out of the Frenches' home, the couple allegedly schemed to obtain the rest of his money. On April 19, 1876, Jones ate dinner at the Frenches' home and soon became violently ill, with symptoms consistent with arsenic poisoning. He died on April 22, 1876, after three days of agony. A county investigation begun on April 24 found that Benjamin French had purchased an ounce of arsenic from a local drug store days earlier, claiming it was for killing rats. Both Benjamin and Mollie French admitted to the purchase but denied intending to murder Jones. They were arrested on April 24, 1876, and charged with murder. A subsequent examination by the local physician confirmed arsenic poisoning, and Jones's stomach was sent to Louisville for chemical analysis.

After the Frenches had been held in the Warsaw jail for ten days, a group of masked men — reported by contemporaneous newspapers to be linked to the Ku Klux Klan — forced the jailer, Joseph Wilshire, to open the jail in the early morning hours of May 3, 1876. The mob took Benjamin and Mollie French from their cell, placed them on horses, and rode off. Witnesses who alerted the sheriff followed horse tracks the next morning to a farm about three-quarters of a mile from Warsaw, where the bodies of Benjamin and Mollie French were found hanged from separate branches of a tree. Newspaper accounts described the scene in graphic detail, including grass found on the knees of Benjamin French's trousers, which was interpreted as a sign he had knelt or pleaded for mercy.

Contemporaneous press accounts reported conflicting explanations for who carried out the lynching, with some sources suggesting the mob was composed of farmer neighbors of Lake Jones from the nearby Glencoe district, and others reporting claims that the lynchers were entirely Black. Local newspaper coverage after the killings characterized the Frenches negatively, describing Benjamin as a "chicken thief" and alleging that Mollie French had previously poisoned a former husband. Lake Jones, by contrast, was widely praised in local coverage and was buried in the Howard family cemetery, with burial expenses paid by the Howard family; his grave reportedly remains unmarked. No one was prosecuted or held legally responsible for the lynching of Benjamin and Mollie French.