About the Author

Duane Taylor (B.A. University of Illinois, M.A Yale) has lived and worked in western Illinois for most of his life.  Professionally he taught writing and humanities at Western Illinois University, Carl Sandburg College, and John Wood Community College and held a variety of administrative positions at those colleges. His publishing credits feature mostly poetry and some short stories.  He is a lifelong student of Lincoln and has made a number of presentations on Mr. Lincoln’s health and rare physicality. Always fascinated by local history and looking for a true story which had never been fully treated in print, he became aware in 2000 of the 1877 Spencer murders in Clark County, Missouri, a narrative which combines an unsolved mass murder, a mob lynching, and important insights into the shadowy world of post Civil War bounty-hunters and private detectives. He spent the next dozen years unraveling and reassembling the entire three-year cycle of dramatic events buried in local newspaper archives, a handful of older publications, and third-hand reminiscences.  He is an expert on this story, its large cast of varied characters, and its many twists and turns. The book he has written is called “Innocent as the Angels.” He lives on the family farm near Warsaw, Illinois.