Old Missoula

Missoula Murderess With A Little Pistol – 1^st Woman to State Penitentiary (1878)

Homicide

Felicite Sanchez is in duress vile. She snuffed out the light for a party named Kelly last Friday. She did it with her little pistol, firing three shots, one of which took effect in Kelley’s breast, producing almost instantaneous death. Kelley came down from Butte some two or three weeks before, and spread his blankets in a vacant house in the outskirts of town. Felicite had come down from Deer Lodge only a few days before, and finding the house where Kelley was stopping the only vacant one in town, moved into the front room, allowing Kelley to retain the back room. Felicite conceived that she needed the whole house in her business and that appears to have been the cause of the trouble. Kelley was in the act of moving his things out when death overtook him; what was her occasion for using the pistol is known only to herself. Kelley was a man given to liquor, a reputed tramp, and was suspected of being in the illicit traffic of the ardent to the natives. Himself or his antecedents were not known here. Felicite is reported to be a Mexican, a drunkard, an adept on other occasions with the knife and pistol, and a votery of felicity otherwise than connubial. The grand jury had been discharged the day before, but a special venire was issued for a new grand jury to inquire into the matter, and an indictment was found against Felicite Sanchez for murder. The trail was set for Thursday, and was not concluded up to the time of going to press. – Missoulian.

The above article appeared in the Helena Weekly Herald on November 28, 1878.

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The Murderess of Kelley. – Elizee Sanchez, the woman who shot and killed Kelley at Missoula Nov. 16^th, was tried at the District Court in session at that place last week and sentenced to imprisonment in the Penitentiary for three years. She is the first female who has been sentenced to imprisonment in the Montana Penitentiary, although, if we may be allowed to so express ourselves, others have committed crimes which they should have expiated in the same institution. But juries have thought differently and the culprits have gone unpunished. The prisoner entered the plea that the act was committed in self-defense; that Kelley was possessed of a knife and she feared for her life, and that she did not regret her action, but would commit the deed again under the same circumstances. The prisoner was brought to Deer Lodge yesterday. It is to be hoped that her imprisonment will prove for her good and work a complete reformation in her manner of living hereafter.

The above article appeared in The New North-West (Deer Lodge, Montana) on November 29, 1878

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Felicita Sanchez, a native of California, aged 20, height 5 feet 3 ¾ inches, weight 128 pounds, black hair and eyes, dark complexion, little education and of previous bad character, sentenced from Missoula to three years in the U. S. prison for manslaughter was committed to that institution on Wednesday.

The above notice appeared in The New North-West (Deer Lodge, Montana) on December 6, 1878.

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