Lloyd Leadbetter Majors (1837-1884): Double-Murder Mastermind Lynched for Crime

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors

Strangers' Plot, Plot 41

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors was one of the most unlikely architects of a nineteenth-century California murder. A Civil War veteran, trained lawyer, Methodist minister, temperance advocate, and hotel keeper, Majors cultivated the appearance of moral reform even as he quietly planned a crime of extraordinary brutality. His downfall followed the murders that shocked Los Gatos and the Santa Cruz Mountains in March of 1883, a crime remembered locally as the “Lexington murders.”

Majors was born in Ohio around 1837, near the town of Garfield, and was educated at Ann Arbor, where he studied law. He practiced briefly before abandoning the profession for the ministry, becoming a traveling Methodist preacher in the Midwest. Those who later testified about him described a man of intelligence and ambition, but also of restlessness and contradiction. He preached against alcohol while operating saloons, spoke publicly about virtue while privately displaying a capacity for deception, and styled himself a reformer even as his life moved steadily toward criminality.

By the late 1870s Majors had drifted west and settled in Los Gatos, where he operated a hotel and saloon and was well known in the small town. He was regarded as articulate, intense, and persuasive, a man who could command attention in conversation and bend others to his will. Behind the scenes, however, he was deeply in debt and increasingly obsessed with the idea that an elderly mountain recluse possessed hidden gold.

That man was William Peter Renowden, who lived in a remote cabin in the Lexington district of the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of Los Gatos. Renowden was known to neighbors as a solitary figure, rumored to have money but living simply. In early March 1883, Majors devised a plan to rob him and recruited two men to carry it out while keeping his own hands ostensibly clean.

John Showers & Joseph Jewell

The accomplices were John Franklin Showers and Joseph Jewell, men of sharply contrasting personalities. Jewell was a small, soft-spoken English immigrant, a painter by trade, new to the area and largely unnoticed. Showers, by contrast, was notorious. He arrived in Los Gatos in 1876 with his widowed mother and cultivated a reputation as a violent braggart, referring to himself as a “bad man from Bodie” and rarely appearing unarmed. Newspapers portrayed him as crude, volatile, and eager for notoriety.

Majors supplied the plan, the weapons, and the tools. According to trial testimony, he gave Jewell and Showers pistols and a pair of pincers, instructing them to use the latter to pull out Renowden’s fingernails if he refused to surrender his gold. The instructions were explicit, chilling, and deliberate. Majors remained in Los Gatos while the two men rode into the mountains under cover of darkness.

On the night of March 11, 1883, Jewell and Showers reached Renowden’s cabin. Inside they found not only Renowden but also Archibald McIntyre, a friend visiting him. What followed was a scene of prolonged violence. Both men were beaten, tortured, and ultimately shot. Their bodies were left inside the cabin, which was then set on fire in an effort to conceal the crime.

Double-Murder Scene in Los Gatos

The next morning, smoke rising from the mountains drew attention. The burned cabin was discovered, along with the charred remains of the two victims. The brutality of the murders, combined with the attempt to destroy the evidence, horrified the region. Los Gatos was thrown into alarm, posses formed, and the search for the killers began almost immediately.

Suspicion quickly fell on Jewell and Showers, whose movements before and after the murders aroused notice. Within days they were arrested. Under questioning, Showers confessed and implicated Jewell and Majors. Jewell, confronted with the evidence, also confessed, confirming Majors as the mastermind who had planned the robbery and supplied the means.

Majors was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree. His trial, held in Alameda County, became one of the most closely watched criminal proceedings in California. The prosecution portrayed him as the calculating brain behind the crime, a man who cloaked himself in religion and respectability while directing others to commit murder. The defense attempted to cast doubt on the testimony of confessed killers, but the evidence was overwhelming.

In November 1883, Lloyd L. Majors was convicted and sentenced to death. A series of appeals and a temporary reprieve delayed the execution, but the outcome was never seriously in doubt. While awaiting death in the Oakland jail, Majors made a dramatic and violent attempt to escape, overpowering guards and seizing keys before being confronted by firemen drawn by the noise. In the struggle his arm was broken, ending the attempt and leaving him badly injured.

Majors maintained his innocence to the end. On the morning of May 23, 1884, he was led from his cell to the gallows in Oakland. Witnesses noted his composure despite his injuries. He refused to make a final speech. The trap was sprung shortly after noon, and he died with his neck broken. Within minutes his body was cut down and placed in a coffin, the execution carried out in near silence inside the jail yard.

Majors was the first person legally lynched in Oakland and the third in Alameda County (the other two being in San Leandro). 

The lynching of Lloyd Majors

The men who carried out the killings fared little better. Jewell and Showers were convicted and sentenced to long terms in San Quentin. Showers died in prison; Jewell eventually disappeared from the historical record after serving his sentence. Majors alone paid with his life, executed not for pulling a trigger himself, but for planning, directing, and enabling a crime whose savagery shocked even a violent era.

The Lexington murders lingered in local memory as a cautionary tale about appearances and hypocrisy. Lloyd Leadbetter Majors, preacher and saloonkeeper, reformer and arsonist, embodied the contradictions of the Gilded Age West. His life demonstrated how intelligence and respectability could mask greed and cruelty, and how the distance between moral posturing and moral collapse could be terrifyingly short.

Footnote about the site of the crime: Renowden’s cabin was located in the Lexington district of the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of Los Gatos. The exact cabin site no longer exists; the area was later transformed by the creation of Lexington Reservoir. The murders occurred in what is now part of the Lexington Hills area near Alma Bridge Road, beneath or adjacent to land inundated or reshaped by the reservoir and surrounding parklands. 

Sources: San Francisco Call, Sacramento Daily Record-Union, Atchison Globe, Quincy Daily Whig, Omaha Daily Bee, and other contemporary California and national newspaper accounts, 1883–1884; Facebook: San Francisco Bay Area Memories; Find a Grave; Ancestry.com