When her body was discovered by her husband and Maud townspeople the next day, a white mob began to form, and they combed the area to find the person guilty.

They cornered, detained, kidnapped, tortured, and—in some cases—mock lynched several men over a few days, before they settled on two teenagers they thought were guilty of the crime: Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson.

McGeisey and Sampson were chosen despite there being no evidence for a second killer, and the mob accused them of raping, murdering, and having sex with the dead body of Mary Leard.

In front of judge John R. Thomas, special prosecutor Horace Speed led the prosecutions of the men involved in the lynching.

It was the first successful prosecution of lynching in the Southwestern United States, though one man was released early from prison and returned home to a celebration proclaiming his innocence.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the American government removed the Seminole people from Florida to the Indian Territory, a region that now lies in the eastern part of Oklahoma.

[6] In one case in Pottawatomie County in 1897, a mob attempted to lynch a man named Israel C. McGlothlin: He was hanged alive three times, but he ultimately survived.

[11] He murdered her by hitting her over the head with his gun, threw her infant daughter Cora on the floor, asked the children for money, and then fled.

[20] The general public acts in such cases [accusations of rape] on the theory that it is infinitely safer to summarily execute such criminals than run the risk of seeing them turned loose upon the community for the want of prosecution.

[31] They invaded the home of John Washington, kidnapped him at gunpoint, and mock lynched him by stringing a noose around his neck and hanging him from a tree until he lost consciousness, then brought him down and brutalized him.

In the still-dark morning hours of January 8, 1898, a mob carried McGeisey and Sampson to a makeshift prayer site filled with dry brush, just south of the post office in Maud—a "tabernacle" in the local parlance.

[39] Leard had previously confessed her sins to the community at this location, and the mob wanted to "mingle their [McGeisey's and Sampson's] blood with her departed spirit".

[39] They were shackled together by their necks to opposite sides of a tree, facing northwards, as the mob surrounded them with dry wooden poles from the site's brush arbor.

[21] Soon after the men were murdered, newspapers started claiming that members of the Seminole Nation were planning to target white Oklahomans in a race riot.

[45] Writers for the Weekly Oklahoma State Capital claimed on January 15, 1898—through a special bulletin—that in response to "the excesses of the armed bands of whites", Native American revenge was "imminent".

[news 10] This was a falsehood crafted by a communications employee in Earlsboro, Oklahoma,[46] and officials from the Department of the Interior were unable to find any evidence of any insurrection.

[49] Independently, Governor Cassius McDonald Barnes of the Oklahoma Territory offered a $1,000 reward for anyone who could secure a conviction against mob members for their role in "acts of lawlessness and barbarism".

[50] In February and March, several warrants were executed by federal investigators, but it remained difficult to find all of the members of the mob; out of around 90 people who were due to be arrested, only 67 had been located.

[53] Before Judge John R. Thomas, Speed successfully prosecuted several men, some of whom requested a jury trial and some pleaded guilty.

[57] Though Mont Ballard was sentenced to 10 years, albeit he served 7, and returned home to a celebration of hundreds in Maud who proclaimed his innocence.

Nelson Jones, the last man serving prison time for his role in the lynchings, was released from USP Leavenworth on parole in November 1910.

[67] He called for more examinations of the lynching of Native Americans, since there is extensive documentary evidence of their existence, and it is underrepresented in historical analyses.