Within two months of the Wiggans Patch Massacre, McParland left the coalfields. It has been widely reported that Kehoe had come to suspect him, if not of complicity in the murder of his kinsmen, at least of being a spy. Whatever the reason for his sudden departure, his return was easily explainable.

He had come back to testify against more than 50 men who he claimed were Molly Maguires.

The first trial for the Yost murder got under way in May 1876, and it marked the beginning of what historian Harold Aurand would later call one of the most outstanding surrenders of sovereignty in American history."

The prosecutor in the cases was none other than Gowen himself, and the judge was his old friend and Kehoe's old political nemesis, Cyrus L. Pershing, imported by the railroad from Cambria County especially for the trials.

The investigations had been conducted by Gowen's hired detectives, and the arrests not one of the men tried was apprehended while committing a crime were dragged from the homes by Gowen's private Coal and Iron Police. As Aurand put it, the state "provided only the courtroom and the hangman."

Schuylkill County Courthouse

After the five men accused of murdering Yost were convicted and sentenced to hang, "the same verdict was handed down in the cases of other innocent miners," Boyer and Morais wrote. "Mike Kelly and Ed Doyle received death sentences. Jack Kehoe as convicted for the murder ofLangdonwho had been killed fourteen years beforestoned by a crowd of miners."

Kehoe's House of the Hibernians

It didn't matter that witnesses had testified that they had seen Kehoe running past them at the very moment that Langdon was apparently being attacked, Wayne said. It didn't matter that Langdon, who lived three days after the attack and was apparently conscious, never identified Kehoe as one of his attackers even though Kehoe lived right around the corner from Langdon at the time. It didn't even matter that even the witnesses who claimed he was in the crowd, never testified that they actually saw him throw a stone.

The jury found Kehoe guilty and sentenced him to die. It was hardly a surprise, Wayne said. Gowen had handpicked the jury and though it did not include a single Irishman or Catholic, it did include one Dutch immigrant who noted in broken English that he didn't understand everything that was said, but all the same was "for hanging him."

In Kehoe's case, in Alex Campbell's case, in all the cases in fact, the principal testimony much of it hearsay evidence came directly from McParland.

As Boyer and Morais wrote; "McParlan[d] agreed to testifythat all those whom Gowen wanted removed had freely and voluntarily confessed to him that they had committed various murders. His word was to be corroborated by various prisoners at various of the county's jails, freedom the reward for corroboration.

Among them were men like Manus Coll, a man who even the Moffett in his glowing article in support of McParland's work acknowledged "had been a Molly for a number of years, but had been expelled from the order as being too bad even for that desperate organization."

In the Yost case, for example, the key corroboration for McParland's testimony testimony that sent five men to the gallows -- came from "Powder Keg Kerrigan," the man who most observers believe was Peter Yost's killer and who bought his freedom by implicating others.

John Kehoe death warrant

In all, between 1877 and 1879 nineteen miners were sent to their deaths as a result of the Molly Maguire trials. Among them were Kehoe, and Campbell.

All of them died proclaiming their innocence.

As a reporter for the New York World wrote of the last of the executions, those of Charles Sharpe and John McDonald, "the demeanor of the men on the scaffold, their resolute yet quiet protestations of innocencewere things to stagger one's belief in their guilt."

In a final irony, just moments after the limp bodies of the two hanged men were cut down from the gallows, a messenger arrived from Harrisburg, bearing an order, signed by the governor, commuting their sentences to life.

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