On February 4, 1920, a farmer named Speed Collins found a school satchel and a cap by a fence along a cornfield in southern Fayette County, Kentucky, and took them to the nearby school, where the teacher, Anna Young, knew them as Geneva Hardman's. Geneva, ten, had not been home since the morning. Collins, a storekeeper named Claude Elkin and Thomas Foley went back to the field, found the tracks of a large man and followed them to the girl's body behind a fodder shock, partly covered, with blood on her and on the stalks and a large rock beside her. Captain Volney Mullikin's bloodhounds followed the tracks toward Keene in Jessamine County. A driver, James Woolfolk, said he had given a ride to Will Lockett, a war veteran, known burglar and bootlegger and farm day laborer, and a farmer near Nicholasville had seen a Black man walking the pike muddy to the knees. A search party chased the fleeing man, and Dr. W. T. Collette and Deputy Sheriff W. C. White caught him near Dixontown after he claimed to be Will Hamilton. Questioned by Assistant Chief Ernest Thompson and Detective Dudley Veal, he confessed that he had attacked Geneva intending to rape her and had killed her with a rock.
His real name was Petrie Kimbrough. He was raised in Pembroke, Kentucky; one account gives his birth as May 1888, another as 1896. He had taken the name Will Lockett on his travels. In his confession on death row he said he had tried to rape a white woman in Christian County, Kentucky, in 1905; that in 1912 he had attacked and killed Clara Miller Rogers, a white woman of twenty-five, near the railroad tracks at Carmi, Illinois; that in 1917 he had choked, raped and beaten Eliza Morman, a Black woman of twenty-five, at Governor and Canal Streets in Evansville, Indiana, and left her for dead; and that while serving at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville he had raped and strangled Sallie Anderson Kraft, a Black woman of fifty-five. Authorities began to check those killings but soon lost interest, since he was going to be executed anyway.
Governor Edwin Morrow sent the Kentucky National Guard to Lexington. "Do as much as you have to do to keep that negro in the hands of the law," he told the adjutant general. "If he falls into the hands of the mob I do not expect to see you alive." On February 9, 1920, a lynch mob of five to ten thousand people tried to storm the courthouse. Police and Guardsmen opened fire and shot more than fifty people. Five rioters, William Ethington, James Masengale, John Van Thomas, John Rogers and L. M. King, and a bystander, Benjamin Carrier, were killed; only twenty-one wounded rioters went to hospitals, for fear of prosecution. The Brooklyn Eagle called it "the first time south of Mason and Dixon's Line that any mob of this sort had actually met the volley fire of soldiers," and W. E. B. Du Bois called it the Second Battle of Lexington.
The mob looted pawnshops for pistols and cartridges, and Morrow asked for federal help. Twelve hundred Army troops under Brigadier General Francis Marshall arrived by special train with tanks and machine guns, declared martial law, drove the crowd out, and beat those who resisted with rifle butts. Marshall had Lockett marched openly through the streets to the train under a guard of four hundred soldiers. He cut telephone and telegraph traffic within a hundred miles and posted patrols, among them in the city's Black districts. Two grand juries were convened over the riot, and the second decided on February 26 that indictments would only inflame feeling further. Martial law was lifted two weeks after it was declared.
Kimbrough pleaded guilty. At his sentencing he said, "I know I do not deserve mercy, but I am sorry I committed the crime and I would give anything if the little girl could be brought back to life." His lawyer pointed to his honorable discharge, which rated his character very good. The jury fixed his punishment at death, and Judge Charles Kerr sentenced him. On March 11, 1920, at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, he showed almost no emotion as the black cap was lowered, and the current killed him within fifteen seconds. Geneva's two brothers were among the witnesses. He was buried in the prison cemetery.