In his Guerrilla Warfare volume one, p. 192, Bruce Nichols attributes the commanding officer of the 34-man Federal force who killed the men at the Givens house on Sept. 4, 1862 in Callaway County as being Capt. Henry Windmuller. This is the "Prairie Grove Massacre" discussed in another thread on this board.
The date of the killings in this reference work is off and the Federal regiment is wrong -- Windmuller was captain of Company A, 1st Missouri State Militia Cavalry Battalion -- but Nichols asserts Windmuller resigned Oct. 7, 1862. Windmuller's card at the State Archives confirms this. The timing of the resignation is interesting, but I haven't found the data putting him in command of the squad at the site.
I'm also wondering if Windmuller was the fall guy for the killing of the Unionist county judge at the site of the killings so it wouldn't interfere with his senior officer's run for U.S. Congress (Lt. Col. Arnold Krekel). Does anybody have access to Windmuller's file, and, if so, is there any reprimand in it or does it otherwise provide any hints as to the reason for the resignation?