True Crime Chronicles: A convict in transit killed a deputy with an iron bar to earn the first legal execution in Yell County

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n the closing weeks of 1900, a Black convict known as Bud Wilson, who also answered to the name Henry Stanley, was being taken under guard to a convict camp near Danville in Yell County.

Deputy Warden Robert H. Taylor, a white officer responsible for the camp, had charge of the prisoner during the conveyance. Contemporary accounts do not record the exact nature of Wilson’s original sentence or the length of time he had already served, nor do they provide any detailed personal history for either man.

Wilson appears in the record simply as a convict assigned to the labor camp system then common across the state, where prisoners were put to work on roads, farms, and other projects under armed supervision. Taylor’s background is likewise sparse; he is identified only by his rank as deputy warden of the Yell County camp.

What followed was swift and fatal. While being moved toward the camp, Wilson seized an iron bar and struck Taylor with it. Once the officer was down, Wilson snatched the pistol from the fallen man and shot him in the head.

The assault left Taylor dead. Reports place the killing in December 1900. Wilson was taken into custody, charged with murder, and eventually convicted in the Yell County courts. He was sentenced to hang.

Nearly a full year later, on December 6, 1901, the sentence was carried out in Danville.

Wilson was led to the scaffold erected for the purpose. The trap was sprung, and the body dropped. After roughly twenty minutes, the body was cut down and placed in a coffin. Before the lid could be secured, however, the body began to move. Wilson’s eyes opened and his frame shivered.

Deputies lifted him from the coffin and carried him back up the steps of the scaffold with the intention of hanging him a second time. When they reached the platform, the body stiffened, held rigid for a moment, and then went limp.

Physicians examined him carefully and pronounced him dead. Death had resulted from strangulation; the first drop had not broken the neck cleanly enough to produce immediate death. No second drop was performed, as life had already left the body by the time the platform was reached.

Contemporary dispatches from Atlanta and from Little Rock, carried in papers elsewhere in the South, recorded the essential facts of the murder and the unusual sequence at the hanging.

No further details of a final statement, religious ministrations, or the size of any crowd have survived in the accessible reports. Burial information for either Wilson or Taylor is likewise absent from the surviving accounts.

The case fits the pattern of Arkansas capital punishment in the early years of the twentieth century, when hangings for murder were still conducted at the county level and the state’s convict labor system placed large numbers of prisoners under the control of local wardens and guards.

The limited surviving record leaves the deeper personal histories of both men largely unknown, but the sequence of the killing, the conviction, and the protracted strangulation on the Danville scaffold is documented in the newspaper notices of the day.