True Crime Chronicles: An 1886 affair led to the murder of a Boone County farmer and a controversial hanging

In Marion County, Arkansas, near Yellville, farmer George Watkins shared his modest home with his wife Rebecca, their young son, and a hired hand named Andrew J. Hudspeth, known to some as Charles or Andy.

On December 9, 1886, the two men set out together in a wagon loaded with cotton bales bound for town. Watkins sold the crop. Hudspeth returned alone. He told anyone who asked that Watkins had stepped off to seek work on the railroad and would follow later.

Neighbors found the story odd. Watkins was a hard-working, inoffensive man with no reason to vanish in the night when he was only a few miles from home.

Suspicion settled quickly on Hudspeth. Deputy Sheriff Lawson arrested him on February 1, 1887. Rebecca Watkins had already left for Fayetteville and told her father in Harrison that her husband had been killed on the railroad. Brought back for an examining trial, she gave a different account under questioning.

She admitted to a criminal intimacy with Hudspeth and said the two had plotted to remove George so they could be together. She described finding a great deal of blood on the wagon when Hudspeth returned and watching him leave the next day with a bloody axe.

She claimed she asked whether he had hidden everything so it would never be found, and that he answered he had.

Rebecca was held as a material witness. On the night of July 10, 1887, a group of nightriders dragged her from the deputy’s house, placed a rope around her neck, and threatened to hang her unless she revealed more about her husband’s fate. She pleaded for her life.

The mob eventually released her unharmed. In August, the Marion County circuit court indicted Hudspeth for first-degree murder. A change of venue moved the case to Harrison in Boone County.

The first trial lasted nearly a week in early 1888. Rebecca testified for the state. The jury convicted Hudspeth, and the court sentenced him to hang on April 19. He appealed. The Arkansas Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Burrill Battle, reversed the conviction on a technicality after finding that the trial judge had improperly excluded evidence that might have undermined Rebecca’s credibility.

A new trial was ordered.

While waiting in the Boone County Jail in late July 1888, Hudspeth picked the lock of his cell and walked free. He remained at large for years, traveling under various aliases, the last of them J. J. Taylor.

On March 23, 1892, officers arrested him near Clarksville in Johnson County. He was armed with a large axe and showed signs of resistance. The Arkansas Gazette described him as a hard case.

Brought back to Harrison, he faced a second trial in late July 1892. Thirty-eight witnesses took the stand. Once more the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. The court set the hanging for October 13.

Acting Governor Christopher Columbus Hamby granted a fifty-eight-day delay so the case could be reviewed for possible commutation. Governor James P. Eagle then pushed the date to December 30 so he could examine the evidence himself.

After two days of study, the governor refused clemency. The absence of a body troubled many observers, yet the testimony and circumstantial proof, including Hudspeth’s possession of Watkins’s money, coat, gloves, and pipe, proved enough for the courts.

On the day before the execution, Hudspeth met with a local Methodist preacher and asked to be baptized. The minister declined, saying the circumstances made it unnecessary. Hudspeth told his attorney privately that he was innocent, but he never offered any explanation for Watkins’s disappearance.

On December 30, 1892, Sheriff D. A. Eoff waited until 4:15 p.m. in hope of a last-minute reprieve that never came. Hudspeth refused a final statement. In feeble health yet steady on his feet, he walked to the scaffold.

At 4:30 the trap fell. His neck broke cleanly. The body showed no tremor. Twelve minutes later it was cut down.

The hanging was the first legal execution in Boone County history, though three men had been lynched there in earlier years. No trace of George Watkins’s body was ever recovered.

Years afterward, a story circulated that Hudspeth’s lawyer, W. F. Pace, had located Watkins alive and farming in Kansas in June 1893. The claim was never substantiated and was widely regarded as a hoax.

The trial judge of the day offered to wager any sum that Watkins was dead. The case remains a stark example of a conviction secured without a corpse, resting on the word of a lover, the silence of the accused, and the weight of circumstance in the isolated Ozarks of the late nineteenth century.