True Crime Chronicles: Blood in the Hollows-The Boone County/Enon Massacre of 1922

In the shadowed hollers of Boone County's Enon community east of Omaha, where moonlit roads twist through untamed Ozark woods, a single night of betrayal and bullets etched a scar on Arkansas history.

On September 16, 1922, the Enon Massacre claimed four lives in a hail of over 100 rifle rounds, born from a tangled feud of family honor, forbidden love, and Prohibition-era grudge.

This swift, savage ambush, rooted in rural desperation, ignited a generational rift and reshaped a community forever.

The spark ignited months earlier. Ebenezer "Eb" Badley, a 29-year-old factory hand at

Harrison's Cricket Canning Company, had tangled with the Scott family--poor, numerous, and feared for their moonshine runs and mean streaks.

Eb impregnated young Julia Scott, 15, shaming the clan led by her brothers: David "Boss" Scott, a fugitive hothead, and the rest. Amid bootlegging turf wars with the Woods (linked via sister Georgia), Eb planned to flee with Julia and his brother James "Utah" Badley, 20.

Fate intervened at Calvin Roberts's Enon home, site of a wedding dance awash in illegal liquor. Eb arrived with pal Henry Blevins, 22, and Blevins's fiancée Rosetta Creekmore, 16.

Spotting Julia, Eb danced and schemed one last rendezvous before escape. As the quartet--Eb, Utah, their uncle James A. Badley, 50, and coworker John Martin, 25--drove home in a rattling Model T, the Scotts lay in wait on a remote road.

Rifles blazed; the car crumpled under the barrage. Autopsies revealed horrific head and torso wounds. Julia, hiding nearby, witnessed the horror but later wavered in testimony.

Sheriff James Helm's deputies swarmed the bloodied scene, matching bullets to Scott rifles via ballistics--a rarity for 1922 forensics. The brothers fled to Missouri but were nabbed days later.

Harrison Daily Times headlines screamed "2 Killed and 2 Near Death in Shooting" (Sept. 18), fanning fears of wider war. Julia's initial denial--"It wasn't my brothers"--crumbled under scrutiny, sealing the case.

The January 1923's Boone County Circuit Court trial packed Harrison's courthouse, with Daily Times dispatches like "Circuit Court Starts Monday" (Jan. 3) drawing crowds. Facing four first-degree murder counts, David and James Scott claimed self-defense in a "feud of honor."

Prosecutors decried the "cold-blooded" trap.

After two weeks, the jury opted for manslaughter on February 15--feud sympathy softening the blow.

Judge Webster L. Moose handed down 21-year sentences at Cummins Penitentiary. David died en route; James served 12 years, paroled in 1935 amid lingering hate that sparked skirmishes into the 1940s.

Enon responded with a stark ban on dancing and drink, blaming the "devil's brew" for the blood. The massacre, one of Boone's deadliest, mirrors broader Ozark feuds like the political Tutt-Everett slaughter or Franklin County's McLaughlin-Nixon moonshine wars--tales of land, liquor, and lethal pride.

Yet it underscores a shift: from unchecked vengeance to courtroom reckonings, however flawed. Today, Enon's hollows whisper of lost lives and fractured kin, a cautionary ballad of how love and liquor can turn kin to killers.