True Crime Chronicles: Commuted sentence in 1878 Franklin County rape and murder incited mob lynching
Updated: Aug 17
In the rural reaches of post-Reconstruction Arkansas, crimes of rape often provoked a form of retribution that formal courts neither fully controlled nor always succeeded in directing.
Local communities, steeped in notions of honor and swift accountability, frequently stepped outside the law when they judged legal processes too slow, too lenient, or insufficiently severe for offenses against women. The case of Cal Emory illustrated this tension with stark clarity.
Mary E. Taylor had lived for two years at the home of her brother, Starling Dabbs, in Franklin County after separating from her husband in Missouri.
She had married roughly seven years earlier at that same household. On the morning of July 7, 1878, she left the Dabbs place around eight o’clock, dressed in a light brown calico dress and a checked sun-bonnet, intending to walk about a mile east along Mulberry Creek to the home of John George.
She never arrived.
Eight days later searchers found her body in a shallow slough roughly three-quarters of a mile west of the Dabbs house. Decomposition had advanced. Flesh was gone from the face, the scalp was missing, entrails protruded, and the body was swollen.
Seven front teeth were absent. Her dress showed slits and cuts over the breast area. A medical examination revealed a fracture of the eighth rib on the left side, about an inch from the spinal column, with coagulated blood around the break indicating violence near the time of death. Her bonnet had been discovered two days earlier hanging on a bush at the creek’s edge, with rings tied to its strings.
Cal Emory, a twenty-eight-year-old Franklin County MAN had been " paying court t" o Taylor since May of that year. He visited her regularly even though she remained legally married.
James Youngblood, who lived and worked on a nearby farm belonging to James M. Huggins, was associated with Emory. Both men stayed the night of July 6 at the home of Youngblood’s father and were seen leaving together the next morning.
After the discovery of the body they vanished. Authorities located and arrested them on August 13, 1879, in Sharp County.
Youngblood later made a voluntary statement while in custody. He told Sheriff Robert Case that he and Emory had planned an encounter in which Emory would engage in sexual intercourse with Taylor and Youngblood would then demand participation. Taylor refused, declaring she would die first.
Violence followed. Emory washed blood from a handkerchief. Youngblood described the affair as a rough job. Other witnesses recalled Youngblood speaking of Taylor in contradictory terms, once calling her a whore with no friends and later describing her as a perfect lady and virtuous woman.
Circumstantial details accumulated: the two men had been seen consulting during the search for Taylor, Emory had borrowed money offering Youngblood as surety, and Youngblood had attempted to sell his crop under suspicious circumstances.
The pair were jointly indicted in Franklin County Circuit Court in November 1879 on seven counts of murder, alleging death by stabbing, beating with clubs or fists or stones, or drowning. They elected to sever. Youngblood was tried at Ozark, convicted of murder in the second degree, and sentenced to twenty-one years in the state penitentiary. The Arkansas Supreme Court later affirmed the conviction, finding the circumstantial evidence and Youngblood’s statements sufficient for the jury.
Emory obtained a change of venue to Pope County. At the October 1880 term of the circuit court in Dover, he was convicted and sentenced to hang on December 17, 1880. His lawyers appealed and lost. By early June 1881, the gallows stood ready in Dover. Governor Thomas J. Churchill, a former Confederate major general who had recently taken office after serving as state treasurer, then commuted the death sentence to twenty-one years in the penitentiary.
The Russellville Democrat denounced the decision as an outrage upon public decency. Emory remained confined in the Dover jail. Several attempts by groups of men to seize him were frustrated by the guards.
On the night of June 13, 1881, a mob overpowered those guards. They led Emory toward the scaffold that had been erected for his legal execution. The leader ordered him to climb the steps. Emory refused, declaring he would be damned if he did
. Impatience spread through the crowd. One man fired, striking Emory in the forehead. Additional shots followed into his body. The wounded and groaning prisoner was seized and hurried up the steps. A noose was fixed around his neck and the trap was sprung. One contemporaneous report suggested he was already dead before the hanging.
His body remained suspended until the following day.
No arrests followed. Newspapers reported the belief that the mob had come from Franklin County and consisted of friends of the murdered woman.
The Russellville Democrat insisted that no citizen of Pope County had taken part and that the county bore no stain for an act carried out against a prisoner held there solely because of a change of venue.
Emory’s partner Youngblood served his prison term. Governor Churchill’s brief administration soon became entangled in accusations of financial irregularities from his earlier tenure as treasurer, a controversy that overshadowed other aspects of his record.
The scaffold in Dover, built for a lawful hanging that never occurred under state authority, stood as a physical reminder of the limits of formal justice when communities determined that the courts had failed to deliver the outcome they demanded.
