True Crime Chronicles: Grim Reaper cheated Arkansas justice by taking killer before his scheduled execution date

On February 7, 1980, at about two o'clock in the afternoon, Darrell Wayne Hill steered a maroon Ford Thunderbird into E. L. Ward's Service Station in Pencil Bluff, a quiet settlement along Highway 88 in Montgomery County. Ward, the station owner, walked out to check the radiator and pump gas.

A few minutes later, Donald Lee Teague, a wildlife technician with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, arrived in his own vehicle and asked for fuel. Ward stepped into the garage to clear the pumps.

Hill followed Ward inside. He drew a handgun and demanded money. Ward emptied the cash register into a paper bag and added his wallet. Teague entered the garage at that moment. Hill turned the gun on him and ordered Teague to place his billfold in the bag.

Hill then announced that both men were going for a ride. He made Teague drive the Thunderbird while Ward sat beside him with the money bag. As they traveled, Hill reached over and took the cash from Ward's wallet.Teague followed Hill's directions onto a gravel road off Highway 88.

Hill told him to stop. He marched the two men into the weeds and ordered them to lie face down with their hands behind their backs. Hill shot Teague several times, killing him. Ward begged for his life. Hill fired four more shots at Ward, striking him and leaving him for dead. Ward lay still until he heard the car drive away.

He called out to Teague, received no answer, and crawled back to the road. A pulpwood driver found him that afternoon. Ward gave officers a clear description of Hill and the Thunderbird before he was taken to a hospital in Hot Springs.

Donald Lee Teague was thirty-seven years old. Born on December 30, 1942, in Charleston, he worked as a commissioned officer enforcing game and fish regulations across the state. His primary duties involved turkey restoration projects, but he also served part-time in enforcement.

On February 7 he was simply on duty and needed fuel when he pulled into the station. He left behind a family that included relatives in the Charleston area. His death was recorded as line-of-duty by the Officer Down Memorial Page.

E. L. Ward owned and operated the only service station in Pencil Bluff. Local residents knew him as the man who kept the pumps running and the garage open. He survived four gunshot wounds. His detailed description of the gunman and the car became the basis for the immediate alert that led to the arrest.

Ward recovered and testified at trial.

Darrell Wayne Hill, born September 11, 1940, in Sperry, Oklahoma, was thirty-nine years old on the day of the crimes. The NCIC bulletin described him as a white male, roughly forty-five to fifty, medium build, about one hundred sixty pounds, with a rough-skinned face, black hair, last seen in a gray suit and blue shirt. The car carried a white Oklahoma plate with dark lettering.

Officers classified him as armed and extremely dangerous.Hill carried a criminal record of five prior felony convictions, including two robberies, one in Missouri and one in Oklahoma. Court records later showed he had been prescribed antipsychotic medication and had taken it regularly from at least June through December 1979.

He missed an outpatient appointment in mid-January 1980, about three weeks before the Pencil Bluff robbery. At trial, he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury rejected it.

Donald Lee Teague,

At 4:05 p.m. the NCIC dispatch went out. At 6:25 p.m. Hot Springs police spotted the matching Thunderbird. Officers stopped the car, conducted a protective frisk and search justified by the armed-and-dangerous bulletin, and found a loaded Charter Arms .38 Special revolver and a brown paper sack containing coins beneath the driver's seat.

Ballistics later matched the gun to the bullets recovered from Teague and Ward. Hill was arrested on the spot.

Montgomery County Circuit Court tried the case in July 1980. On July 11 the jury convicted Hill on every count: capital felony murder of Teague, attempted capital murder of Ward, two counts of kidnapping, and two counts of aggravated robbery. The panel sentenced him to death for Teague's murder, life imprisonment for the attempted murder of Ward, and fifty years on each of the remaining counts.

The fifty-year terms ran consecutively to the life sentence.

On direct appeal the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the capital murder conviction and death sentence along with the Ward-related convictions. It merged the Teague kidnapping and robbery counts as lesser-included offenses of the capital murder and set them aside.

The court also later vacated the Ward kidnapping and robbery counts on post-conviction review for the same reason. Overwhelming evidence included Ward's eyewitness identification, ballistics, vehicle match, and physical evidence recovered from the Thunderbird.

No change of venue was granted because prejudice was limited. Hill's prior felonies were used for enhancement and aggravation.

Federal habeas corpus proceedings in 1993 led to a resentencing hearing. In 1996 a new jury again found four aggravating circumstances and no mitigating circumstances and imposed the death penalty once more.

Hill remained on Arkansas death row for twenty-five years. During that time he developed an unusually large number of correspondents around the world. On December 8, 2005, at age sixty-five, he died of heart failure in prison at Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff.

He was never executed. His death left him as one of the longest-serving inmates on the state's death row at the time.

The case file, the ballistics reports, Ward's identification, and the physical evidence recovered from the Thunderbird left no doubt about the sequence of events.

What began as a stop for gas in a mountain hamlet ended with one wildlife officer dead, a station owner wounded, and a man who had spent much of his adult life cycling through the criminal justice system facing the ultimate penalty only to die of natural causes decades later while the sentence remained in place.