True Crime Chronicles: Mary Jane Billingsley killed her abusive brother-in-law on November 8, 1914, in Womble
On the morning of November 8, 1914, in the railroad town of Womble in Montgomery County, Rev. Edward Millard Beard, known as Eddie, was shot and killed by his sister-in-law, Mary Jane Billingsley. The shooting took place at about eleven o’clock in the Big Four restaurant, where the Beard family and Mary lived together.
A coroner’s jury convened that same afternoon by Justice of the Peace Van Dyke and returned a verdict that Mary had acted in self-defense and was justified. She faced no further criminal charge.
Edward Millard Beard was born December 2, 1879, in Lincoln County, Arkansas, the son of Millard Fillmore Beard and Frances Eleanor Rowe, called Fanny. Census records listed him at various times as Edgar M., Millard Edger, and Edward. He married Sarah Caroline Billingsley, called Cary, on December 30, 1900, in Bradley County.
She had been born October 1, 1885, in Ashley County, the daughter of Samuel Ford Billingsley and Telietha Jane Camp. The couple had five children. The youngest was born and died in Womble in 1914.
An infant daughter named Naydine had died only four months before her father. A daughter named Reta, who was about ten at the time of the shooting, later recalled brothers named Roy, Louie, and Lelion. Reta was interviewed in 1986 when she was eighty-two. In the prepared family version of that interview her father was said to have died suddenly at age thirty-five.
Handwritten notes from the same interview recorded that he came in drunk and Aunt Mary shot him.
By 1911 or 1912 the family had moved to Womble, a new lumber and railroad town founded in 1907 and renamed Norman in 1925. Beard worked during the week as a lumberjack and blacksmith and raised peanuts. On Sundays and at meetings, he preached. He had been ordained about two years earlier and traveled the county holding gospel meetings.
The family lived at the Big Four, a hotel and restaurant building with fourteen rooms upstairs, a large dining room, a soda fountain, and rooms downstairs. Beard also operated a barber shop and pressing shop in the front of the building. Cary cooked and helped run the boarding house. Mary Jane Billingsley, Cary’s younger sister, lived with them. She was twenty-three years old in 1914.
On the morning of the shooting, Beard told his wife he intended to kill Mary and then kill himself. He had whipped Mary a week earlier and had tried to beat her again only days before. He demanded entry to the upstairs room where she was staying. She called out that he should not come up.
He continued up the stairs. Mary fired a revolver she was carrying. The first shot struck him in the heart. A second shot went wild. He turned and fled downstairs, falling in the hallway. Mary followed and fired two more shots. One entered his head above the temple and one struck the fourth finger of his right hand.
An unopened pocket knife was found in his left hand. Four shots were fired in all, three of them taking effect. A man named Ford was the only eyewitness.
Both Mary and Cary testified before the coroner’s jury. They stated that Beard had threatened Mary’s life on numerous occasions and that she had kept herself hidden from him for more than a week because she was frightened.
The jury deliberated into the late afternoon and concluded that the killing was justified as self-defense. The death certificate from Montgomery County listed the cause as shot with a pistol in the hands of Mary Billingsly.
Newspaper accounts in the Arkansas Gazette the next day described Beard as forty years old, though family records and the death certificate indicate he was about thirty-five.
Family accounts differed on the reasons for the earlier beatings and threats. One version passed down through a cousin of Beard’s eldest son said that Mary had announced she wanted to become a telephone operator. Beard refused permission, she defied him, and the beatings followed.
Another account simply recorded that he came in drunk and she shot him. The genealogist who later researched the case noted the possibility of unwanted advances or simple resistance to authority, but the surviving records do not resolve the question.
The coroner’s jury accepted the testimony of ongoing threats and the immediate circumstances of the shooting.
Beard was buried in Ferguson Cemetery in Montgomery County, next to his infant daughter Naydine. Markers for E. M. Beard and Naydine are recorded there. The cemetery lies on private property near what is now Norman.
Cary remarried after her husband’s death and lived until September 16, 1962, in Los Angeles County, California. Mary Jane Billingsley later married and died in 1967. The Big Four building continued in use for years afterward. In 1921 it was purchased, the second floor removed, and the ground floor converted into a café serving homemade chili, hamburgers, pies, and baked goods, with living quarters beside it.
The episode left the Beard and Billingsley families with a carefully managed public account and a more fragmentary private memory. The coroner’s verdict closed the legal matter within hours.
The town of Womble continued its brief boom as a lumber and railroad center before the name change and the later decline of the mills. The graves in Ferguson Cemetery remain the most tangible local record of the events of that November morning.
