True Crime Chronicles: Neighbor's greed led to one of the most heinous murders in the history of Adair County

In the shadowed hollows of Adair County where the Cherokee Nation’s old ways still clung to the red-dirt hills, a quiet September evening in 1922 turned into a slaughter born of envy and cold calculation.

James “Uncle Jimmie” Davenport, a 64-year-old widower with calloused hands and a soft spot for his hog dogs, lived alone on a small farm just outside Stilwell. He was an outsider with no Cherokee blood but he worked the land hard and owned a string of fine horses that made neighbors take notice.

One of those neighbors, full-blood Cherokee landowner John Doublehead, noticed a little too much. On Friday, September 8, Davenport was out in the field wrestling hogs when Doublehead walked up. What started as talk about a horse trade ended with a club to the skull.

One crushing blow dropped the old man; a second made sure he stayed down. Doublehead dragged the body across the property line to his own backyard, which was only sixty-six steps from Davenport’s porch, wrapped it in a shirt, overalls, a gunny sack, and a blanket, and dug a pitiful grave just fourteen inches deep near his spring.

He laid Uncle Jimmie face-down, tucked the dead man’s hat under his head like a cruel joke, then plowed the earth smooth to hide the evidence. The murder weapon went into the weeds. The shoes were carried a mile and a half and stuffed under a bush. The saddle was stashed at a fence corner.

That night, Doublehead rode into Stilwell on one of Davenport’s stolen horses, leading another, acting like the deal had been honest.

By Monday the neighbors knew something was wrong. Uncle Jimmie never let his stock go hungry. Chickens were unfed, dogs unpenned, and the best horses were missing. Suspicion fell fast on Doublehead bwcause he’d been seen with the animals and couldn’t keep his story straight.

On Tuesday, searchers found the shallow grave. The body was still warm with summer heat, wrapped exactly as Doublehead later described.

They locked him up in Stilwell on September 17. Getting the truth out of him took a grim parade: handcuffed, surrounded by a deputy with a Winchester, a marshal with a shotgun, and the county attorney, Doublehead was driven back to the farm.

Four unarmed locals tagged along, the air thick with talk of a necktie party. At the grave he pointed, silent at first, then talked. He showed them the hidden saddle, the shoes under the bush, and finally spilled every detail: the ambush while Davenport worked the hogs, the club snatched in rage, the frantic burial under moonlight, the bareback ride dragging the corpse.

It was a confession delivered at gunpoint, but every piece fit the ground like it had been waiting there all along.

Stilwell burned with fury. Threats of lynching flew so loud that Doublehead’s lawyers begged for a change of venue. The judge refused. An insanity plea surfaced—booze, syphilis, maybe shell-shock passed down from a gassed grandfather, but the doctors couldn’t agree, and the jury never bought it. Doublehead stayed mute on the stand.

December 1922 brought the trial. The courtroom crackled. Prosecutors called it one of the most brutal killings the county had ever seen. The armed confession was argued for days, but the judge let it in. On December 19 the jury needed little time: guilty, first-degree murder.

Two days later, in a voice that brought tears to hardened men, the judge sentenced John Doublehead to die in the electric chair at McAlester, one minute past midnight on February 20, 1923—only the second death sentence ever handed down in Adair County.

Appeals dragged it out. In 1924 the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals upheld the conviction but threw out the death penalty. The prosecutor had scared the jury with a wild prediction: send him away for life and he’d be “walking the streets of Stilwell in five years with Uncle Jimmie’s blood still on his hands.”

That was over the line. The court changed the sentence to life at hard labor.

Doublehead never saw freedom again. He died in the penitentiary a year later, malaria and plain "prison rot" they said. They buried him somewhere on the grounds, unmarked.

Uncle Jimmie Davenport lies today in the Stilwell cemetery under a simple stone that remembers the year he was born and the year a neighbor’s greed put him in the ground.

The hills around his old farm are quiet now, but if you walk them on a September evening when the wind moves through the blackjack oaks, some say you can still smell fresh-turned earth and hear the faint, betrayed bark of long-dead hog dogs.