True Crime Chronicles: US Forest Ranger was investigating a fire on Pilot Mountain in Scott County when he was killed in 1936

Eben B. Bethel

On a mild early summer Tuesday in 1936, as the nation still labored under the weight of the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs sought to steady a weary country, the remote ridges of western Arkansas remained far from the headlines that filled the day’s papers.

That same June 2, General Anastasio Somoza García seized power in Nicaragua, overthrowing President Juan Bautista Sacasa and beginning a decades-long family dynasty, while Hungarian authorities rounded up hundreds of National Socialists accused of plotting against their government.

In western Arkansas, the temperature climbed only to a comfortable 83 degrees with no rain, a gentle day that gave little hint of the extreme heat and drought that would soon grip Arkansas and much of the South.

Yet in the timbered hills of the Ouachita National Forest near Waldron, far from those distant upheavals, a quiet federal duty ended in gunfire.

Eben B. Bethel, born November 10, 1890, to William Riley Bethel and Susan Nell Miller Bethel, was a forty-five-year-old deputy United States forest ranger assigned to the Cold Springs Ranger District.

Married to Bertha L. Bethel and the father of sons including Charles L. Bethel and Carl Griffin Bethel, he left behind a wife and three boys when he was killed while investigating a forest fire on Pilot Mountain, about twelve miles northeast of Waldron.

The blaze had been set by someone trying to smoke bees from a tree for honey. Bethel followed the tracks until they led him to a twenty-four-year-old Scott County sawmill worker named Adell Allen, a former Texas convict who had only months earlier finished a two-year burglary sentence.

Afraid the encounter would return him to prison, Allen ambushed the ranger near his vehicle and shot him three times--twice in the chest--with a rifle stolen from the house of his employer, J. P. Canada. Allen later confessed that he had told only his wife and Canada what he had done.

Authorities moved swiftly. State Ranger John Hendricks, Sheriff W. W. Austin, and Deputy Albert Oller took Allen into custody. By Sunday he was in the Sebastian County jail in Fort Smith, repeating his account to local, state, and federal officers while a court reporter took it down in shorthand.

A formal first-degree murder charge was prepared the next day and carried to Waldron for filing. Allen was expected to be arraigned later that week. Five other men, including Canada, were questioned as possible accessories, though no charges were filed against them at the time.

Allen was sentenced to the Arkansas state prison. Public records of his later life and death remain scarce. No confirmed details of his sentence length, any parole, release, or eventual fate have surfaced in available sources

Anecdotal statements and claims that he may died in prison in the mid-1960s during a time in which the Arkansas prison system was under national scrutiny have produced no evidence to that fact. His prior Texas conviction is noted in period reporting, but further specifics about that earlier case are limited.

Bethel was laid to rest in Cauthron Cemetery in Scott County, where his wife would later join him. A plaque in his memory was placed on Poteau Mountain south of Hartford. Visitors in recent years have described the remote markers--sometimes noted as a pair--as standing “literally in the middle of nowhere,” with reports that they have been vandalized or defaced and occasional local calls for an updated or better-maintained memorial.

Nearly ninety years after the shooting, the United States Forest Service formally expanded its recognition of Bethel’s sacrifice. Until 2025, the agency had listed eight law-enforcement officers killed while serving: Jason Crisp, Christopher Upton, Kristine Fairbanks, Michael Staples, Stephen Bowman, Brent Jacobson, Harmon Schwoob, and Rudolph E. Mellenthin.

During National Police Week that May--rooted in President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 proclamation designating May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day--Law Enforcement and Investigations Director Tracy Perry added Deputy Ranger Eben B. Bethel’s name to the national memorial for officers killed in the line of duty.

Official accounts recounted the June 2, 1936, fire investigation on Pilot Mountain, the tracking of the suspect, the ambush near the vehicle, the confession, and the state-prison sentence, noting that Bethel was survived by his wife and three sons and that a local monument had long honored his service.

In the timbered hills of the Ouachita, on an ordinary June day amid the Depression, a ranger’s quiet federal duty ended in gunfire. The local plaque on Poteau Mountain and the 2025 addition of his name to the Forest Service’s national memorial ensure that Eben B. Bethel is not forgotten.