Edmunds, Howard (Execution of)
Howard Edmunds was hanged on December 9, 1881, in Warren (Bradley County) for the murder of his young sister-in-law with whom he had had an affair and impregnated. Edmunds, age twenty-six, was born in Fairfield County, South Carolina, and moved to Arkansas around 1877, settling in Monticello (Drew County) where he soon married his cousin, widow Minnie Stitt, the daughter of planter James R. Watson. Stitt’s sister (and also Edmunds’s cousin), sixteen-year-old Sallie Watson, was a frequent visitor to their home, and she and Edmunds began an affair that resulted in her becoming pregnant. In late June 1881, Howard and Minnie Edmunds and several friends went on a fishing trip during which Edmunds “was abstracted and absent minded to a …
