Dave McWhorter (Execution of)

Dave McWhorter was hanged on July 25, 1902, for murdering his wife. His was the second of three executions conducted at Van Buren (Crawford County) in 1902 and one of six on the same date in Arkansas.

Dave McWhorter (called Thomas in some news reports), described as a “remarkably well preserved man of 59 years old,” had been wed to his wife Mary for about a year when they quarreled and he left her. On November 15, 1901, he went to her home near Mulberry (Crawford County) and asked her to take him back, but she “said she was done with him.” She and her two children headed to the fields to pick cotton as McWhorter continued to plead with her, ultimately threatening to kill himself; she said that “she hoped he would not do so, but…she could not help it.” McWhorter then pulled a pistol and fired. The first shot missed her, “the second shot striking her in the back of the head and passing through her mouth.”

McWhorter fled, and Governor Jeff Davis offered a $250 reward for his arrest and conviction. The Arkansas Gazette reported on November 26 that he was “surrounded in the mountains in Yell county and expected to effect his capture at any minute,” but he remained at large until his arrest at Durant in the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) in January 1902.

He was brought to the Crawford County jail in Van Buren on January 17, and a newspaper reported that he “shows the effects of the exposure and mental worry he has undergone since the killing.” He was placed in the same cell as another wife killer, Kit Helton. A newspaper reported that McWhorter “cries piteously” and “grasps and shakes the iron bars and cries that he cannot escape,” while Helton “sits by and laughs at McWhorter’s display of grief” and “appears to derive a great deal of enjoyment from McWhorter’s mental agony.”

McWhorter, who “gained considerably in flesh” while incarcerated, was tried on February 12, 1902, and his attorneys offered an insanity defense about which the Gazette wrote that “the testimony introduced…in favor of the insanity plea was most revolting and showed that McWhorter was but little removed from the brute.” The jury initially split 10–2, with two agreeing that he was insane, but the verdict was unanimous after a second poll. McWhorter was sentenced to hang on April 11.

He tried to get a jail trusty to buy him strychnine in a failed suicide attempt, but later “spends day and night praying for forgiveness and for strength to bear up under the trying ordeal,” an Arkansas Gazette reporter wrote, adding that McWhorter was “very pious but still refuses to admit he killed his wife.”

The Arkansas Supreme Court issued a stay of execution on April 6, and “from a cringing, crying, pitiable looking object, he at once became a man in appearance” in the belief that Davis would commute his sentence. However, Chief Justice Henry G. Bunn found the evidence “sufficient to convict” and affirmed the sentence.

Davis set July 25, 1902, for the hanging, causing McWhorter to “collapse, and he has spent the time since in crying and praying. It is generally predicted that McWhorter will have to be carried to the scaffold.” Instead, he mounted the platform and “spoke for ten minutes from the gallows, advising his hearers to profit by his fate.”

Two other men died in Van Buren in 1902 on the same scaffold as McWhorter—murderer Kit Helton on March 7 and rapist Hall Mahone on November 7. Five other men would also hang on July 25, 1902—James Kitts in Desha County, Sy (or Cy) Tanner in St. Francis County, Dee Noland and Tom Simms in Hempstead County, and Lathe Hembree in Howard County.

For additional information:
“Arkansas News.” Fort Smith Times, November 20, 1901, p. 4.

“Attempted Suicide.” Arkansas Democrat, February 15, 1902, p. 6.

“Condemned Man Remorseful.” Arkansas Gazette, February 20, 1902, p. 3.

“Condemned Wife Murderer Joyous.” Arkansas Gazette, April 8, 1902, p. 2.

“Six Murderers Hanged.” Woodruff County News, July 31, 1902, p. 1.

“Supreme Court of Arkansas.” Arkansas Gazette, June 22, 1902, p. 2.

“Van Buren News Items.” Arkansas Gazette, November 26, 1901, p. 2.

“Wife Murderer Captured.” Arkansas Gazette, January 17, 1902, p. 2.

“Wife Murderer Now in Jail.” Arkansas Gazette, January 18, 1902, p. 2.

“A Wife Murderer to Hang April 11.” Arkansas Gazette, February 13, 1902, p. 3.

“Will Hang July 25.” Newark Journal, July 18, 1902, p. 1.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System