Fort Smith Quadruple Execution of January 14, 1887

Four men were hanged at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on January 14, 1887, after being convicted of first-degree murder in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas.

John T. Echols, age thirty-five, a native of Fulton County, Georgia, lived in the Chickasaw Nation with his wife and five children. He traded a horse to John Pettenridge in February 1886 for a Winchester rifle, a pony, and two yearlings. Pettenridge provided the gun, pony, and one yearling but said that the other yearling was on the range and that he did not have time to find it, as he was cutting wood for a cabin. On February 16, Echols confronted him, and “hot words were exchanged” before Echols shot Pettenridge five times. At trial, Echols claimed that Pettenridge had come at him with a knife and he was defending himself, but he was convicted on August 21, 1886.

John Stephens, twenty-eight, “a fine looking mulatto” and a native of Illinois, lived in the Indian Territory with his wife and child. He was arrested after three people were murdered with an axe and a fourth was badly injured in May 1886 near Bartlesville in the Delaware Reservation. Evidence at his trial showed that he had borrowed a horse on May 28, 1886, the night before the bodies were discovered, and that the horse’s saddle blanket was found near the murder scene. He was convicted on September 2, 1886, based largely on circumstantial evidence. He would maintain his innocence to the end.

James Lamb, twenty-three, a native of Crawford County, Arkansas, and Albert O’Dell, twenty-six, from Franklin County, Alabama, were hired to pick cotton on the farm of Edward Pollard and John Brassfield near Lebanon in the Chickasaw Nation in the fall of 1885. Lamb began a relationship with Pollard’s wife, as did O’Dell with Brassfield’s wife. The two men threatened the husbands, and Brassfield abandoned his wife and children to O’Dell, but Pollard refused to leave. Pollard’s wife sent Pollard to Lebanon on December 26, 1885, to buy some supplies, and he never returned, with she and Lamb claiming he had abandoned her. Pollard’s body was found a few months later with a gunshot wound to the head. Lamb and O’Dell were arrested, and “on trial each defendant tried to saddle the murder on the other and each prosecuted the other.” They were convicted on September 18, 1886; Judge Isaac Parker said that the errant wives, who had testified in the trial, should also have been in the dock.

Parker on October 30, 1886, sentenced the four men, along with convicted murderers Patrick McCarty and John Parrott, to hang on January 14, 1887. All applied for a presidential commutation of their death sentences. On January 9, 1887, Echols, Lamb, and O’Dell were notified by U.S. Attorney General Augustus Garland that their request had been denied, and “when the messages were read to the condemned men, all three of them gave way to tears.” Lamb, however, asked that Garland should seek a pardon for O’Dell, whom he said had no part in Pollard’s murder. Stephens would learn that his request was denied on the night before his execution. McCarty received a respite and would not hang until April 8, 1887, while Parrott’s sentence was commuted to five yeas in prison.

Echols, O’Dell, and Stephens were baptized into the Catholic Church on January 13, 1887. On the morning of January 14, the condemned men were given a large meal “of which all partook with apparent relish,” followed by cigars.

On climbing the gallows, O’Dell, Echols, and Stephens knelt with Father Lawrence Smythe as Lamb sat on a bench and “shook like an aspen leaf, but whether from cold or from nervousness one could not tell.” Lamb spoke briefly, advising people to avoid bad company and the Indian Territory, and Stephens requested that his body not be turned over to doctors for dissection; the newspapers reported that “Echols and O’Dell had nothing to say.”

Then, “at 11:30 o’clock all four stepped on the death-trap beside the ugly-looking nooses…the ropes adjusted, the black caps drawn and in another instant the huge trap fell…and all was over—the law had been vindicated.” The necks of all four men were broken “by a fall of seven feet.” All four were buried in Fort Smith’s Oak Cemetery.

For additional information:
Akins, Jerry. Hangin’ Times in Fort Smith: A History of Executions in Judge Parker’s Court. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2012.

“A Big Day’s Work.” Arkansas Gazette, January 15, 1887, p. 1.

“Convicted of Murder.” Osceola Times, September 25, 1886, p. 2.

“Fort Smith.” Arkansas Gazette, October 31, 1886, p. 3.

“Fort Smith.” Arkansas Gazette, January 14, 1887, p. 3.

Riley, Michael Owen. “Capital Punishment in Oklahoma: 1835–1966.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas, 2012. Online at https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/518/ (accessed December 18, 2025).

“Their Last Hope Gone.” Arkansas Gazette, January 9, 1887, p. 3.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas