Irene Taylor (Murder of)

On May 5, 1939, the body of white teenager Irene Taylor was pulled from Flat Bayou in Jefferson County, near Altheimer. The same day, twenty-two-year-old Black man Sylvester Williams was arrested for the crime. Williams’s subsequent detainment and trial became one of the highest-profile capital offense cases of the decade in Arkansas, necessitating the activation of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent two lynching attempts. The murder made national headlines, with publications frequently amending details to emphasize the crime’s sensational appeal. 

The Taylor family worked as sharecroppers near Altheimer. Fannie Irene Taylor, who went by her middle name, was born on December 26, 1919, to Silas and Jenny Taylor. Irene Taylor was the seventh of the couple’s eventual nine children. According to reporting at the time of her death, nineteen-year-old Taylor worked part-time selling candy bars. On May 2, 1939, Taylor was reported missing after she failed to return home from a visit to her sister’s house. Three days later, officers of the Jefferson County sheriff’s department discovered her body in Flat Bayou near Mount Moriah Church, a little under three miles north of Altheimer. A medical examination revealed that she had been sexually assaulted and hit with an axe over her left eye before being strangled to death. Her head had been covered with a gunny-sack, and pieces of an iron stove were bound to her arms and legs with haywire so that her body would sink. 

Taylor’s death sparked nationwide (and often sensational) newspaper coverage. Two days after the discovery of her body, the story of the murder was printed in the Sunday editions of over a dozen publications from Brooklyn, New York, to Oakland, California. While some of the reports were straightforward accounts of the events, many editorialized to emphasize the sensory details of the case. A report published in the Bryan, Texas, Eagle on May 6, 1939, for example, states the facts briefly: “Strangled to death with hay wire, Irene Taylor, 19-year-old daughter of an Altheimer farm couple, was found weighted down with scrap iron in the shallow waters of Old Flat bayou, two miles north of here Friday.” In contrast, papers like the Standard-Speaker of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, published accounts with more descriptive language: “Dark-haired Irene Taylor was found slain today and a few hours later Sheriff Garland Brewster announced he had jailed four negroes, one of whom he said had admitted assaulting and killing the 19-year-old farm girl after seizing her ‘because she had a pretty box of candy.’ Sheriff Brewster said the girl, missing since Tuesday, had been clubbed, raped and strangled with haywire.” Much of the added descriptive language in this and other reports is devoted to illustrating Taylor’s appearance and emphasizing her youth, innocence, and desirability. Some publications also emphasized her association with candy, referring to her as a “candy sales girl” or including the alleged quote from Sylvester Williams that appears in the Standard-Speaker. 

Sylvester Williams was arrested on the same day Taylor’s body was discovered, and he was taken to the county jail in nearby Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). By the following day, May 6, Williams had confessed to the crime. It is not unlikely that Williams confessed under duress; in the cases of Bubbles Clayton and James X. Caruthers earlier in the decade, for instance, the accused reported being beaten with rubber hoses in order to secure confessions of their guilt in a robbery case. Two Pine Bluff Graphic reporters were also present when Williams confessed to Taylor’s murder, and the paper published news of the confession that day. That evening, hundreds of white Altheimer residents gathered outside the jail, demanding Williams be turned over to them. The Jefferson County sheriff, Garland Brewster, managed to remove Williams from the jail, taking him to the state penitentiary, where he was held until his trial.  

Historian Marlin Shipman argues that reportage of Williams’s arrest in the Pine Bluff Graphic and Pine Bluff Commercial provoked and enabled the mob activity. The papers’ reports included graphic descriptions and police photographs of Taylor’s body, fomenting the community’s horror and outrage at her death. By publishing Williams’s confession, characterizing him as guilty of the crime before he had been tried, the papers provided a focus for that outrage. While the papers’ reports did not use explicitly racist language against Williams, they did describe him as “Negro,” identifying him as a potential target of the extra-legal racist violence that was common in Arkansas communities at the time. Finally, the papers shared information about Williams’s location, enabling the mob to mobilize and attempt to lynch Williams.  

Two weeks later, an even larger mob returned to the jail, convinced that Williams had been returned there even though he remained at the state penitentiary. When Williams was returned to Pine Bluff for his trial in late May, he was escorted by armed guards as an ostensible safeguard against extralegal violence. In anticipation of the trial, the city had closed at least six streets around the courthouse, and two local National Guard units had been activated. The Graphic reported that the deployment was “the greatest occupation of Pine Bluff by military troops since the Civil War.”  

Despite the two lynching attempts Williams had faced in the previous weeks, and the looming threat of further violence that necessitated a military presence at the courthouse, no legal objection was raised to Williams being tried in Jefferson County. Shipman notes that this decision fits into a pattern for high-profile cases in 1930s Arkansas: Although the defendants in fourteen out of twenty-seven of the decade’s death penalty cases, all of whom were Black, needed to be moved from their county jails to escape lynching before their trials, none of them had their trials moved to safeguard either their physical wellbeing or their legal rights. 

As the trial began, the court completed jury selection in less than twenty minutes, creating the all-white jury that was customary in Arkansas until 1947. In an opening statement, one defense attorney noted that defending Williams was “unpleasant,” but that it was their duty to do so. During the trial itself, Williams’s lawyers called no witnesses, although the state called twelve against Williams. The jury returned a guilty verdict after fifty-five seconds of deliberation, and the defense waived the customary forty-eight-hour waiting period between the jury finding and sentencing. Williams was immediately sentenced to death and was executed via electric chair at the Tucker Unit on June 30, 1939. His death was witnessed by at least one member of the Taylor family. 

The story of Taylor’s murder was also adapted in 1941 in true-crime pulp magazine Actual Detective Stories. Allegedly told by Jefferson County sheriff Garland Brewster to Herbert Mason, an Actual Detective Stories writer, the article adds to and changes some of the facts of the actual case so that it better fits into a murder mystery story’s style and structure. Instead of being found by county police, for example, Taylor’s body is accidentally discovered by a fisherman who speaks in exaggerated colloquial language: “The weight on his fish-line suddenly began to move and the fisherman pulled and tugged. The water swirled. The mud from the bayou began roiling to the surface like an angry storm. Then: ‘By the jumpin’ crawfish!’ the fellow gasped. ‘It’s a girl—a dead girl that I have on my line!’” 

Like much of the newspaper reporting on the case had done, the Actual Detective Stories adaptation emphasizes Taylor’s association with candy. It also changes Taylor’s age at death to seventeen rather than nineteen, and more explicitly characterizes her as young, innocent, and romantically and sexually desirable. The story includes this quote, allegedly from Taylor’s mother: “Irene had quite a few dates, all right. She was popular with the boys, but I always tried to get her to wait until she was older before she got too serious with any of them. And that was what she did.” The plot of the story follows Brewster as he investigates several suspects in Taylor’s killing before eventually arresting Sylvester Williams. The story includes Williams’s confession to the crime, but it does not describe Williams’s race or mention the racial violence that he faced in reality.  

For additional information:
“3 Negroes Die in Electric Chair for Women Attacks.” Times (Hammond, Indiana), July 2, 1939, p. 77. 

“Arkansas Girl Was Found Slain.” Hazleton Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, Pennsylvania), May 6, 1939, p. 1. 

“Body of Strangled Girl Is Found in Pool.” Bryan Eagle (Bryan, Texas), May 6, 1939, p. 6. 

“Charges of Murder and Rape Against Negro.” Bristol Herald-Courier (Bristol, Tennessee), May 7, 1939, p. 1. 

“Crowd Fails to Get Negro at Pine Bluff.” Arkansas Gazette, May 20, 1939, p. 2. 

“Farm Girl Found Attacked, Killed.” Hope Star, May 5, 1939, p. 1. 

“Guardsmen for Pine Bluff Trial.” Arkansas Gazette, May 23, 1939, p. 14. 

“Girl Is Murdered for Box of Candy.” Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, Tennessee), May 6, 1939, p. 9. 

“Heavy Guard for Negro Defendant.” Arkansas Gazette, May 25, 1939, p. 2. 

Leus, Christian. “What Remains: Telling the Story of Irene Taylor’s Murder.” MA thesis, University of Mississippi, 2021. Online at https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2024/ (accessed August 29, 2024). 

Mason, Herbert. “He Couldn’t Resist Candy, Irene—or Killing.” Actual Detective Stories, January 1941, pp. 8–11, 44–45. 

“Mob Storms Jail in Vain, Man Wanted Is Far Away.” Oshkosh Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), May 20, 1939, p. 5. 

“Negro Confesses Rape, Murder of White Girl.” Johnson City Chronicle (Johnson City, Tennessee), May 7, 1939, p. 2. 

“Negro Quickly Sentenced to Be Executed.” Arkansas Gazette, May 26, 1939, p. 2. 

“Negro Youth Admits Slaying of Woman.” Victoria Advocate (Victoria, Texas), May 7, 1939, p. 1. 

“Officers Rush Negro Away to Avert Lynching.” Arkansas Gazette, May 6, 1939, p. 1. 

“Quick Thinking of Sheriff Saves Negro Slayer from Mob.” Sun-Democrat (Paducah, Kentucky), May 7, 1939, p. 7. 

“Sentenced to Die for Slaying Girl.” Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois), May 25, 1939, p. 1. 

Shipman, Marlin. “Forgotten Men and Media Celebrities: Arkansas Newspaper Coverage of Condemned Delta Defendants in the 1930s.” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 31 (Autumn 2000): 110–125. 

Weaver, Michael. “‘Judge Lynch’ in the Court of Public Opinion: Publicity and the De-legitimation of Lynching.” American Political Science Review 113, no. 2 (2019): 293–310. 

Christian Leus
Little Rock, Arkansas