Jack Taylor (Execution of)

Jack Taylor was executed at Clarendon (Monroe County) on May 25, 1883, “for the murder of an old man by the name of Ingram…in the summer of 1880,” a killing Taylor claimed was in self-defense.

Hugh W. Ingram, age sixty-three, was a well-to-do white farmer in Monroe County’s Cache Township, where he lived with his twenty-four-year-old wife. He employed Jack Taylor, a six-foot, 175-pound, middle-aged white man reportedly “with a mean scoundrelly-looking eye, and was no doubt a very bad character.”

Taylor returned to the Ingram farm one October 1880 evening “in a beastly state of intoxication” after drinking heavily in Clarendon. Taylor drunkenly accused Ingram of stealing from him, and the farmer ordered the laborer to get off his property. Taylor instead went to the cotton crib, where he slept, and retrieved a gun. He then shot Ingram in the back as he stood on his porch, “the shots entering above the hip and coming out just below the left nipple, killing him almost instantly.”

Taylor fled for “some time” but reappeared in Craighead County in 1882, where he was arrested and charged with Ingram’s murder. Prosecutors developed a theory that Ingram’s young wife and her lover had hired Taylor to murder the farmer for $500; the couple fled the state in January 1883 “for parts unknown.” Despite his claim that he killed Ingram in self-defense when the farmer charged him with an axe, Taylor was convicted of Ingram’s murder on April 14, 1883, and sentenced to hang on May 25. A newspaper reported that “he took his sentence hard, sometimes giving way to fits of sobbing.” No attempts were made to have Governor James Henderson Berry commute his sentence.

A Catholic priest from Helena (Phillips County) offered the condemned man spiritual guidance on May 25, 1883, but urged him to not confess the crime to an Arkansas Gazette correspondent who visited him in the Monroe County jail. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people had gathered in Clarendon when he left the jail at noon and mounted a wagon that was surrounded by around twenty guards as it drove the three-fourths of a mile to the execution site.

Speaking in a “trembling voice,” Taylor “began a speech from the gallows, but changed his mind and bade the crowd goodby [sic], saying he hoped to meet them in heaven.” At 12:40 p.m., his arms and legs were bound, and “the sheriff read the death warrant, the rope and cap were adjusted, and at 10 minutes to 1 the soul of Jack Taylor was sent to the hereafter,” though the rope slipped on one side, “causing some struggling.” His body was taken down after twenty-seven minutes.

Taylor’s was one of three hangings in Arkansas on May 25, 1883. Jack Hinton was hanged for murder in Helena, and convicted rapist Joseph Young was executed at Richmond (Little River County).

For additional information:
“Helena, Ark.” Daily Memphis [Tennessee] Avalanche, May 26, 1883, p. 1.

“Jack Taylor’s Doom.” Arkansas Gazette, May 26, 1883, p. 2.

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System