James Perry Williams (1920–1995)

James Perry Williams dropped out of high school at Warren (Bradley County) and moved to the central Arkansas town of Sheridan (Grant County), where he began a series of crime sprees and jailbreaks that lodged him in jail and state and federal prisons for most of the rest of his life. The most famous was on New Year’s Eve, 1949, when, according to his own account, he masterminded an escape with three other inmates from Tucker Prison Farm in Jefferson County. His final crime spree included bank robberies across the Midwest, often using bombs at nearby businesses to divert police from the bank robberies. In brief spells outside prison, Williams led an exemplary life, including a midlife job as a distributor for the Arkansas Gazette and as a champion for prison reform.

Born on August 27, 1920, at Warren, James Perry Williams was the youngest of three children of J. Claude Williams and Nettie Beard Williams. His father worked as a carpenter and was the clerk of a pool hall, and his mother was a dressmaker. Perry Williams dropped out of Warren High School after the tenth grade. On his draft-registration form in 1941, he said he was unemployed; actually, he was a prisoner.

His first known victim was Wilton R. “Witt” Stephens of Prattsville (Grant County), then a fledgling bond broker and later the head of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company (Arkla) and the Stephens Inc. brokerage firm, and eventually Arkansas’s most powerful man outside public office. Stephens had left his farm in the summer of 1935 and, on the road into Sheridan, spotted a handsome hitchhiking youngster, Williams, and picked him up. Williams pointed a gun and threatened to kill Stephens, who talked him out of it but surrendered his vehicle. Williams drove off with the car. He was arrested and sent to jail for that and apparently other crimes.

On February 1, 1940, Williams got into a fight among inmates at the Pulaski County Penal Farm west of Little Rock (Pulaski County). Howard Eugene Brewer, a fifteen-year-old inmate, died of wounds from the fight. Williams and Gerald Wayne Thorpe pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to fifteen years in prison. They were sent to Cummins Prison Farm in Lincoln County.

Later that year, on Labor Day, Williams was among twenty-six inmates who escaped from Cummins; he was captured the same day. He was in prison in 1949 at the Tucker Unit in Jefferson County when he and the other three men (David Dyer, Jack Rheuark, and Odus Eaton) decided to escape. They killed a trusty, William Bohannon, before fleeing into the countryside. (A trusty was an inmate used as a guard, a common practice in the Arkansas prison system at the time.) Williams’s dramatic avoidance of posses for five days received national attention. When Eaton was captured, he said that Williams had intended to head for Michigan to see a woman when he escaped; Matilda Tuohey, the Gazette’s first female reporter, later wrote that the suspected romantic connection behind the big escape was an unidentified former Little Rock waitress. Williams and Rheuark were captured, being shot in the process, on their fifth day at large at 10:30 p.m. in a shed at the rear of 507 West Twenty-sixth Street in North Little Rock (Pulaski County). Williams was later convicted of first-degree murder in Bohannon’s death and sentenced to life imprisonment.

While he was serving his time at Cummins, on Christmas Day 1966, Williams was given a one-day pass to eat Christmas dinner with his aunt at Warren. He did not come back. Three months later, the Memphis, Tennessee, police got a call about a prowler in a residential neighborhood. They arrested Williams, who had more than thirty car keys in his pockets, and returned him to Cummins.

In 1970, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, who was soon to leave office after his defeat for a third term by Dale Bumpers, commuted Williams’s life sentence to time served. The biggest issue in Rockefeller’s four years was how to go about reforming the corrupt state prison system, which made international news. It was still a convulsive issue four years later when David Pryor took office. Pryor appointed what was called a “blue-ribbon” commission in 1975 to suggest reforms in a prison system noted for brutality and corruption. He appointed Williams, the celebrated former prisoner, to the commission. Williams had visited his one-time victim, Witt Stephens, who chatted with Pryor about the affable former criminal he was putting on the commission.

Williams’s final return to violent crime exploded into the news in 1982, when it was revealed that he and a younger criminal associate, Robert Loring Kendit, had collaborated with M. J. Probst, a prominent Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) lawyer and political figure, in burning down a Tastee-Freez restaurant in Monticello (Drew County) so that the owner could collect insurance for the loss. Williams and Kendit had detonated a bomb in the toy department of a nearby Ben Franklin store to deflect police and firefighters. That investigation connected with simultaneous federal and state investigations of a series of bank and savings-and-loan robberies across the Midwest that turned out to be the work of Williams and Kendit, usually involving bombs at nearby businesses to distract investigators from the actual robberies. Williams and Kendit would plead guilty to robbing banks or savings and loan associations in Carthage, Missouri; Greensboro, North Carolina; Gahanna, Ohio; South Haven, Mississippi; Olathe, Kansas; Elizabethtown, Kentucky; Huber Heights, Ohio; Joplin, Missouri; and Springfield, Missouri. There was also an unsuccessful attempt at robbery in Pine Bluff. The two robbers implicated Probst, whom they said had helped plan the robberies and shared the loot. Williams also admitted using explosives to rob a Hinky Dinky store in Omaha, Nebraska.

Probst had been on the staff of Senator John L. McClellan in the 1970s and worked in the last campaign of Senator J. William Fulbright in 1974. He was chairman of the state Claims Commission, which adjudicated property and injury claims against the state. The investigation, indictments, and trials of Probst, Williams, Kendit, and other collaborators were major news stories in 1981 and 1982, years notable for big crime stories, such as the murder of Alice McArthur, for which Mary Lee Orsini was ultimately arrested and convicted.

Williams spent the rest of his days in federal prisons. He became ill and died in the St. Bernard Regional Medical Center at Jonesboro (Craighead County) on June 22, 1995. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery at Warren.

For additional information:
“Arkansan, 60, Is Indicted in Omaha Blast.” Arkansas Gazette, June 18, 1982, p. 6B.

Associated Press. “Two Suspects Plead Guilty to Robberies.” Arkansas Gazette, September 8, 1982, p. 12A.

“Caple Seeks Recognition for Jail.” Arkansas Gazette, September 15. 1940, p. 18.

“Cummins Escapee Arrested in Memphis.” Arkansas Gazette, March 30, 1967, p.1B.

Fletcher, John L., and Sam G. Harris. “Fugitive Convicts’ Saga Ends; Two Shot, One Seized in Northside Chase.” Arkansas Gazette, January 5, 1950, pp. 1A, 3A.

“Former Lawyer’s Bid to Vacate Sentence Denied.” Arkansas Gazette, May 31, 1986, p. 10A.

Lancaster, Bob. “Doing His Time.” Arkansas Times, August 18, 1994, pp. 10–15.

“Panelist Robs Ark La [sic] Official.” Arkansas Gazette, May 12, 1977, p. 1B.

Tuohey, Matilda. “Hunt Included Little Known Woman Angle.” Arkansas Gazette, January 6, 1950, p. 3A.

Wells, George. “$100,000 Cash Bond Set for Probst on Charges in Missouri Robbery.” Arkansas Gazette, September 17, 1982, p. 5A.

———. “Probst Receives 8-Year Term; Sentenced for Role in Arson, Conspiracy.” Arkansas Gazette, November 24, 1982, p. 1A, 4A.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas

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