John Adkins (Execution of)

John Adkins was hanged at Perryville (Perry County) on May 27, 1910, for the ambush murder of his brother-in-law.

William Jones Sr. was riding his wagon back to his Perry County farm shortly after noon on March 18, 1910, after collecting some money in Houston (Perry County) and was about a quarter mile from home when he was shot from ambush. After he fell from the wagon, an assailant rifled through his pockets.

Jones’s wife, Rachael, heard the shots and ran toward the scene, seeing her son William (Willie) Jones Jr. running away from the body. She fled to a neighbor’s house, who called Sheriff J. E. Oliver in Perryville. He hastily assembled a posse and went to the Jones farm, where Rachael Jones told him that she had seen her brother John Adkins and her sons Willie (age fifteen) and Claude (thirteen) in the area earlier and that she saw Willie near her murdered husband’s body. Using bloodhounds, the posse followed the trail twelve miles to a mountain near Perry (Perry County) before stopping because of darkness. A heavy rainfall ruined the scent, and the killer or killers escaped.

The elder Jones and Adkins had been feuding since Jones had married Rachael sixteen years earlier, and their mutual enmity worsened when Adkins convinced Jones’s two sons to leave home around 1908 and live with him.

Sheriff Oliver offered a $50 reward for Adkins, describing him as “40, slender, dark complexion and hair, left eye burst out, and white; black mustache, and paralyzed in right hip; limps in right foot.” He also offered a $25 reward for Willie Jones. On March 25, 1910, Adkins went to a store in Leola (Grant County), seeking to buy two straw hats. The storekeeper, seeing Adkins’s eye, surmised he was the wanted man, and a posse captured Adkins and Willie Jones a few miles north of town. It is unclear where Claude Jones was.

Oliver took the two to Perryville and requested a special term of the circuit court after a “mob proposed to take the law into its own hands unless a speedy trial were given the pair.” Judge P. J. Lea went to Perryville on April 11 and impaneled a grand jury, which indicted Adkins and Willie Jones on first-degree murder charges but found that Claude Jones “was not old enough to appreciate the gravity of what was going on.”

A trial was held on April 18, 1910, with around twenty witnesses testifying, though Rachael Jones provided “practically the only direct testimony,” the other evidence being circumstantial. Testimony indicated that Adkins and the boys had walked forty miles from his home at Natural Steps (Pulaski County) to commit the murder. Adkins admitted on the stand that he killed Jones, “but said it was an act of self-defense.” Willie Jones, though, “declared Adkins had formed the plot to assassinate his father.” Adkins was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang on May 27, 1910.

Willie Jones pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Judge Guy Fulk sentenced him to five years in reform school, saying that “the evidence shows that this boy never had the chance to learn the difference between right and wrong….Every man has a right to one chance and I am disposed to temper justice with mercy and give him an opportunity to make good.”

There was no appeal of Adkins’s death sentence to the Arkansas Supreme Court, nor was there a plea to Governor George Washington Donaghey to commute the sentence. Adkins began reading the Bible, and Catholic priests regularly visited him in his cell. It was reported that Adkins “appears to be as indifferent to the fate that awaits him as when Judge Fulk sentenced him to death.”

A few days before the scheduled execution, Bishop John B. Morris asked Donaghey to have Hulbert C. Stinson, superintendent of the State Asylum for the Insane (later called the Arkansas State Hospital), examine Adkins. Stinson went to Perryville and visited the condemned man and reported “at no time…did he manifest a single symptom of insanity.” Donaghey declared his intention to let the hanging proceed.

Adkins was baptized on the morning of May 27, 1910, and said “he felt all his sins had been forgiven.” A “great crowd…from all over” had come to Perryville for the hanging, and while only a limited number of people would be allowed in the gallows enclosure, “many witnessed the execution from the housetops,” with people reported climbing trees and looking out the windows of the Perry County Courthouse.

Adkins was accompanied by two priests, the Arkansas Democrat reported, and “he mounted the scaffold with a firm step and he appeared perfectly resigned to his fate.” Adkins spoke to the crowd for about twenty minutes, claiming that Willie Jones had fired the fatal shot. The Arkansas Gazette wrote that Adkins “appeared self-possessed” until Oliver approached him with the black cap, at which time the condemned man collapsed and shouted, “Oh, God, please save me” and “save me, O, Lord, save me.” The trap door opened at 12:45 p.m., and Adkins’s neck was broken in the fall; he was declared dead sixteen minutes later. His coffin was left open, and “the body was viewed by hundreds of people,” many of whom went to the Perryville cemetery to watch his burial.

Adkins’s hanging was the third in Perry County conducted by Sheriff Oliver. He executed J. M. Armstrong in 1886 shortly after taking office and had overseen Walter Hogue’s hanging on March 11, 1910.

For additional information:
“Adkins Ready for Death.” Arkansas Gazette, May 27, 1910, p. 1.

“Adkins Said that He Did Not Kill William Jones.” Arkansas Democrat, May 27, 1910, p. 1.

“Adkins Sane; Must Hang Today.” Arkansas Gazette, May 27, 1910, p. 1.

“Adkins, Praying, Drops to Death.” Arkansas Gazette, May 28, 1910, pp. 1–2.

“Alleged Felons Are Taken Back.” Arkansas Democrat March 27, 1910, p. 12.

“Boy and Man Are Held for Murder.” Arkansas Gazette, March 26, 1910, p. 2.

“Boy Murderer Given Five Years.” Arkansas Gazette, April 21, 1910, p. 2.

“Condemned Man Is Indifferent.” Arkansas Gazette, May 23, 1910, p. 2.

“Farmer Is Shot from Ambuscade.” Arkansas Gazette, March 19, 1910, pp. 1–2.

“Is Adkins Insane?” Arkansas Democrat, May 26, 1910, p. 9.

“John Adkins Now Reads the Bible.” Arkansas Gazette, May 16, 1910, p. 1.

“John Adkins to Hang May27.” Arkansas Democrat, April 20, 1910, p. 9.