Owens, William (Execution of)
William Owens was an African American man executed at Varner (Lincoln County) on May 30, 1895, after being convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife. William Owens’s wife, whose name was not included in any news reports, was “intimate with a neighbor named Will Collins” on May 17, 1894, and Owens beat her, leading her to move into her father’s house. On May 30, he found her hoeing cotton with around thirty other people in a field near Noble Lake (Jefferson County). He asked her to come back to him, and when she “flatly refused” he pulled a pistol and shot her before grabbing a hoe and hitting her on the head twice, breaking the handle. He …
