The legacy of Judge Isaac C. Parker and the myriad of hangings he did over the years while on the bench for the Western District of Arkansas tends to make us overlook other executions held throughout the region during the same tumultuous years.
But a murder committed in Logan County between Paris and Booneville in 1894 by a 22-year-old Indiana man rivals anything that came out of the "Hanging Judge" years and led to an execution held in Ozark before the end of the year in which the murder was committed.
Jesse Jones was born around 1872 near Eureka, Spencer County, Indiana, one of six children in the prominent farming family of Charles S. Jones and Lewesa Jones. He left home in 1892 and traveled to Florida; St. Louis, Missouri; and Texas before ending up in the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), where he was hired to run a wagon and cook for horse dealers Charlie and Jesse Hibdon.
According to contemporary newspaper accounts of the situation, young Jones tended the "bachelor needs" of the Hibdon's, two wealthy half-breeds who lived about 140 miles inside the border of the Indian Territory near the community of Paolo. The adventuresome Indianan, who has hired at the salary of $25 per week, handled the chuckwagon duties of the cousins as they ventured into Arkansas in 1892 to trade a string of saddle ponies.
The three men left Paolo in the Chickasaw Nation in early 1894 to drive a herd of about fifty ponies into Arkansas to be traded for cattle. On February 18, 1894, they were spending the night in a cabin about three miles west of Booneville. Witnesses later reported hearing two gunshots around midnight, “and following the shots were heard, pounding as if some one was cutting up meat.”
The next day, Jones was seen outside the cabin with a Winchester rifle “as if he was on guard,” and the cabin burned to the ground several hours later. Jones claimed that the Hibdons said they were being pursued by U.S. marshals and had fled.
few weeks later, the cabin’s owner arrived from the Choctaw Nation and found bones in the burned remains of the cabin, which a local physician identified as being human. Jones was indicted for grand larceny and two counts of first-degree murder.
At a special term of the Logan County Circuit Court, the victims’ mother testified that Jones had the traders’ belongings and “every statement of Jones in regard to the Hibdons were proven false.” A jury deliberated only twenty-five minutes on April 9, 1894, before convicting him of the murder charge. He was sentenced to hang on May 18.
In May 1894, Indiana officials asked Governor William Meade Fishback to commute the murder sentence “in regard to Jones’ high family relations,” while Logan County “citizens…are signing a remonstrance against the petition from Indiana.” An Indiana newspaper noted that local people thought Jones was innocent of the crime, writing that “it cannot be denied at any rate, that authorities down there failed to give him time to prepare for a defense.”
Fishback declined the commutation, but the Arkansas Supreme Court remanded the case back to Logan County for a rehearing.
Jones was granted a change of venue to Franklin County, where an improved legal team defended him in a five-day trial in the spring of 1895 in which “no less than 140 witnesses were on the stand.” Jones claimed at trial that Charles Hibdon had killed Jesse Hibdon, and on the stand “he interwove his statement with the testimony of the witnesses so logically that there was scarcely the shadow of contradiction.”
Nevertheless, he was again convicted. Governor James P. Clarke set his execution for November 15, 1895, after the state Supreme Court upheld the jury’s verdict.
Also according to newspaper reports at the time, there were at least two attempts to lynch Jones before his date with the gallows.
Jones’s father Charles Jones came to Arkansas in November and presented Clarke with letters from the governor of Indiana, U.S. Senator Daniel W. Voorhees, and others “testifying to the good character of his son.
Clarke granted a reprieve of the execution until December 6 but would not commute it. An Arkansas Gazette reporter who visited the condemned man in early December found him resigned to his fate, with Jones saying, “I am innocent of the crime for which I am to be put to death, if no one save God and myself believe it.”
He was taken from his cell at 11:00 a.m. on December 6 and mounted a wagon, giving a lengthy speech in which he again proclaimed his innocence even as he forgave the people who had testified against him in his trial.
Jones mounted the gallows at 11:25 a.m., after which a preacher performed a religious service. Stepping onto the trap door at 11:40 a.m., he said, “I am ready to die. I am willing to die. God wants me to come to him. I am going home.”
A black cap was placed over his head at 1:44 a.m., and Jones said, “Good-bye,” when the trap door opened a minute later. “The rope stretched some, which caused his feet to touch the ground, but it was soon raised.”
Jones was declared dead eight and a half minutes later, his neck broken.
An interesting side note to the murder and execution occurred exactly one year after Jones was hung by his neck until dead.
His father and supportera rom Indiana, along with the very vocal editor of the Evansville Indiana newspaper, never accepted the fate of young Jones.
It is said his father spent most of the family fortune amassed from farming and ranching on the Indiana prairie over the years, in an effort to exonerate the name of his son.
Exactly one year to the day after the hanging, Charles S. Jones presented a witness to the court who claimed that Jesse Hibdon was alive and well and being held in a territorial jail cell near Quinton.
Since Jesse had claimed on the witness at alternate times that both Hibdons had run away because they were being pursued by the law and also said Charlie Hibdon had killed his cousin after a disagreement over a business transaction, the attempts to exonerate Jesse fell on deaf ears in Arkansas.
