Editor’s note: This is Part 2in a series about Tom Slaughter's historic 1921 escape from the Arkansas state prison known as The Walls. Part 1 appeared in Style on Dec. 13, Part 2 on Dec. 20, Part 3 Dec. 27. See arkansasonline.com/1227part1 and arkansasonline.com/1227part2 and arkansasonline.com/1227part3
See arkansasonline.com/1227men for information about the seven escapees.
See arkansasonline.com/1227hogg to read what the minister said at his funeral.
■ ■ ■
Five hours after he began his systematic conquest of The Walls, Tom Slaughter and six other escapees piled into the warden's big Ford and fled the Arkansas state prison at Little Rock.
But first, he stopped to close and lock the big gates, which had been wide open more than an hour. Then he took the prison keys from his pocket and returned each key to its proper spot in the front office.
This happened about 2:30 a.m. Dec. 9, 1921. He had cut the local and distance telephone lines in the prison office, robbed the safe, removed tires from all the other cars, and imprisoned everyone except his six confederates.
Slaughter didn't expect their flight to be discovered until well past sunrise, so he fixed breakfast for the warden's family. His meticulously planned escape was unfolding like clockwork, and he hadn't fired a single shot.
That was lucky for him, because the German Luger he'd obtained — somehow from somebody — had a defect he didn't notice. Its magazine spring was broken. While there were bullets in the magazine, the chamber wouldn't load. So, he took down The Walls with a broken gun.
Two other details also escaped his notice:
◼️ Warden E.H. Dempsey's bedroom had its own telephone line.
◼️ One of the men in the cell house stockade had an iron poker hidden in his bed.
A young-looking hoodlum named Horace Hayes who was loyal to the warden found that poker.
OOPS
About 22, Hayes was serving eight years for his part in a Little Rock auto theft ring. After 9:30 p.m. Dec. 8, Slaughter rousted him barefoot from sleep in the prison tailor shop and used him as a human shield to search the icy yard for trusties.
Hayes begged to go back for his shoes. Slaughter relented but made him grab a random pair. They were so small Hayes started limping, which Slaughter found suspicious. He had "the youngster" take off the shoes for inspection.
As Slaughter completed his arrangements, he and James Wells made a final visit to the stockade. The youngest escapee at age 18, Wells had been scheduled to die by electrocution that November, but his sentence was under appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Slaughter opened the stockade doors, and once again invited everyone to escape. Out stepped 25-year-old James C. Howard. Slaughter sent him to the commissary to pick out civilian clothes.
Then, Slaughter and Wells forced the other inmates to stack the iron slats from 40 cots outside the stockade. During this to-and-fro, young Hayes spotted the contraband poker and slipped it under a mattress.
As soon as Slaughter left, Hayes hopped up, grabbed the poker and climbed atop a bed. Still face down on the floor as Slaughter had left them, the others cursed Hayes and whispered urgently that he was getting them all killed — as he proceeded to pry planks off the ceiling.
Hayes opened a hole and clambered into the attic. He then crawled to a flue hole and dropped through it to the floor outside the stockade. A trusty named Noah came after him.
They hurried downstairs to the death cells where Slaughter had imprisoned the Dempsey family. Using the poker and bed slats, they hammered frantically on the locks and soon freed the warden.
[RELATED: These men escaped from The Walls with Tom Slaughter in 1921]
Hayes and Dempsey then raced through the yard to the steel door that led to the prison office. It was locked from the outside. So, Hayes climbed the gates. In the office, he found all the keys in their proper places, right where Slaughter had left them.
Using the phone next to his own bed, Dempsey sounded the alarm 15 minutes after the escapees drove away.
GUNFIGHT
Instead of a four-hour head start and a good chance to reach Hot Springs before daybreak, Slaughter had a welcoming committee waiting at Benton as he motored through the dark.
Saline County Sheriff Jehu Crow (reported as John or J.J. Crow), Benton Chief of Police W.H. "Bud" McKeown and a private security guard, Ray Will, stood in front of Parker's Drug Store at 126 N. Main St., on the corner of North Main and West Sevier streets. Between 3 and 3:30 a.m., they heard the Ford coming up East Sevier Street, heading west.
[GALLERY NOT SHOWING? Click here: arkansasonline.com/1220Tom.]
They weren't sure it was Slaughter, so when the car veered north onto Main "we stood there with our guns in our hands," Crow recalled in 1961.
"I'd given Ray a shotgun and he decided to take a chance and shoot their tires," Crow told the Arkansas Democrat. "We thought if it wasn't our party, they'd stop. He opened fire, and they returned it, speeding up the car as they did so."
One bullet zipped past McKeown to nick the corner of the drugstore. (Ray Baxter, whose law firm occupies the 111-year-old building today, says the bullet gouges are still visible among myriad other scars in the bricks.) Two bullets also hit a telegraph pole at the southwest corner of Main and Sevier.
"I stepped out in the middle of the street, fell down on one knee and began pumping bullets at the car," Crow continued. "I was shooting a high-powered rifle with hard-nose bullets and had to shoot straight up the street for fear I'd shoot into a house. I shot three times and ran out of shells. McKeown was shooting, too, with a .25 caliber pistol.
"We failed to stop them, and they headed toward Hot Springs."
SHOT IN THE HIP
In the back seat of the Ford, Charles Jones was wounded. A bullet glanced off the butt of a revolver in Wells' pocket and cut through the fleshy part of Jones' hip, in and out. He didn't tell Slaughter until about a mile northwest of Benton. Slaughter asked if it was a bad wound, and Jones replied that it was not.
Slaughter stopped the car and examined Jones in the headlights. Apparently satisfied by Jones' assurances that he wasn't disabled, Slaughter let him back in the car.
They stopped several times. Slaughter had Jack Buster climb a telephone pole to cut the wires. He stopped to get water and to climb up on a stump and look back for pursuers.
Pursuers were on their way. Some federal revenue officers and U.S. marshals happened to be staying overnight in Benton at La Grande Hotel, a block from the shooting. They meant to raid a moonshiner's still Dec. 9.
Crow and his well-armed posse were on the road at daybreak.
INTO THE WOODS
The fugitives didn't know that the route to Hot Springs was under construction until they reached Alum Ford, where the bridge was out. While working out how to proceed, they saw or heard the posse. Slaughter took the Ford off-road and drove through the trees until the wheels stuck in a clay bank.
The fugitives stayed near the car about 40 minutes, resting by the Saline River as the posse passed.
Saying, "I want to show you something," Slaughter drew Howard aside. The forger watched, astonished, as Slaughter dipped a blank paper in a puddle and a diagram of The Walls appeared on it. Slaughter tore it up. He had other papers, too, but did not let Howard read them.
Slaughter divided "the loot" then -- three watches and cash from prisoners, nurse Alta Cumbie and the prison wall safe. He gave Howard a watch taken from the warden's son, Edward Dempsey.
"There were four pocketbooks," Howard said. "He emptied them all into his cap and handed out the money in handfuls. I got about $5, and I guess the others got about the same." (Jones got $2.50. Slaughter kept $58.)
Herding the others ahead, Slaughter kept his gun in his hand as they trekked four miles up and down wooded, brushy ridges, through thorns and frequently near the road. They heard farm dogs barking in the distance. Fearing bloodhounds were after them, they crossed and recrossed the many streams and branches in the hills.
Jones' wound became inflamed. Whenever the men coughed, Slaughter threatened to kill them.
POSSEMEN
More posses traveled the highway as word spread that Gov. Thomas McRae had authorized a $500 reward for the return of Slaughter's body, dead or alive. $500 was all the money left in the state kitty for rewards.
In unrelated posse action, Elmer Sidebottom and Curtis Anthony, alleged moonshine transporters, ran out of gas and flagged down a car on the highway. It was full of law officers who noticed the 5- and the 10-gallon kegs in the car and arrested Sidebottom and Anthony on the spot.
THE PISTOL
Slaughter was able to load the Luger, but then he made Clifton Taylor trade guns with him. Taylor slipped the Luger into the hip pocket of his coveralls. At Alum Creek, he lost his balance climbing down to the water and fell in.
Tired, wet and hungry, the fugitives didn't bother to hide from a group of Black workmen coming along a lane near the ford.
After a while, Taylor confessed that he'd lost the Luger, he assumed, in the creek. But it had fallen out in a field.
"That's all right," Slaughter said. "I'm glad you lost it. It was no good."
At 2:30, they stopped to rest. A posse passed within 100 yards of their hideout without seeing them among the underbrush and small trees.
Slaughter sent the Black men out into the woods as lookouts, spaced about 75 feet apart. Then he let Howard in on a new plan.
"These Negroes are holding us down," Slaughter said. "There isn't but one thing to do. We got to kill them. About 9 o'clock tonight there won't be anybody in the woods but us, and we'll kill them then."
Howard said nothing, and Slaughter took his silence for agreement.
At 5:30 p.m., he called the sentries back to "camp," and they built a fire with pine knots. They would rest, he said, until the moon rose, and then they could split up and continue separately in the dark.
Wells declared that if he knew the way back to The Walls, "I'd be on the road right now." Taylor chimed in that he would, too.
Slaughter threatened Wells viciously, telling him to shut up or else.
"He always had his gun in his hand," Howard said later, and Slaughter was a big, muscular man.
Slaughter allowed the weary sentries to stay near the fire until it dried their clothing, then posted them out in the woods again.
Pretending to check that they hadn't run off, Howard walked out to confer with Wells and Taylor. The three made a plan of their own, to capture Slaughter and surrender: Taylor and Wells would "handle" the other three Black men while Howard "took care" of Slaughter.
HOWARD'S HEROIC IDEA
Howard later claimed that it had been his scheme all along to subdue the others and return them to The Walls, and that was why he'd volunteered to escape. He'd even left a note behind for the warden but was interrupted while writing it. Indeed, investigators at The Walls eventually found in the prison commissary an envelope addressed to Howard with "Will come back an--" scrawled on the back.
After the sounds of pursuit faded, Slaughter summoned everyone back to the fire. Under the pretext that the guns were short of ammunition and he needed ammo to stand night watch, Howard disarmed Jack Buster, Willis Cannon and Charles Jones.
A Gazette reporter envisioned the scene: The entire party hunkered about the small fire, miserably chewing hickory nuts as the chill deepened. Feet toward the blaze, Slaughter reclined on a bed of leaves and his raincoat, his head pillowed by his hands and a pistol clasped in his right hand. A keen north wind raked leaves off the trees.
Huddled in the firelight and half comatose with fatigue, the Black men would be easy victims.
Slaughter asked Howard what time it was. It was 8. There was an hour to go. The big man pulled his coat over his head. Standing above and behind him, Howard slid his gun forward.
"Everybody stretch out," Howard said, "and don't move your hands."
Slaughter lurched upright, swinging his gun hand free. Or maybe he was asleep and never heard it coming. Either way, that's when James Howard shot off half of Tom Slaughter's head.
After a while, Slaughter died.
Part 3: Deadly deeds, horrible consequences.
Gallery: Escape from The Walls
