On the night of September 14, 1944, James Waybern Hall and his wife of six months, Fayrene Clemmons Hall, nineteen, went to a dance at the Rainbow Garden in Little Rock with a friend, Katy Bryant. The couple drove Bryant home, quarreling in the car, and she was the last person known to have seen Fayrene alive. Hall took his wife to a road near the Arkansas River, beat her about the head some twenty times and left her body by the water. Two weeks later, on September 28, he went to her father to say that she had walked out on him on the 25th, and he told the police she ran around with other men. With nothing to connect him to it, the police filed her as a missing person.
Hall was twenty-three, a big man with a shock of red hair, called Red and Big Jim. He was born on January 28, 1921, the son of Samuel Jerome Hall, a farmer and minister who beat his children; most accounts give his birthplace as Pulaski County, and the biographer Janie Nesbitt Jones places his boyhood in Happy Valley near Enola in Faulkner County. At about twelve he suffered a head injury, believed to have come from his father. He left school after the eighth grade and from 1937 drifted around the country, hitching rides, to Kansas and to Detroit. A first marriage in 1938 produced a son who died at birth on Christmas 1941 and another born in March 1943, and ended in divorce that year. He was drafted into the Navy in 1943 and dishonorably discharged after eight weeks for dodging his training. He married Fayrene on March 14, 1944. Within three months they had separated for a time.
The killings of 1945 were robberies of the drivers who stopped for him. On January 29 the body of Carl Hamilton, a Black barber and bootlegger known as the Camden Barber, was found slumped over the wheel of his car with a bullet in the chest; he had been dead for days. On February 1 E. C. Adams, a war plant worker, never reached his job in Little Rock and was found hours later in Dallas County, outside Fordyce, shot in the head with a .38. The same day Doyle Mulherin, thirty, a truck driver for a Little Rock meatpacker, left on a delivery he never made. His body turned up a week later near the Bayou Meto Bridge outside Stuttgart, shot with the same pistol. On March 9 the charred remains of J. D. Newcomb Jr. were found in a burned-out car near Heber Springs in Cleburne County, identified from his dental records. Newcomb had given Hall a ride in Pulaski County, and Hall shot him after asking him to pull over at Conway.
The pistol had been borrowed. A relative of the man who lent it told the Arkansas State Police about the loan, and the tip led straight to Hall, a part-time cab driver. He was arrested in Little Rock on March 15, 1945. A Little Rock detective drew the confession out of him, and he talked easily; one lawman called him a pleasant conversationalist. He led officers to the riverbank. They found a jawbone, a pair of women's shoes, hair, bones and pieces of a red dress with buttons, which Katy Bryant identified as what Fayrene had worn to the dance. A farmer nearby had already found a human skull there and never reported it, supposing it belonged to some drowned stranger. Her family identified her by her teeth.
He also confessed to far more. By his account he had killed since 1938, and the figure grew to about twenty-four: a Black woman beaten to death in Salina, Kansas, in 1938; ten Mexican migrant workers, shot or bludgeoned one at a time on an Arizona farm where he worked that year; a traveling Bible salesman in Texas; and two men in Oklahoma, in 1940 and 1944. Police from other states came to question him. By March 25 the Arkansas police were speaking of seventeen, though they doubted much of it. One of the out-of-state cases is the double killing of Corporal Charles Nipper, twenty-one, and an osteopath, Dr. M. E. Lambert, shot on a Kansas road on October 30, 1944. Jones argues that the deaths match his pattern. Nipper's cousin Bill Cook, who was ten at the time, said in 2016 that the family had been told a serial killer was responsible and that the case was never conclusively solved. None of the claimed killings outside Arkansas was ever brought to court.
Arkansas tried him for one murder, his wife's. The trial opened on May 7, 1945, in Pulaski County with the state seeking death. Pretrial examiners had found him sane and fit to plead, but the defense argued insanity and called five psychiatrists. On May 9 the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and unanimously recommended death, and on May 14 Judge Lawrence C. Auten sentenced him to the electric chair. The Arkansas Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on October 22, 1945, and denied a rehearing on November 19. Governor Benjamin T. Laney refused clemency.
On death row at the Tucker Unit he read the Bible. On his last visit with his father-in-law, A. Z. Clemmons, he said he had never meant to kill Fayrene and that it had been an accident. He was cheerful the night before, ate steak, pork chops and strawberry ice cream, and on January 4, 1946, at twenty-four, told the guards, "Boys, I'm not afraid, I can take it." About sixty-four people watched him die, Fayrene's father among them.