James Waybern Hall was born in 1921, one of ten children of strict parents; his father was a preacher and a farmer. An author who researched the case and interviewed members of his family says he suffered a head injury at about twelve, possibly from a beating by his father, and describes him as walking fast and leaning to the left, with the hair on one leg grey. He was known as Big Jim for his size and Red for his wavy red hair, and true crime magazines later called him the Arkansas Butcher.
He was drafted into the Navy in 1943, having tried hard to avoid service, and was dishonourably discharged after eight weeks of training. He went home to Little Rock and married Fayrene Clemmons, who was nineteen, on March 14, 1944. The marriage was violent and they separated briefly in June.
On September 28 he called on his father-in-law to say that Fayrene had left him three days earlier. The police took reports about her behaviour, decided after a week that she had probably run away, and closed the file. Two months later her relatives received a Christmas card signed in her name and postmarked Bakersfield, California. Hall borrowed the card and envelope before the police could examine them, and they were never seen again.
On January 29, 1945 loggers found an abandoned car in Ouachita County with a dead man behind the wheel, shot through the heart. Fingerprints identified him as Carl Hamilton, a barber from Camden. He had been dead for several days, and nobody connected him with a missing wife in Little Rock.
On February 1 E C Adams disappeared on his way to work at a war plant in Little Rock. His car was found outside Fordyce and his body in brush nearby, with a single bullet in the brain. The same day a trucker named Doyle Mulherin failed to arrive with a meat delivery. His vehicle was found near Stuttgart, forty miles the other side of Little Rock, and his body in a sweep of the area, shot once through the head with a hundred and twenty-five dollars of company money gone from his pockets.
Police had no suspect. On March 2 Hall was arrested in a bar fight in Little Rock and fined a hundred and six dollars and ninety cents for simple assault. They became interested in him when an acquaintance said he had lent him a car on January 28. There had been a loaded pistol in the glove compartment, and when Hall returned the car the next day a round was missing from the clip. Ballistics matched that gun to the killing of Carl Hamilton.
On March 9 a burned-out car was found near Heber Springs with an incinerated body in the back seat, identified from dental charts as J D Newcomb Jr of Little Rock. A search of Hall's lodgings turned up ammunition and shaving equipment stolen from Hamilton.
He was picked up near Little Rock on March 15 and confessed at once to a series of hold-up murders that had brought him less than three hundred dollars altogether. He took detectives to where he had buried his wife, and was surprised to learn that a farmer had picked up the skull months before. Fayrene was identified by her crooked teeth and finally buried.
He was convicted after a two-day trial in May 1945 and sentenced to death. His lawyers ran an insanity defence, which he took offence at. He was electrocuted on January 4, 1946, days short of twenty-five, and by the account of the guards he was cheerful about it, laughing and joking, and told them he was not afraid and could take it.
The larger claims are his own and were never tested. Asked by detectives whether he had killed about a dozen people, he is reported to have said it was more like twenty-four. He confessed to killing a woman at Salinas, Kansas in 1938, a man at San Marcos, Texas in 1944, and ten migrant workers in Arizona between 1938 and 1944. The 1938 killings would have been committed at about sixteen or seventeen. Once his confessions became known, police from other states came to Arkansas to ask him about their unsolved cases; he talked freely about some and gave hints about others before refusing to go on.
One of those enquiries has been revisited. Corporal Charles Nipper, twenty-one, and a Kansas osteopath, Dr M E Lambert, were shot dead on a lonely road in McPherson County, Kansas on October 30, 1944, each hit three times, the assumption being that Lambert had picked Nipper up while he was hitchhiking back to base. Kansas investigators travelled to Arkansas to question Hall and he was never charged. The author researching him considers the two deaths to fit his pattern, since he hitchhiked around the country and killed the people who gave him lifts. Neither Kansas county records nor the Kansas Bureau of Investigation now hold anything on the case, and Nipper's family were never told anything.
The count here is the four he was convicted of, five confessed killings in Arkansas including Newcomb, and twenty-four as his own claim. They are three different things.