On the day he was hanged at Birmingham, Alabama, June 25, 1915, Syd Jones left a note in his cell. In it he confessed to thirteen murders and listed them: two unnamed convicts at the Banner mines in Alabama, in 1907 and 1911, and a third, Cleave Waters, on May 22, 1911; Thomas Thompson and Charles Bennett at Crawford, Nebraska, and a deputy sheriff there he called W. S. Moseley; Shay White, Thomas Shay and a Chinese man named Sam Lee at Monterey, California; an unidentified brakeman for the Mobile and Ohio Railroad at Bardwell, Kentucky; Bessie Humphrey at Huntsville, Alabama; a Mexican woman, Pattie Quiergo, at Fort Wingate, New Mexico; and a Native American man, John Little John, at Sheridan, Wyoming. He added a failed attempt on a man named Richard Moore on September 12, 1912, and said he regretted missing, because he had wanted to even out his count.
Little else about him is established. His date of birth was never recorded; he is presumed to have come from Alabama, and he is believed to have served in the 10th Cavalry, a regiment of Black soldiers posted to western forts in the years he said he began killing. The newspapers that reported the note say he had been sentenced to life for a murder, and that he was hanged for killing a fellow convict while serving it, most likely Cleave Waters at the Banner mines, where Alabama leased its prisoners to work coal. One report places the killing of the deputy at Monterey; the note itself puts it at Crawford.
Within days of the hanging, the police at Crawford wrote to The Alliance Herald to set the Nebraska part straight. There had been killings there, they said, but the officer's name was Art Moss, not Moseley. The 10th Cavalry was then stationed at nearby Fort Robinson, and some troopers held a grudge against the Moss brothers for beating them in a race. With the town marshal away, Art Moss was deputized, and when drunken soldiers came into town one Sunday evening and caused a disturbance he went to calm them. They shot him dead and fled. Townspeople chased them, killing one near a reservation and capturing another in a barn loft. The remaining soldiers armed themselves and surrounded the jail, where a guard from the fort had been posted against a lynching, and when a man named Phil Murphy ran toward the alley they were holding, they shot and killed him too. The captured trooper was convicted and sent to the penitentiary. The Crawford police said a man named Jones had been connected with the regiment and suggested he had been among the soldiers who killed Moss.
That is the only part of the note anyone is recorded as checking, and it bore out a killing while correcting the name. Nothing in the record tests the rest. Jones was one of three men hanged in Alabama on June 25, 1915; Lon Carter was hanged the same day at Birmingham for murdering his wife, and Tim Sharpe at Anniston for killing two policemen.