The Watkins Case

High school years, early. I'd have been still a couple of years too young to drive. Cars anyway, I'd been driving tractors for years and drove trucks around on the farm and the back roads. My friend that was a cousin of the fat guy named Joey knew more about what happened because his dad - a farmer like mine - had a fair-sized operation in the area connected with it. Some more big farmers, the Watkins family had some property near theirs and they talked some. So Randy - did I mention his name yet, might as well - and I saw each other every Sunday at church. So he kept me updated and Mom and Dad knew a bit from talking to the other adults.

What happened was...

Most families of any size have one, sometimes more than one. Some families seem to have not much else, if we're talking about bad people or people who screw up all the time. And sometimes cause grief for other people. The Watkins clan had at least one of those, up until he was twenty-seven or so. At which point he died.

He died because someone shot him with a shotgun, and that's a pretty bad thing to have happen to you. Get shot in the arm or leg it's gonna hurt for sure and you might bleed to death but take one well into the torso area and your chances are not good. How Mr. Watkins came to get shot... well...

He was some distance from home, in an area where a lot of us hunted deer back in the day. Some still do, we didn't go in for that. We had a few days of deer season in Graham county and quite a bit of forest on some, us and the other farmers and we'd harvest a deer or two if we had the time and inclination. But a lot of folks then and now if they could afford it - and some that couldn't - had a membership in a hunting club or two. Deer and ducks mostly, go rough it with the guys for a few days, drink and swap lies, the usual. Maybe kill a deer or some ducks. Go back home and drink and lie some more.

DeWitt was about a two hour drive from the Watkins farm territory. One of the younger guys in the clan was down there one day and he wasn't hunting deer. He ran into some kids that was hunting beer.

Not so much hunting, they knew where it was. They weren't old enough to buy it. The youngest was fifteen, a year older than me. The other three were older, two were eighteen and one twenty. You had to be twenty-one to buy adult beverages and they had tried and been rebuffed at a liquor store. Somehow they ran into Jimmy Watkins, of the Watkins farm family two hours away. As I said he wasn't there to hunt deer. Boys were another matter.

He offered to buy them some beer if they would 'perform sex acts with him' as was stated in the legal proceedings. So they got the beer and drank some, and when he wanted his sex action they reneged. Some sort of scuffle ensued, one of the boys pointed a shotgun at him and told him to stop, he got hit with the gun somehow, here were conflicting versions. It ended with him getting shot dead.

The boys left his body lying on the ground and went into town. At some point they encountered a cop and one of them told the cop something about a dead man. Cop naturally wants to know more and they take him to the body. Somewhere in there one of them says he shot him.

With a corpse and some guys apparently involved in making it a corpse the boys were arrested and before long charged with murder. First-degree murder, capital murder they sometimes say these days. Back then any first degree murder had a good shot at being capital. Electric chair in Arkansas.

Prosecuting attorney, what they call them in Arkansas, went to work. Prosecuting attorneys in Arkansas are elected, with on average about the same results as electing sheriffs. The prosecutors do have to be lawyers, but that probably makes it worse. You might get a decent sheriff now and then, maybe.

The prosecutor got to talking with one of his buddies about the prospects for convictions on murder one. His buddy was a seriously reptilian type - I know something about him - and he bet he could get the death penalty for all four. And told him how to do it.

Mainly it consisted of suppressing evidence, some of it with the help of the judge. That's how it was done then and how it's done now, but it helped that there was quite a bit of outrage in the community and the kids were pretty much deemed guilty by the locals. Torture pior to the killing was alleged, and while the fact that the corpse was mostly undressed - wearing a woman's nightgown and panties - apparently didn't raise any questions. Four kids driving around looking for beer don't carry women's lingerie with them but a pervert might. The prosecution stressed the fact that the dead fellow was married with children, so the story about the homosexual propositioning must be a lie the kids made up.

The youngest one was tried first and handily convicted and sent to death row. It would be a while before the other trials were conducted and things cooled off some. The appeals were better than the defense, and the trial judge had made plenty of 'errors'. The fact that the dead guy had been arrested a year or so earlier in the same town for propositioning a teenager. Asked him if he wanted a blow job. Posted bond and left town. Anyway the overkill was apparent anyway and the governor stated that he would commute the sentence if the courts didn't correct the matter. A younger kid or two have perished in the chair but that was a long time ago.

So Joe wasn't going to fry, but he would have liked to be free someday. So the appeals went on and the other trials went on and the next kid got life. One of the others got 21 years and the fourth got 19. His conviction overturned Joe was convicted in a second trial and got 21 years for second-degree, which was reasonable. Twelve years suspended and he was out after another five or six years, with the time he'd already served. He didn't enjoy it long - he went to California for a while and came back and was killed in a motorcycle accident at 24. What happened to the others I don't know. Joe had a somewhat unusual last name and the case got quite a bit of press so he can be found fairly easily on the Internet.