Famous Last Words: Black Jack Ketchum

Black Jack Ketchum

(An updated and expanded version of this post may be read at Sweethearts of the West, where I blog on the 12th of each month.)

"Can't you hurry this up a bit? I hear they eat dinner in Hades at twelve sharp, and I don't aim to be late."

Whether or not he aimed to be late, Thomas Edward "Black Jack" Ketchum missed the dinner bell by more than an hour on April 26, 1901. In fact, his hanging was delayed by more than four hours while authorities tried to ensure his execution was both humane and permanent.

Black Jack, a native of San Saba County, Texas, also was known as "the handsome train robber." Between 1892 and 1899, he and his older brother Sam, along with a gang of other young men -- all of whom were described as well-mannered and well-dressed, riding good horses and flashing plenty of money -- "liberated" payrolls and other large sums of cash from trains passing through the Four Corners area of the Southwest. Their largest take, in September 1897, totalled about $60,000 in gold and silver.

Sam died in jail in July 1899 as a result of wounds he received during a shootout with a posse near Santa Fe, New Mexico. One month later, Black Jack was shot by the conductor of a train he was robbing alone. He didn't resist when either a posse or a railroad crew (there's a dispute) found him the next morning.

After he was sentenced to hang, the date of the execution was delayed several times by arguments about where final justice should take place, since several towns wanted the honor. Finally, reacting to a rumor that the old gang planned to break Black Jack out of jail, the hanging became the center of a carnival in Clayton, New Mexico. Despite an extended debate about the length and strength of the rope necessary for the deed, something went wrong. Shortly after 1 p.m., Ketchum was decapitated as his body plunged through the scaffold's trapdoor. He was 37 years old.

Black Jack Ketchum bears the dubious distinction of being the only man sentenced to die in New Mexico for "felonious assault upon a railway train." Apparently his botched execution set the residents of Union County back a mite, because Black Jack also was the only man ever hanged in Union County. Until Eva Dugan suffered the same fate at the Pinal County, Arizona, prison in 1930, Black Jack Ketchum was the only person in the U.S. who literally lost his head to a hangman's noose ordered by a court.