John William Woods

John William Woods, a 30-year-old white male, was serving as a deputy sheriff in Ashley County, Arkansas, when his final call took him out to the tracks near White Station on October 17, 1913. He had gone to intercept a man who had walked away from a work crew. In the brief, volatile moments of the encounter, a shot was fired, and Woods fell mortally wounded—his end of watch recorded that Friday, the county’s quiet broken by the sound and the sudden scramble of witnesses and lawmen converging on the scene.

Word of the killing spread quickly through Ashley County. Colleagues marked his name among the small roll of the department’s dead, a stark entry that would be repeated in memorial listings for generations: Deputy Sheriff John William Woods; cause of death, gunfire; end of watch, October 17, 1913. The facts were spare, the loss plain, and the community’s memory of the young deputy fixed to that date and place.

In the weeks that followed, the investigation culminated in the arrest and prosecution of Ed King, a Black teenager. Contemporary and retrospective records identify King as the man responsible for the murder of “Will Woods,” a deputy sheriff, and they show that he was convicted and executed in the state’s electric chair on December 12, 1913—one of the first executions carried out under Arkansas’s new centralized system at the penitentiary in Little Rock. The listings are blunt but consistent: Ed King, Ashley County, crime—murder; victim—Will Woods, deputy sheriff. King’s age is given as nineteen, and his execution is recorded across multiple ledgers of capital punishment.

Thus the case that began beside a rural work line ended in a courtroom and then behind prison walls, closing the official record within two months of the shooting. The stark entries in memorial rolls and execution registers are all that remain to sketch the arc from the moment at White Station to the December sentence carried out—an entire story reduced to a handful of dates, a deputy’s name, and the fate of the man condemned for killing him.