In mid-August, 1959, on the banks of the St. Francis River, Isaac Carter was stabbed to death. In what must have been a frenzied killing, four men stabbed and cut Isaac a total of 26 times – in his hands and arms, in his chest and stomach, twice in his back and once across his right cheek. Isaac died fighting for his life; but still, Isaac died. The men who committed this brutal murder dumped Isaac’s lifeless body into his fishing boat, set it on fire and sent it drifting on the river toward the small town of Coldwater.
I know what happened to Isaac and I know what happened to the men who murdered him; and ultimately that’s what this story is about – it’s about how fate demanded and got justice for Isaac.
Isaac’s body was found by a fisherman around sunrise the next morning. The boat had drifted down river and got stuck on a sand bar nearly three miles from where Isaac was murdered. The fisherman towed Isaac’s boat down to the site where the old pontoon bridge had once crossed the river and tied the boat to a large willow. The county sheriff was notified of the murder, and it took several hours for Sheriff Stone to eat lunch, make calls to re-arrange his afternoon schedule, and drive the 30 or so miles from his office in Wynne to where a group of neighbors had gathered to protect Isaac’s body until the sheriff arrived. Isaac was taken back to Wynne for an autopsy where the coroner determined Isaac had died from repeated stab wounds, and that he had been dead less than a half day when he was found.
Just before dusk, the day of the autopsy, Sheriff Stone drove to the Carter’s house and confirmed the body found in the boat was their son Isaac, and that he had been “murdered as the result of a significant number of stab wounds.” He said he would leave it up to them to let Isaac’s wife know of his death – it being more of a family thing.
The following day, eleven of us from up and down Highway 75 – all neighbors of a sort and all wanting to know what had happened to Isaac – met with Sheriff Stone at the Fortune Baptist Church to find out what he knew. It wasn’t much. The sheriff – a somewhat benign man with few if any skills to be sheriff – told us it had all the markings of a revenge killing, that Isaac must have cheated someone or done something criminal to one of his neighbors. We were his neighbors; and in what was almost a single voice, all eleven of us informed the sheriff he was wrong. Two of the men began shouting at the sheriff, telling him that Isaac was above reproach and had no enemies. After some hemming and hawing as to other possible motives, the sheriff suggested Isaac may have been fooling around with some other man’s wife, or worse yet – as the sheriff put it – some man’s daughter. The sheriff had no idea how lucky he was that he had met us at a revered place of worship; otherwise, his day would have gone sour for him right at that point. Mr. Kendall, a man not prone to anger or vulgarity, a man who I’ve never even heard use a word as strong as ‘damn’, informed the sheriff that he was an “unmitigated ass.” With that, Sheriff Stone left the church as fast as a fat man can walk, and went directly to his car. Sitting in the security of his official Cross County Sheriff car and being a lazy man who would never turn down a chance to go back to the comfort of his air conditioned office in Wynne, the sheriff concluded we would probably never find the men who did this. Once again, that “unmitigated ass” of a sheriff was wrong.
Recent Comments