In the late summer of 1944, a young woman named Fayrene Clemmons, aged 19, disappeared from Little Rock, Arkansas. Her husband, James Waybern 'Red' Hall, a man she had married only six months prior, reported her missing, suggesting to both her family and the police that she had left him for another man. Their marriage was known to be turbulent, marked by a brief separation just a few months after their wedding.
On the night of September 14, 1944, the couple was seen quarreling after attending a dance with a friend. This would be the last time Fayrene was seen alive by anyone other than her husband.
For a time, Hall's story seemed plausible, and the police treated Fayrene's disappearance as a runaway case. The investigation took a dark turn, however, as a series of murders of lone male motorists began to plague the highways of Arkansas. These men, all picked up while hitchhiking, were robbed and shot. As law enforcement investigated these 'hitchhiker murders,' a friend of Hall's came forward with a critical piece of information. He had loaned Hall his car, and upon its return, noticed that bullets were missing from a gun kept in the glovebox. Ballistics testing linked this weapon to one of the unsolved murders.
This breakthrough led police to obtain a search warrant for Hall's apartment and ultimately to his arrest in March 1945. Under questioning, Hall not only confessed to the string of hitchhiker killings but also admitted to the murder of his wife. He led investigators to a location near the Arkansas River where he had brutally beaten Fayrene to death and left her body. A farmer in the area had previously discovered a human skull, which, along with other remains and personal items found at the scene, was identified as belonging to Fayrene Clemmons.
James Waybern Hall was tried and convicted for the murder of his wife. Despite confessing to numerous other killings, he was only prosecuted for Fayrene's death. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. On January 4, 1946, just weeks before his twenty-fifth birthday, James Waybern Hall was executed by electrocution for the murder of his young wife, Fayrene Clemmons.
