Bentley MacFarland Burnett, a 60-year-old male city marshal, was killed in Haleyville, Alabama, on September 5, 1908, in what surviving online accounts describe as a sudden burst of violence during an arrest. The clearest retellings say Burnett was escorting a prisoner to the town calaboose or jail that Saturday night when another man came up from behind and demanded that the prisoner be released. When Burnett refused, the man opened fire, and one contemporary newspaper transcription says the marshal was shot and instantly killed at about 8 o’clock.
The man most directly identified in the online record is Jeff Blanton. A transcription of a September 11, 1908, Cullman Tribune item names Blanton as the person who shot Burnett, while the Officer Down Memorial Page preserves the same core outline of the killing: a city marshal walking a prisoner to jail, a confrontation from behind, a demand for release, and fatal gunfire when Burnett stood his ground. Those accounts leave the scene with the feel of a frontier-town ambush, with Burnett carrying out an ordinary duty only to be cut down in the space of a few moments.
As for what happened afterward, the surviving online material is thin but not silent. One genealogical news digest preserves a later item stating that Jeff Blanton, described there as the man who had shot an officer in the back at Haleyville, was out on a $7,500 bond by October 6, 1908. That indicates there was at least an arrest or formal detention followed by release on bond, but I did not find a dependable online source, outside material that should not be used here, that fully documents the final court outcome, any verdict, or a conviction. Based on the sources that can be relied on, Jeff Blanton is the named suspect in Burnett’s death, and a bond was reported, but the broader judicial ending remains unclear in the accessible online record.
