Walter S. Harris, 54, male, was the elected sheriff of Miller County, Arkansas, when he was killed on July 28, 1931, during a Prohibition-era raid on an illegal liquor still near Texarkana. Accounts describe deputies moving in on the still when gunfire broke out; Harris was fatally shot in the exchange. The confrontation unfolded in the countryside south of town, a detail later important enough that the jury in the case was taken as a body to view the scene.
The investigation quickly focused on a 20-year-old suspect, Sam Day. He was arrested and brought to trial that winter in Miller County Circuit Court. Testimony concluded on December 10–11, 1931, and, with one juror too ill to attend deliberations, the panel continued its work from a nearby rooming house. The jury returned a guilty verdict for murder, holding Day responsible for shooting the sheriff at the whisky still.
Within two weeks, the court denied Day’s bid for a new trial, and the judge imposed a life sentence. Contemporary reporting on December 23, 1931, summarized the outcome plainly: Sam Day, 20, sentenced to life imprisonment for the slaying of Sheriff Walter Harris at a whisky still, was refused a new trial.
Harris’s death was immediately recognized as a line-of-duty killing, and later remembrances recorded the essentials: he was shot and killed while leading a raid on a moonshine operation outside Texarkana. Those same remembrances, compiled from law-enforcement memorials and historical summaries, place the event firmly in the violent undercurrent of local anti-bootlegging enforcement at the tail end of national Prohibition.
