John P. Biggers, a 65-year-old male, was the city marshal of Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, when he confronted a disturbance at a bustling street carnival during the county fair on the night of October 30, 1912. Responding to a plea from Laura Driver to have her estranged husband arrested for drunken harassment, Marshal Biggers approached the man, Dock Driver, to serve a warrant.
Driver drew a pistol and shot the marshal three times; a bullet also passed through the hand of a small boy caught in the crowd. Biggers, who was also known locally as a preacher, succumbed to his wounds from the gunfire.
Driver was quickly disarmed, arrested, and moved to the jail at Newport for safekeeping amid rising public anger. Citizens circulated a petition demanding a special court session, and Judge R. E. Jeffery convened a grand jury on December 9, 1912, which heard testimony from twenty-seven witnesses. Driver presented no witnesses and claimed self-defense; the jury deliberated only sixteen minutes before finding him guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to hang on January 31, 1913—the last legal execution in Lawrence County. On the eve of his execution, jailers believed he attempted to poison himself; he was ill through the night but survived to face the gallows. Shortly after 12:35 p.m., he was hanged; more than a thousand people reportedly filed past his casket in the courthouse hallway.
Contemporary accounts noted that the pistol seized from Driver bore four notches and that sentiment for swift justice was intense. Earlier that year, he had been among nine Lawrence County men arrested for nightriding during what became known as the Walnut Ridge Race War, a climate of vigilantism and racial intimidation that shadowed the town in 1912. These details frame the marshal’s death not as an isolated crime but as a flashpoint in a community already strained by violence and lawlessness.
