Henry C. Cox, male, 56, was serving as the city marshal of Prescott, Arkansas, on November 1, 1901, when he was fatally shot just beyond the town limits. He had gone out to quell a disturbance reportedly involving a railroad camp laborer; as he arrived, he was fired upon before he could draw his own weapon. Accounts note that this was his first day as the newly appointed town marshal. He died from the gunshot wound the same day, and he was later buried in De Ann Cemetery in Prescott.
The shooter fled immediately. Contemporary press dispatches named the suspect as Charles Levy and reported that townspeople shut their shops to join the pursuit that evening. Newspapers at the time identified Levy as Black, a detail widely repeated in wire-service summaries published in early November 1901.
Levy eluded capture for several months before being arrested at Hope, Arkansas, on February 20, 1902. He was tried soon after; an initial conviction carried a death sentence. The Arkansas Supreme Court set that judgment aside on July 27, 1902, ordering a new trial. In the retrial that followed, Levy was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-one years in prison—a result reflected in the Supreme Court’s opinion, which remanded for sentencing on the lesser degree of homicide.
His imprisonment was turbulent. On May 27, 1904, Levy escaped from a prison work crew assigned along the Iron Mountain Railroad near Gurdon, sparking a years-long search that ended with his recapture at Texarkana on August 10, 1908. A bid for parole was denied on February 27, 1911, but he ultimately received a gubernatorial pardon on January 1, 1913. These developments closed the legal chapter that began with the killing of Marshal Cox in 1901 and trace the full arc from arrest to conviction, escape, recapture, and final clemency.
