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1897 · A CONFLICT PRINTED WHOLE
Chapman's record holds no execution — its longest sentences are Hickman's life term and Schulkoski's twenty-one years — but the state's own list holds two men from this county, and the first comes with a conflict in the official record itself, printed here unresolved. The Indiana Department of Correction's list of executions since 1897 opens with this county: its first entry records the hanging on May 7, 1897, of Harry Jones, age 23, offense dated July 5, 1896, sentenced January 7, 1897, county St. Joseph, crime murder. The South Bend Tribune, reporting in 2005 on the research of the department's spokesman, stated it the same way: a man from St. Joseph County named Harry Jones, 27, was executed by hanging on May 7, 1897.
The other standard compilation disagrees. The execution registry derived from Rob Gallagher's "Before the Needles" research enters the same date and method under the name Henry Jones, age 27, occupation convict, and assigns the county as Marion, naming the victim as Homer Thomas. The two compilations cannot both be right about the county, and the materials reached for this page — no contemporary South Bend press account of the case was found in the digitized record — do not settle which. What stands agreed is the date, the method, and the fact of the hanging itself: Indiana's executions were carried out by hanging until the law changed in 1913, thirteen men were hanged in the state between 1897 and 1907, and the first name on the state's list is a Jones of 1897 whose case the state's list ties to this county and the independent registry ties to Marion. The underlying killing — whose it was, and where it happened — is the largest single gap in this page, and it is left open rather than papered over.
Sources:
- Indiana Department of Correction, "Indiana Executions 1897–Present" — entry no. 1: Jones, Harry, hanged May 7, 1897, county St. Joseph
- South Bend Tribune, August 2005, reporting the Department of Correction's account (spokesman Nothstine) ahead of the Matheney execution
- Rob Gallagher, "Before the Needles" execution registry, as republished by Genealogy Trails — Jones entered as Henry Jones, county Marion, victim Homer Thomas
- Indiana Department of Correction, summary of executions 1897–1961 (1966) — thirteen hangings, 1897–1907