The Deadliest Outlaws: The Ketchum Gang and the Wild Bunch, Second Edition

Tom Ketchum was the first and last person to be executed for a crime of this nature. He was hanged in 1901, and his head was torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows. His attorneys argued that the penalty was "cruel and unusual" for the offense charged. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang and related outlaws for more than forty years and has mined unpublished sources, family records, personal reminiscences, trial transcripts, and other court papers to provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 560 pages
Publication date: 03 October 2022
Publisher: University of North Texas Press,U.S.

After being sentenced to death for attempting to rob a train, Tom Ketchum's legal team argued that the punishment was "cruel and unusual" for the offense charged. The appeal was unsuccessful, and he became the first and last person to be executed for a crime of this nature. He was hanged in 1901, and in a macabre twist to his life of crime, his head was torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows.

Tom Ketchum was born in 1863 on a farm near the outskirts of the Texas frontier. At the age of nine, he became an orphan and was raised by his older brothers. In his mid-twenties, he left home for the life of an itinerant trail driver and ranch hand. He returned to Texas, murdered a man, and fled. Soon afterwards, he and his brother Sam killed two men in New Mexico. A year later, he and two other former cowboys robbed a train in Texas. The career of the Ketchum Gang was underway.

In their day, these men were the most daring of their kind and the most feared. They were accused of crimes that were not theirs, but their proven record is long and lurid. Their downfall was brought about by what one editor called "the magic of the telephone and telegraph," by quarrels between themselves, and by their reckless defiance of ever-mounting odds.

Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang and related outlaws for more than forty years. He has mined unpublished sources, family records, personal reminiscences, trial transcripts and other court papers, official correspondence and reports, census returns, and contemporary newspapers to sort fact from fiction and provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver, Ben Kilpatrick, and Butch Cassidy.

The Deadliest Outlaws was initially published in a limited edition.

Weight: 912g
Dimension: 154 x 235 x 36 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781574414745