Sometime after 3am on November 8th 1931, Fred Barker, William Weaver, and most likely Alvin “Creepy” Karpis were driving around the town of Pocahontas Arkansas allegedly looking for businesses to rob.
The men’s vehicle stopped to allow William Weaver to exit the vehicle and answer the call of nature when night Marshal Manley Jackson took interest in the vehicle and began writing down the car’s license plate number.
Marshal Jackson, who’d been on patrol most of the night, was summoned into the vehicle at gunpoint by Fred Barker. The men drove the officer several miles outside of Pocahontas, where it’s said that Fred Barker shot Marshal Jackson numerous times in the back with a .45 caliber pistol.
Manley Jackson’s body was not discovered until about 11:00 a.m., by local residents Charles Johnson and his wife. Jackson’s body was said to be about 40 yards off the highway with witnesses describing 5 bullet wounds in his back. It was also noted that shell casings were discovered about 15 yards from his body.
In a strange plot twist, soon after the murder of Jackson, two local men—Lige Dame and Earl Decker—were accused and convicted of the crime. Dame eventually confessed to the murder, but he repudiated and changed his statements several times in the months and years afterward. In one of his confessions, he accused the Pocahontas Chief Of Police, John G. Slayton, of hiring him to commit the murder.
It was not until the 1971 publishing of Alvin Karpis’s autobiography entitled “Public Enemy Number One, The Alvin Karpis Story” that the murder of the night marshal at Pocahontas was attributed in detail to Fred Barker.
This kidnapping and killing of night Marshal Manley Jackson marked a beginning of the evolution of the Barker-Karpis Gang.
The month following the murder, Barker, Karpis, and Weaver were involved with the murder of Sheriff C. Roy Kelly of West Plains, Missouri, after they burglarized stores in that town.
Manley Jackson is buried in a family plot in the Masonic Cemetery in Pocahontas Arkansas.
Fred Barker was killed in Florida in 1935 during a gunfight with the FBI. Barker was buried in California.
Alvin “Creepy” Karpis served more that 3 decades in prison before being paroled in 1969, Karpis moved to Canada and then to Spain before writing his autobiography. Karpis died in 1979, first ruled a suicide but later changed to natural causes. Karpis is buried in Spain.
William Weaver was captured in 1935, he died in Alcatraz in 1944, he is buried in Mammoth Spring Arkansas under the name Phoenix Donald (his real name) at the Riverside Cemetery.
