#BotchedExecutions | Will Purvis And The Noose That Let Go

In 1894, Will Purvis dropped through the trapdoor at Columbia, Mississippi, and the noose let go, leaving him alive on the ground. The crowd voted to postpone the hanging, and in 1917 a dying farmer confessed to his part in the murder and said Purvis had nothing to do with it.”

From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Originally aired: October 14, 2026


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Speaker 1: This is Botched Executions from Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar.

For nearly 400 years, states have been putting people to death,

and some of those executions went horribly wrong. Trap doors

wouldn't open, flames rose from the electric chair, and needles

couldn't find a vein. In this series, I'm taking you

through my book, Botched Executions, one chapter at a time.

Everything you'll hear comes from the witnesses, the court records,

and the state's own written reports. Where the accounts disagree,

you'll hear both. Whatever you believe about capital punishment, these

are the cases where a state set out to kill

someone and got it wrong. A word of warning before

we begin. These are real deaths, described by the people

who watched them, and some of the details are hard

to hear. And now, botched executions, four centuries of failed hangings, electrocutions, gassings, injections,

and firing squads. Chapter 8. Will Purvis Falls Through to

the Ground. Columbia, Mississippi. February 7th, 1894. In the early 1890s,

Marion County, Mississippi, had a white cap problem. The white

caps were a night-riding vigilante band of white men and

a Kosciuszko paper later described them as terrorizing that section

for a long time by burning barns, whipping Negroes, and

killing stock. By the summer of 1893, it had gotten

so bad that Sheriff McGee needed 50 special deputies to

hold a term of circuit court. Many of them called

for jury duty were sent home, because they were thought

to be in sympathy with the Whitecaps. Three whitecaps had

just been convicted of whitecapping and sent to the penitentiary

for ten years apiece. One of the men who had

turned on them was Will Buckley. The whitecaps had flogged

the Buckley family's black farmhand, Sam Waller, by the account

the National Registry of Exonerations gives, and Buckley, who had

been a whitecap himself, decided to take what he knew

to the grand jury. He'd been a witness against the Whitecaps,

the Macon Beacon reported at the time, and it is

said they threatened vengeance. Later reports said the band had

an oath that the first man to turn traitor would die.

On an evening in June 1893, Buckley was on his

way home with his brother Jim and the farmhand when

somebody fired from cover. The buckshot hit Will Buckley from

behind and it killed him. Will Purvis was about 20.

He'd been in the Whitecaps, and that, along with a

bloodhound trail and a neighbor's suspicion, is what got him arrested.

Sheriff McGee took him to Meridian, a Jackson paper reported,

because he feared that if he left him at Columbia,

he would have been lynched. At the trial that summer,

Jim Buckley pointed at him and said, Will Purvis there

killed the man. Purvis said an alibi, a neighbor he

said he'd been talking with, but the jury didn't believe him.

and Judge Terrell sentenced him to hang. He took it,

the Mississippi leader reported, with unmoved stolidity at first. But

after being conveyed to the jail, his nerves gave way,

and he succumbed to piteous lamentations. In January 1894, the

state Supreme Court upheld the conviction, and the hanging was

set for Columbia, the county seat. He spent the night

before it praying. On the morning of Wednesday, February 7th,

the crowd came in from every part of the county,

black and white. A strong guard was drawn up around

the scaffold in case the white caps tried to rescue,

the New York Sun's Wire report said. Before the death

warrant was read, Purvis made a sworn statement in front

of the clerk of the circuit court. It named other men,

and the New Orleans Picayunes correspondent called it a partial

confession of what he'd known about the Buckley murder. he

admitted something, too. The Sun reported that he acknowledged that

he was one of the party, but declared he did

not fire the shot. A Methodist minister from Colombia, the

Reverend Mr. Sibley, attended him on the platform. Then they

put the black cap over his head and the noose

around his neck, and the trap was sprung. As soon

as the trap fell, Purvis, instead of being hurled into eternity,

was precipitated to the ground, the Picayune reported. The noose

had let loose, and Purvis' neck, instead of being broken,

was only slightly abraded by the rope. He fell on

his back and remained perfectly still for a few minutes.

The Picayune's man was the first to reach him. He

leaned over to see whether Purvis had been frightened to death,

the paper said, and called to him. From beneath his

black cap, Purvis replied, For God's sake, get me out

of this! Nobody could agree on what the rope had done.

The picayune said the noose let loose, the sun said

it parted, and a paper in Wheeling, West Virginia said

the rope broke. Kosciuszko paper later blamed a disarrangement of

the noose, while the clarion ledger said the rope had

simply slipped off his neck. By the time the story

had been retold for a few years, the knot had

slipped after the body writhed and quivered in midair. The

state historical marker that stands in Columbia now says he

fell straight through to the ground, the noose having slipped

and spared his life. Sheriff McGee got ready to take

him back up, but four members of the county board

of supervisors were in the crowd, and they called the

sheriff into the courthouse. Given how hard Purvis had sworn

he was innocent, and the statement he'd just made, they

advised him to put off the rest until he'd heard

from Governor John M. Stone. McGee said he'd go along

with it, willingly, the Picayune reported, but his orders were imperative.

The supervisors had no say over a thing like this.

While the sheriff was in the courthouse, Purvis believed they

were fixing the rope for a second try, the Picayune said.

He cried out that they were murdering an innocent man,

and that if he knew who'd killed Will Buckley, he'd

tell them. Then Sibley turned to the crowd. As the

Picayune told it, the minister put the escape down to

a divine intervention of providence and asked the people for

a verdict. Should the hanging wait until the governor could

be heard from? Not one voice was raised against it,

the paper said. The Sun reported that Sibley made an

impassioned plea to the spectators, and it was decided by

unanimous vote that the execution be postponed. Later accounts gave

the crowd a harder edge. The sheriff held off owning

to the threatening attitude of the crowd, a Birmingham paper

said in 1898. and the Macon Beacon had the people

crying him down with one voice and threatening violence. The

guards and those on the platform crowded around Purvis to

embrace and congratulate him, the Picayune reported. He sat there

for a while, as if he couldn't take in what

had happened, and when it finally reached him, he sobbed.

He'd asked a merciful God to spare an innocent man,

he said, and God had done it. McGee took him

back to jail. In Jackson, Nobody had told Governor Stone anything,

and until he heard otherwise, the son reported, he'd believed

the sentence had been carried out. This is the first

time in the history of the state, so far as known,

the report said, where a criminal sentenced to death escaped

the same by the interference of outsiders. Stone said there

was nothing he could do about it. Purvis would have

to go back to court and be sentenced over again.

A day or two later, a deputy took him up

the road toward the jail at Hettysburg, and let him

stop at his father's house on the way. His parents,

a New Orleans paper correspondent wrote, received him almost as

one who had arisen from the dead. He was still

wearing the suit he'd put on to die in. There

had been a radical change in the minds of the

people in regard to his guilt, the correspondent went on.

It is believed now by nearly everyone that he is

an innocent man. The district attorney didn't believe it. He

went back to court and and in June 1895, Purvis

was sentenced to death again. In November, the state Supreme

Court upheld it and set a new date, December 12th.

A few nights later, a little after midnight, about a

hundred men armed to the teeth with shotguns and Winchester

rifles surrounded the jail at the town of Purvis. They

opened his cell with duplicate keys and drove him off

in a buggy, while some of them stayed behind to

keep the deputies from raising the alarm. A large reward

was posted. and no trace of him was found. Mississippi

was electing a governor that fall, and Ansel McLaurin had

promised that if he won, he'd commute Purvis' sentence to

life and pardon him later. He won. On March 6th, 1896,

Purvis walked in and gave himself up to the sheriff.

He'd been only a few miles from home the whole time,

he said, dressed as a woman. McLaurin sent word to

bring him to Jackson, and he went into the penitentiary

under a life sentence. He didn't stay long. In 1898,

a petition for his pardon went around with the names

of more than 100 legislators on it, and one of

the people who signed was a brother of the murdered man.

By then, in the account the National Registry gives, Jim

Buckley had said he'd been mistaken. On December 19, 1898,

McLaurin gave Purvis a full and unconditional pardon. In 1917,

a Marion County farmer named Joe Beard, dying of pneumonia,

confessed that he'd been one of the men who killed

Will Buckley. The story that came out of it in

the papers was that Beard and another man had waited

by the road to kill both Buckley brothers. The other

man fired the shot that killed Will, then threatened Beard

for losing his nerve and not shooting Jim. Purvis, the

confession said, had nothing to do with it. In 1918,

a bill to pay Purvis for what he'd been through

got a majority in the Mississippi House and still failed,

because the Speaker ruled that it was a donation and

needed more votes than it had. In 1920, it passed

as an appropriation. One of the representatives backing it was B.B. Buckley,

a cousin of the man Purvis had been convicted of killing,

and Purvis got $ 5, 000. He farmed in Lamar County, married,

and raised a family. He died of heart trouble in

a hospital in Lumberton, Mississippi, on October 13, 1938. And

the wire story that reported it said he had owed

the last two-thirds of his life to a faulty hangman's noose.

Retellings since then say he outlived every juror who convicted him,

but none of them gives a source for it. Thanks

for listening. I've been reading from my new book, Botched Executions,

Four Centuries of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections, and Firing Squads.

If you'd like a list of sources I used for

this episode and for the book it's narrated from, you

can find the full list at weirddarkness.com slash botched executions.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for the sources used.

If you'd rather not wait for the next section to

be shared in the podcast, the whole book is available

on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, as well as Kindle Unlimited.