Former NM state historian dispels hanging myths

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico abounds with macabre tales about “hanging trees” where Wild West miscreants were strung up in the days of frontier justice — but as former state historian Robert Torrez discovered, there’s more myth than truth in many of the stories.

Torrez says as a child he was frightened of one such tree, which older boys insisted had been used as a means of execution.

“I remember the older boys delighted in scaring us to death as we were coming home from a movie at night,” he said.

Torrez later learned it never supported a hangman’s noose, nor did many other supposed “hanging trees” around the state. It provided the title of his book, “Myth of the Hanging Tree,” published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2008.

As state historian from 1987 to 2000, Torrez was often asked by researchers about hangings and mob lynchings before New Mexico became a state in 1912 and later, in the early days of statehood.

When he looked into their queries, “they’d find out that things often were not as we imagined them,” Torrez said in a recent interview at his Albuquerque home.

But he did glean some hard facts amid the myths.

From 1849-1923, 71 people, including one woman, were legally hanged in what is now New Mexico. The practice ended when the Legislature changed the method to electrocution in 1929.

Torrez’s book also lists 125 lynchings in New Mexico from 1852-1928, but he acknowledges the list is likely not complete. He turned up references to at least a dozen more he could not confirm.

The last known lynching took place in Farmington in 1928. Rafael Benavides, a sheepherder, was kidnapped from a local hospital after being shot by a sheriff’s posse that arrested him for assaulting the wife of a rancher who owed him money.

Torrez found no legal hangings from trees, and said trees were used in less than half of the lynchings. Lynch mobs more often used gallows, telegraph poles and billboards.

What surprised Torrez most about hangings in New Mexico was their cruelty.

He said Thomas “Black Jack” Ketchum, the only person executed in territorial New Mexico for a crime other than murder, was decapitated by the hangman’s noose in Clayton in 1901. Ketchum was convicted of “assault on a railroad train with intent to commit a felony.”

Others suffered agonizing deaths by strangulation after nervous public officials failed to cleanly break their necks.

There was the botched hanging of William Wilson, who was placed in his coffin still alive, in Lincoln in 1875.

“They decided they had to string him up again to make sure that he was dead before they could bury him,” Torrez said.

The image of a grim professional executioner traveling from town to town to carry out hangings also is a myth made popular in Westerns, Torrez said.

During New Mexico’s 63-year territorial period, there were 51 executions, so “it wouldn’t have been much of a living” for an executioner, Torrez said.

The judicial process also appeared inadequate for some people convicted of premeditated murder, Torrez said.

“It seems to me that there were a number of individuals that were hanged that probably nowadays would have been convicted of a much lesser crime,” he said.

Crowds turned out to watch the hangings. Eventually, sheriffs tried to lessen the spectacle by placing a canvas cover around the gallows, but this backfired in a hanging in Estancia.

“When the sun came up behind the gallows, (the crowd) could still see the outlines of the people through the canvas that were hanged, so I guess it made it very dramatic,” Torrez said.

Perhaps the most famous legend he challenges concerns a sentence supposedly imposed on convicted murderer Jesus Maria Martinez and put into writing.

As legend has it, Judge Kirby Benedict spoke to the convict of the coming spring he would not live to see or hear.

“When these things come to gladden the senses of men, you will be occupying a space about six by two beneath the sod, and the green grass and those beautiful flowers will be growing above your lowly head,” Benedict supposedly said.

Torrez discovered a letter in the state archives that said the judge’s sentence could have been verified, if not for a fire that destroyed the district court records.

But then Torrez found the district court records.

“There was no fire or if there was a fire, the records survived and the records are there, and the death sentence of record is not even close to what the public sentence is,” he said. “Unfortunately, there appears to be no truth to his famous sentence.”