NOTE: My apologies, this was supposed to be posted back in May with a short disclaimer saying that it would be a while till my next post. That being said, since it has been that while, let’s find out the end to that last saga, shall we?

Anyway, it’s 1881, and to catch everyone up to speed, Milt Yarberry, dangerously erratic gunman and constable of Albuquerque, NM Territory has just managed to blow away his romantic rival Harry Brown and get away with it. He continued in office for several weeks and managed not to kill anyone else until the afternoon of June 18, 1881.

On that evening, while Milt was talking with a  buddy on the porch of a house, someone fired a shot, probably in a fit of drunken high spirits. Yarberry rushed to the scene and asked who had done it, and when a bystander pointed out a man walking away, Milt unlimbered his .45 Colt and opened up, firing four shots. The man collapsed and witnesses said Milt rejoiced, saying, “I’ve downed the son of a b-—!”

A coroner’s jury established that the deceased, Charles D. Campbell (ironically a Tennessee native like Brown), had been hit by three shots in the chest and the back. Yarberry’s testimony was that Campbell, a railroad employee who was something of a drinker, had pulled a pistol and threatened him and that he had fired – as always in such cases – in self defense. However, the bullet hole in Campbell’s back raised eyebrows, despite Yarberry’s contention that Campbell had spun around when shot and taken the final bullet in that location. For the record, Campbell, though a drunk, had little reputation for violence and no pistol was found on the deceased, although admittedly it might have been removed by a rubbernecker at the scene.

Arrested and tried, Yarberry’s case divided the community of Albuquerque. He had both friends and enemies in the community, and the testimony at the trial was far from clear as to what had happened on that street in the dark. In the end the jury found Milt Yarberry guilty of murder in the first degree, and set his punishment as death by hanging.

Yarberry made an abortive escape attempt but was recaptured, an event that sealed his guilt in some minds. He resigned himself to his fate, playing his fiddle and bragging to the press from his jail cell. He eventually confided to his closest friend, Sheriff Perfecto Armijo, that his real name was Armstrong and that he was born in Arkansas.

On February 9, 1883 he was marched to the gallows – reportedly the same contraption whose construction he had overseen as constable. He made a speech from the platform, and made the cryptic statement that he was being hanged not for killing Campbell, but because he “killed a son of Governor Brown of Tennessee.” When the mask was drawn over his face, he made his final statement: “Gentlemen, you are hanging an innocent man!”

Innocent or not, the mechanism that sprung the trap was put into gear, and moments later  the man who lived as Milton J. Yarberry shot upwards and died. Today, he lies in Albuquerque’s Mount Calvary Cemetery. An impressive tombstone was placed at his head, paid for by his friends.

It was later stolen, and no trace of it exists today.