Wednesday's did you know Arkansas post is about another unsolved mystery. Was it murder or suicide? More than 130 years ago, a mysterious death beside an Arkansas bayou set off a chain of events involving two murder convictions, a lynching, a $10,000 life insurance dispute, and a widow who eventually married her dead husband's business partner. On May 13, 1896, William Franklin Skipper, a merchant and sawmill owner, was found dead beside Bayou Bartholomew near Baxter in Drew County, Arkansas. He had a knife wound to his neck, and an open knife was found in his hand. Some believed he had committed suicide. Others insisted he had been murdered. Two Black sawmill workers, James Redd and Alex Johnson, were convicted of killing him, but the Arkansas Supreme Court overturned their convictions twice. Before they could receive another trial, an armed mob broke into the Monticello jail in July 1898 and shot both men to death inside their cells. Meanwhile, Skipper's widow, Malissa, was fighting Union Central Life Insurance Company over two policies totaling $10,000. The company maintained that her husband had committed suicide, which would have prevented payment under the policies. A federal jury ultimately sided with Malissa, finding that her husband had been murdered rather than having taken his own life. On June 5, 1902, six years after his death, she finally received the insurance money. The judgment totaled approximately $12,600, including interest and costs. But here's another interesting twist. In 1901, while the insurance litigation was still going on, Malissa married William H. Lephiew, her dead husband's former business partner. Lephiew's first wife had died the previous year. Malissa and Lephiew remained married until his death in 1931. She died in 1933. Both are buried in Oaklawn Cemetery in Monticello, but beside their respective first spouses. So, although a jury determined that William Skipper had been murdered, nobody was ultimately convicted of killing him. The two men originally accused were dead, the widow collected the insurance money, and the identity of the person responsible was never conclusively established. What really happened beside Bayou Bartholomew that day in 1896?