The Deadliest Outlaws

After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was 'cruel and unusual' for the offence charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individual, and the last, to be executed for a crime of this sort. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of Ketchum and related outlaws for more than forty years. He has mined unpublished sources, family records, personal reminiscences, trial transcripts, official correspondence, and contemporary newspapers to provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and other outlaws.