Jim Bradshaw: Louisiana killer loved her Cowboy

Toni Jo Henry went to her execution on Nov. 28, 1942, clutching a small crucifix, loving the man she’d killed for, and worried about a little rat terrier.

It took three trials before her murder conviction finally stuck, even though the facts of her case were never disputed.

She and a companion shot a stranger, Joseph Calloway, on Valentine’s Day 1940, in a rice field between Lake Charles and Jennings because she wanted the new Ford coupe he was driving.

She wanted the car to go to Arkansas to rob a bank.

She wanted to rob a bank to get money to spring her husband, Claude "Cowboy" Henry, from a Texas prison, where he was serving 50 years for murder.

Toni Jo said Cowboy was the only good thing that ever happened to her.

She ran away from an abusive home in Shreveport, was addicted to drugs by age 13, and was drifting around southwest Louisiana when, in her late teens, she met Cowboy and fell in love.

“No one ever cared about me before I met my husband,” she said. “That guy is the king of my heart.”

They were married by a justice of the peace in Sulphur in November 1939, but only weeks later Cowboy was arrested for killing a man in San Antonio in 1938.

Toni Jo swore she would get him out of prison somehow, but she needed help for that.

She found it one night in a Beaumont bar, where she met an ex-con nicknamed Arkie.

He said he knew of a bank in Arkansas that would be easy to rob, if they had a car to get there.

The pair were hitchhiking near Vinton when Calloway, a Houston tire salesman, offered them a ride.

They were just east of Lake Charles when Toni Jo pulled a gun from her purse and made him drive into the field where he was killed.

She and Arkie then drove to Arkansas, where Toni Jo found out that Arkie had been lying to her.

He didn’t know anything about banks. He’d just wanted a ride home.

Toni Jo nearly killed him also, but instead abandoned the car and took a bus to Shreveport, where an aunt convinced her to turn herself in.

She was charged with murder and taken to the Calcasieu Parish jail, where she stayed during the years-long wrangling over her fate.

During that time, she befriended a jailhouse pet, a white rat terrier with a black circle around one eye that was small enough to slip in and out of her cell.

He became her near-constant companion.

By the time of her first trial in March 1940, Toni Jo’s story was known across the nation and hundreds of people jammed into the courtroom, including sympathetic members of the national press.
There was much less sympathy outside the courthouse where the local crowd chanted, “Hang her! Hang her!”

Those chants were the basis for the appeal of her first conviction.

Her lawyers said the jury heard and was prejudiced by them.

While she awaited her second trial, the Rev. Wayne Richard of Immaculate Conception church began to instruct her in the Catholic faith.

He baptized her in her cell in August 1940, with a deputy sheriff as godfather.

Toni Jo was convicted again in February 1941. Defense lawyers again got a new trial on a technicality.

The third trial in October 1941 ended with yet another guilty verdict.

This time there were no grounds for appeal.

The Associated Press reported on Nov. 28, 1942, “Clutching a tiny crucifix symbolic of the Catholic faith with which she had consoled herself … Toni Jo Henry, 26, was executed in the electric chair at 12:12 p.m. … Her last request was that the crucifix be left in her hand when she is buried.”

She’d talked by phone for ten tearful minutes to her beloved Cowboy the day before, “telling him to put faith in God and turn to an upright, law-biding life.”

As she left her cell to walk to the electric chair, “she … patted her death cell companion, a small black and white dog, goodbye … exacting from her jailer a promise that he would send the dog to her niece in Shreveport.”

Minutes later she smiled at her executioner and told him she was nervous.

Those were her last words.

Nobody claimed her body. She was quietly buried in a pauper’s grave, tiny crucifix in hand.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.