Episode Details

Toni Jo Henry, born Annie Beatrice McQuiston near Shreveport in 1916, lived a hard life of addiction and work in Louisiana and Texas brothels. In the fall of 1939 she met Claude “Cowboy” Henry, a down-on-his-luck prize fighter. He helped her get off drugs. They married on November 25, 1939, and honeymooned briefly in California.

Weeks later, Cowboy was convicted of murdering a former police officer in a Texas bar fight and sentenced to 50 years at Huntsville. Toni Jo vowed to free him. On Valentine’s Day 1940, she and accomplice Harold “Arkie” Burks were hitchhiking when salesman Joseph P. Calloway offered them a ride in the new Ford V8 Coupe he was delivering. They robbed him at gunpoint, locked him in the trunk, drove to a remote rice field between Lake Charles and Jennings, made him strip (she wanted the clothes for Cowboy’s escape), and shot him in the head with a .32.

The plan was to use the car to rob a bank in Arkansas and fund a prison break. Arkie eventually fled with the car; Toni Jo confessed and led police to the body. She was tried three times, each time convicted and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution she was baptized Catholic by Father Wayne Richard.

On November 28, 1942, she became the only woman ever executed in Louisiana’s electric chair (the state’s portable chair, sometimes called Gruesome Gertie), in the basement of the Calcasieu Parish jail in Lake Charles. Days earlier, Cowboy had briefly escaped from a Texas prison farm in a futile attempt to help her.

In this episode of Hitched 2 Homicide, Kris and Rob examine the relationship that drove the crime, the Valentine’s Day murder, the three trials, the execution details, and why Toni Jo’s story remains one of Louisiana’s most infamous true-crime cases.

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