I wrote yesterday about Searcy County leading the state in voter turnout in the May elections. Darryl Treat, executive director of the Greater Searcy County Chamber of Commerce, pointed to a four-way race for county judge as a potential driver of turnout. A compounding factor may have been the fact that incumbent Judge Jim Harness pleaded no contest last year to a felony and several misdemeanors in a case involving his ex-wife.

It turns out the Searcy County judge’s race has yet another candidate who’s had more than a little trouble with the law.

Robert Baysinger was convicted in 1976 of capital murder in the death of former sheriff Billy Joe Holder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 1977, the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed his conviction.

The facts of the case, as recounted in the Supreme Court decision and more colorfully in retired Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Tom Glaze’s book “Waiting for the Cemetery Vote,” read like something out of a movie. Here’s an a portion of an excerpt of Glaze’s book the Arkansas Times ran in 2011:

In the late evening of Feb. 9, nearly nine months before the election, Billy Joe Holder, a six-term Democratic sheriff who had lost to the Republican Loren Reeves in 1974, was watching television while his wife, June, sat across the living room crocheting. Someone put a shotgun barrel against the window screen, aimed between the potted plants on the windowsill, and shot Holder in the head. The big redhead, who had been the nation’s youngest sheriff when he was first elected in 1950, died en route to the hospital. Someone had cut the telephone wire to the Holder house, and to call the state police his wife had to use a police radio in Holder’s car. He had gotten a job as an agent of the Arkansas Alcoholic Beverage Control Board after his defeat. June wouldn’t let Sheriff Reeves in the house when he came the next day.

Nearly five months later, the police arrested Robert A. Baysinger, a local bootlegger, his wife, Nina, and two other men, Charles Dye and Norman Keith Sutterfield, and charged them with involvement in Holder’s murder. Baysinger supposedly hired Sutterfield to kill Holder because Holder had arrested his wife for bootlegging and the others were accomplices to the murder. Baysinger would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without parole, but the Arkansas Supreme Court reversed his conviction because of the misuse of a recorded admission of his involvement. He was tried again and acquitted. Charges against the alleged triggerman, Sutterfield, were dropped because he produced witnesses who said they drank beer with him in Missouri the evening of the shooting, and charges were dropped against the other two as well. Except for Baysinger’s short time in prison after his original conviction, no one was ever punished for Holder’s murder.

There’s a lot more about the sordid tale in the excerpt and from the Supreme Court decision recounting the facts: After Holder was killed, Reeves met Baysinger in a hotel parking lot and taped their conversation, in which Baysinger identified the trigger man as Sutterfield, who he’d contacted through Kiddie Care Nursery in Conway. The record also showed that Baysinger had withdrawn nearly $18,000 from his savings account within a few weeks of the murder.

Billy Joe Holder Jr., a state trooper at the time his father was murdered, said he doesn’t think Baysinger should be able to run, though he understands the acquittal is now a factor. Still, he said, “I think there are a lot better people who could have run.”

Baysinger faces Tony Horton in the June 21 runoff primary. Incumbent County Judge Jim Harness and David Roberts lost in the May primary.

Holder now lives in Rogers in Benton County and can’t vote in this race.

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