Eighteen-year-old Will Oakley looked nothing like he had just five weeks before. Sitting in a Montgomery courtroom on Dec. 5, 1912, Oakley was unshaven and his hair had grown long and unkempt, hanging over his forehead. His expression was blank, despite the fact that 12 men were about to determine if he would be hanged for murdering his stepfather on Halloween day.

Not only had Oakley pulled out a pistol and shot P.A. Woods to death, but he’d shot him inside Alabama’s State Capitol Building, just steps from the governor’s office and just minutes after Gov. Emmett O’Neal had left the vicinity. The men had been in an office across from the governor’s to give depositions in a dispute over Oakley’s mother’s land when the shooting occurred.