In the autumn of 1938, a federal marshal named Vernon Crawford ordered the public hanging of Ezekiel Combs from a gallows erected in the Harlan County Courthouse square. Combs, a mountain farmer who ran a small still, had spoken openly against federal prohibition and resisted what he considered illegitimate intrusions into mountain life. Crawford used his execution as a demonstration of federal power. The drop was miscalculated, and Combs strangled slowly for nearly eight minutes while a crowd of hundreds watched in silence.
His body was left hanging for the rest of the day. Ezekiel’s nephew, Isaiah Combs, had been away when the raid occurred. Crawford had timed it deliberately, knowing that Ezekiel’s more capable nephew would not be present to complicate things. Isaiah was 23 years old.
His parents had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic when he was three, and Ezekiel had raised him, teaching him to track, shoot, survive in the wilderness, and above all, to believe that justice was something taken, not given. When Isaiah returned three days after the execution and stood at his uncle’s fresh grave, he felt something change inside him that would not change back until twenty federal marshals were dead. For six months he made no move. He studied the men who had participated in his uncle’s arrest and execution.
He learned their names, faces, routines, and vulnerabilities. He mapped their movements and identified the moments when each would be most accessible. He also built alibis, establishing his presence in distant places with witnesses who could verify his whereabouts. When investigators later connected the killings to him, those alibis held.
The first killing came on March 15, 1939, exactly six months after the hanging. A marshal named Dale Tackett was found in his home, his body cut apart with a skill that suggested hours of deliberate work. Carved into his chest were the words “For Ezekiel. ” Investigators found no fingerprints, no footprints, no witnesses.
Isaiah had been seen in Virginia the night of the murder, and multiple witnesses confirmed his presence there. The second killing followed three weeks later. Marshal Robert Lawson was found strung up in his barn, suspended from the rafters in a position that mimicked Ezekiel’s hanging. Unlike Ezekiel, Lawson had not died from the rope.
He had been cut while still alive, watching pieces of himself removed while he hung helpless. Investigators noted the precision of the cuts, which suggested anatomical knowledge and deliberate method. The pattern continued through the spring and summer. The third victim was found missing both hands and both feet, alive when they were removed.
The fourth victim had been blinded while alive, then cut apart. Each death was worse than the last, and each one left the same message. The fear that spread through the Marshal Service was unlike anything the region had experienced. Deputies who had been present at Ezekiel’s execution understood they were being hunted.
Some fled the county, some demanded protection, and a few resigned outright. Isaiah’s methods were shaped by everything Ezekiel had taught him. He moved through the forest without leaving traces that experienced trackers could follow. He struck at moments when his victims believed themselves safe.
He created alibis through networks of people who believed they were helping with ordinary matters, people who testified about his presence without understanding what that testimony protected. Marshals who fled to other states discovered that distance provided nothing. The seventh killing occurred in Virginia, the eighth in Tennessee, the ninth in West Virginia. By September 1939, seventeen marshals were dead.
Crawford, who had hidden behind guards and fortified safe houses, attempted to flee on September 15, exactly one year after Ezekiel’s execution. The escape was intercepted on a remote mountain road. Crawford’s guards died first, killed in seconds from positions they never identified. Then Isaiah emerged from the shadows and asked if Crawford remembered Ezekiel Combs.
What Isaiah did to Crawford over the following three days would not be detailed in full until decades later, when his journals were finally discovered. He kept Crawford alive through procedures that should have killed him, removing pieces of him while explaining what his uncle had meant to him. Crawford died on the morning of September 18, exactly one year and three days after Ezekiel’s death. The remaining three marshals were killed efficiently in the final days of September, their deaths swift rather than elaborate.
The task was complete. Isaiah Combs disappeared on October 1, 1939. He retreated into a remote hollow in the eastern Kentucky mountains, a place his uncle had shown him years before. The path could not be found by accident.
It wound through crevices and required climbing and crawling through movements that only someone with generation-deep knowledge of the terrain could perform. Beyond the rockfall lay a valley surrounded by steep walls, with a stream running through it throughout the year. He built a cabin against a cliff face using techniques Ezekiel had taught him. Over time he added a smokehouse, a root cellar, and a workshop.
He established a garden that failed initially, then produced reliable crops. He hunted deer along known routes and trapped smaller game. He lived alone. He spoke to his dead uncle daily.
The first winter nearly killed him, not from cold or hunger, but from despair. He would lie in his cabin for days without eating or tending the fire. He held conversations with Ezekiel that the outside world would have called madness, but that he experienced as genuine connection. During the third winter he sat at the highest point in the hollow with his rifle beneath his chin and considered ending his existence.
He lowered the weapon before pulling the trigger. His resolve did not fully return, but he carried the grief in a way that no longer crushed him. He kept journals throughout his isolation, documenting his days and thoughts in notebooks he made himself. He wrote about Ezekiel constantly, preserving the lessons his uncle had taught and the philosophy of justice that had driven his campaign.
He wrote about the killings in detail, naming each victim and describing his role in Ezekiel’s execution. The journals were not intended to remain hidden. They were a confession meant to survive him. The investigation that had searched for him was abandoned by the 1950s.
The case files were closed with the notation that the perpetrator had likely died in the wilderness. Isaiah observed the searchers from concealment they never penetrated. He had committed twenty murders and escaped every consequence except the solitude the escape required. By the 1980s, Isaiah was in his seventies.
The strength that had allowed him to butcher twenty men had faded, and the body that had served him for decades was surrendering to age. He prepared for death as he had prepared for everything else, with practicality and acceptance. He wrote final entries explaining that the journals contained truth he wanted known. Isaiah Combs died in his cabin on November 15, 1989, at the age of seventy-four.
His body was found three years later by hikers who had ventured deeper into the mountains than anyone had explored in decades. The cabin, the garden, and the evidence of fifty years of isolated existence astonished them. Beside his body lay dozens of handmade notebooks containing confessions to twenty killings that had never been solved. Investigators reopened the case files, and the details matched perfectly.
The victims, the methods, the timeline everything Isaiah recorded corresponded to evidence gathered fifty years earlier. Documents were also discovered confirming that Ezekiel’s execution had been extrajudicial, ordered by Crawford for crimes that did not carry capital punishment. The corruption that had enabled the murder was exposed alongside the vengeance it had provoked. The descendants of the marshals learned that their ancestors had helped hang an innocent man for making whiskey and had watched without protest while he died slowly because the drop had been miscalculated.
Isaiah was buried beside his uncle in the Combs family cemetery. His grave bears the inscription: “Isaiah Combs, 1915-1989, he loved his uncle. He avenged his uncle. He waited 50 years.
” Songs arose from the story, and the graves became a place people traveled to see. The mountains keep their memories close, and the names of Ezekiel and Isaiah Combs remain carved in stone at the end of a hollow where a nephew waited half a century for death to reunite him with the only father he ever knew.