Because he was a teenager, Aaron Taylor was sentenced to life at hard labor at Huntsville Prison. Ben Krebs and James Preston were convicted of murder in the first degree and were scheduled to be hung with a third man named Noftsinger in April 1880. Several days before the scheduled execution, Texas Governor O. M. Roberts commuted the murder convictions of Krebs and Preston to life at hard labor. District Judge J. A. Carroll, who had presided over all of the England murder trials, had expressed serious reservations regarding the pair’s guilt and asked the governor to commute their sentences. Before announcing the commutations, however, Roberts had prison officials remove Krebs and Preston from the Gainesville jail and put them on a train to Huntsville. The governor acted none to soon, as a vigilante mob of close to 100 people converged on the jail to lynch the two men.
