Neatly coiled in a wood-framed, glass-fronted display case, the lynching rope is a prize exhibit in the Eastland County Law Enforcement Museum, formerly a local jail. The lynching victim was Marshall Ratliff, who had robbed a bank in Cisco dressed as Santa Claus and who was popularly believed to have wrongly escaped the death penalty.
The people of Eastland, unhappy with the judge's decision, dragged Ratliff from jail and hanged him from a telephone pole. The pole and the lynching spot are fenced off as an historic site a few blocks away.
