Murrell was convicted the second and last time for the crime of slave stealing, in the Circuit Court of Madison County, Tennessee.

While he was incarcerated in Nashville for slave stealing, his mother, wife, and two children lived in the vicinity of Denmark, Tennessee.

Although the corpse had been half-eaten by scavenging hogs, the head was separated from the torso, pickled, and displayed at county fairs.

He is also suspected to have been involved in counterfeiting in Arkansas[7] His claims of being part of a "Mystic Clan" resulted in over 50 white men and a number of African Americans to be either hanged or whipped and banished in Western Mississippi.

On Christmas Day, 1835, Murrell and his "Mystic Clan" planned to incite an uprising in every slaveholding state by invoking the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave rebellion in history.

[9] Murrell believed that a slave rebellion would enable him to take over the South, and make New Orleans the center of operations of his criminal empire.

Some historians say that Stewart's pamphlet was largely fictional and that Murrell (and his brothers) were at best inept thieves, who had caused their father to go bankrupt as he raised bail money for them.

Given Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831 in Virginia, slaveholders were always ready to believe conspiracies of new violence, especially in the Deep South where whites were far outnumbered by blacks.

[11] Approximately 400 in Grand Council (Southern states representatives)[14] Murrell was known as a "land-pirate", using the Mississippi River as a base for his operations.

He used a network of 300[15] to 1,000,[16] and even as many as 2,500 (as some newspaper reports claimed) fellow bandits collectively known as the Mystic Clan to pull off his escapades.

Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett wrote that a lawless district in that town was named for him in the 1840s, as "Murrell's Row".

Just before Murrell was apprehended, he was rumored to be leading a slave revolt in New Orleans in an attempt to take over the city and become a sort of criminal potentate of Louisiana.

A stream in Chicot County, Arkansas, called Whiskey Chute, was named in 1855 for Murrell's raid on a whiskey-carrying steamboat that was sunk after it was pillaged.