Henry Earl, known as “the world’s most arrested man” for his long wrap sheet covering decades, died in Owenton, Kentucky, in May. He was 74 years old.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Mr. Earl had been arrested approximately 1,300 times since the Division of Community Corrections of Lexington Fayette Urban County Government began digitally documenting arrests in 1992.

His first arrest came in Fayette County in July, 1970, for carrying a concealed weapon when he was 20 years old. Since then, it is reported that he spent over 6,000 days in jail.

Supposedly, his record breaking jail spree caught the eye of producers at “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in 2004 but Mr. Earl was unable to attend. You guessed it, he was in jail at the time.
A few years after his would-be television appearance, Mr. Earl logged his 1,000th arrest in 2008 when he was found passed out on a person’s back porch.

His last arrest was for public intoxication in April, 2017. Mr. Earl’s jail sentence in the years before this last arrest had been getting longer, presumably as media reports of his long record made him notorious, judges became less lenient with him.

There are unconfirmed reports that he was once well known in the Lexington community, where he would hang out around the University of Kentucky college bars where students would buy him drinks.