Kinnie was probably unaware that his flight to Virginia changed his status as a fugitive. He had crossed a state line which put his case into the jurisdiction of the FBI. He was now wanted for interstate flight to avoid prosecution.
Back home in Virginia, Kinnie lived in the mountains, where he knew every cave and cliff. He seldom saw his family. When his sister graduated from high school, he wanted to see her and congratulate her. They arranged a meeting in the town park. Somehow the police learned of the meeting. Five officers showed up along with an undertaker and a hearse to carry Kinnie’s body to the funeral home. It appeared that the officers intended to ambush Kinnie, and shoot him down. His reputation as an expert marksman might have influenced their decision, if, in fact, that was their plan. According to Kinnie, without warning, or provocation on his part, the officers arrived at the park and opened fire, but not before he was able to move away from his sister. Lead flew in every direction. One of the officers’ bullets came dangerously close to his sister, knocking her hat off. Another splattered mud on her dress and face.
Kinnie returned fire. When the shooting ended, and the smoke cleared, two officers lay dead, another critically wounded, and Kinnie Wagner had vanished. The other two officers and the undertaker ran away as fast as they could. Kinnie Wagner now had three notches on his gun. All three were law enforcement officers. He was on the run again.
Knnie eventually made it to Waycross, Georgia, where he spent the night in a barn. He was awakened by a lady who came to the barn to feed her animals. He explained his situation to her, and she persuaded him to give himself up. He went to a country store and told the man who he was, and made a deal with him to drive him to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he surrendered to authorities. They immediately transported him to Bristol, Virginia, where he was charged with the murder of Officer John Smith and Deputy Hubert Webb.
Money was donated for Kinnie’s defense, but six lawyers volunteered to defend him pro-bono. The trial lasted six days, and at the end, after thirteen hours of deliberation, they handed the judged the verdict—guilty of first degree murder. Kinnie Wagner was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Standing erect and staring the judge in the eye, Kinnie remained true to his nature. He never blinked as the judge sentenced him to death. He had no intentions of allowing the State of Virginia to carry out the judge’s sentence.
His lawyers asked for, and were granted a new trial, but Kinnie wasn’t about to wait around for that, or anything else. He planned and pulled off a very clever and daring escape. Kinnie Wagner was on the run again.
He ran west to Memphis. From there he traveled to Texas, eventually winding up in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. Kinnie called on his survival skills and marksmanship once again, to shoot his was out of Mexico.
Kenny made his way from Mexico up to Marland, Oklahoma where he hoped to find his friend Tex. Tex had suggested that if he was ever in that part of the world, he would be working at the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch there. When he got to the ranch he learned that Tex no longer worked there. He went to work on the ranch where he met and fell in love with a beautiful half Cherokee girl named Amelia Hoke. Their love was never to be. Kinnie’s crimes and past life would prevent them from ever having anything more than a letter writing romance. After their first meeting, they saw each other less than a half dozen times during the remainder of their lives.
Constantly on the move, Kinnie traveled from Oklahoma to Texarkana, Arkansas where he got a job working at a sawmill. There, he got into a shootout with three men. The men chose the wrong fellow to engage in a gun battle. He killed two of them. Kinnie surrendered to Sheriff Lillie Barker of Miller County, Arkansas. According to newspapers report Kinnie told the sheriff that he was tired of being hunted. Miller County did not charge Wagner in the killings. They said he did society a favor by killing the two. It was rumored that the reason Miller County didn’t charge Wagner in the deaths of the Carper brothers is because the woman sheriff fell in love with the handsome mountain boy from Virginia. Those rumors were never substantiated, and could have been the workings of Sheriff Barker’s personal or political enemies. Whatever the case, freedom eluded Kinnie again when the FBI learned of his arrest.
Agents traveled to Texarkana to investigate. Since Kinnie was wanted for murder in Virginia and Mississippi, the Feds held him under the interstate flight statues, until Greene County Sheriff Webb Walley showed up and transported him to Mississippi to where he would stand trial for the murder of the Deputy McIntosh.
Because of the tremendous amount of pretrial publicity and emotion surrounding the trial in Greene County, the judge granted a change of venue, and moved the trial to Meridian. Wide publicity was given the trial. Hundreds of people visited the jail in Meridian to see Kinnie Wagner. Many were sympathetic, others condemned him, a few were bitter because of his misdeeds.
“Before during and after the trial, Kinnie was subjected to much unnecessary and humiliating parading before the crowds. The sheriff shackled him in all manner of bonds “He was treated more like an animal than a human being,” his lawyer told me. (Wagner biographie ClaudGentry)
It was a shame the way the sheriff treated that boy, he was trying to build up his case against Kinnie; he wanted the people to think Kinnie was really a bad character, his lawyer claimed.
“The state refused to put on the only eye-witness to the shooting on the stand,” Kinnie said, “he was he was the Deputy Sheriff I had hauled whiskey for.”
When Gentry asked Kinnie’s lawyer why the State refused to put the only eye-witness to the shooting on the stand; he answered, “The state knew that the deputy’s testimony would prove that Kinnie shot McIntosh in self-defense, after he had shot Kinnie down. Kinnie didn’t have a gun in his hands.”
Courtesy of The Guns of Kinnie Wagner by Claude Gentry, Magnolia Publishers
During the three-day trial in Meridian, Wagner himself was the only person the defense put on the stand. The prosecution put the widow of the slain deputy, a justice of the peace and Former Greene County Sherriff C.T. McLeod who was sheriff when Wagner shot Deputy McIntosh on the stand. Contrary to Wagner’s testimony, Sheriff McLeod testified that no shots were fired before Wagner shot and killed Deputy McIntosh. The jurors split on how some wanted a verdict. Some wanted to acquit, some wanted to convict him of a lesser charged than murder, but the judge did not give them the option of a verdict less that murder. He instructed them to either convict him of murder or to acquit. They convicted him of murder. On October 30, 1926 the judge sentenced Kinnie to life in prison for the murder of Deputy Murdock McIntosh.
While in the Lauderdale County jail awaiting his transportation to Parchman, Kinnie wrote a letter to the Amelia Hoke who was staying Vicksburg after the trial. He asked her to bring him a white shirt and a plug of Spark Plug chewing tobacco. When she arrived the next day, he told her that he had planned to ask her to marry him. The white shirt was for the wedding if she accepted, but he changed his mind, because he didn’t want to marry her inside a jail. Amelia vowed to wait for Kinnie and returned to Vicksburg.
Cotton picking was in full swing when Kinnie arrived at Parchman. Prisoners were awakened at three o’clock in the morning. After an early breakfast they were transported to the field to wait for daylight when they began to pick cotton. Quitting time was sundown. When Kinnie Wagner entered Parchman, he was a near physically perfect specimen of a man. He stood six foot two and weighed about two hundred and forty pounds. Not an ounce of fat was on his frame. Prison life robbed him of his health, and he eventually developed heart disease.
With Kinnie’s family living in Virginia, he had few visitors at Parchman. Only relatives were allowed to visit and their visits were rare. The one person he wanted to see so badly was not allowed to visit. Amelia Hoke traveled from Vicksburg every visiting Sunday from December 1926 until April 1927 to visit Kinnie, only to be turned back at the gate. She returned to her home in Missouri determined to try again to visit Kinnie. That visit never happened.
Kinnie was a model prisoner at Parchman. He played by the rules and won the respect of prison officials. Regardless of how hard a prisoner tried to obey the rules at Parchman on those days, sooner or later they are introduced to Black Annie. Kinnie was no exception. He found himself of the receiving end of the six-foot bull whip more than one time.
After a year in Parchman, Kinnie planned his first escape. He contacted friends in the free-world to place guns where he could find them near the farm. Kinnie and his escape partner were riding on a wagon hauling corn from a field. When they reached the place where the guns were hidden, they jumped off, found the guns and ran toward a barn where the mules were usually housed. But there were no mules in the barn. They were either at work or in the pasture. They had no choice but to run. It had been raining, and the heavy Delta gumbo mud attached itself to their shoes like glue. It became thicker with each step. His buddy soon gave up from exhaustion. Kinnie engaged the guards in a gunfight and took a bullet in his shoulder and arm. With blood streaming from his wounds, Kinnie surrendered to an unarmed guard named Mr. White. Kinnie was returned to Parchman and punished for his escape. But Kinnie Wagner’s wit and charmed eventually earned him trusty status.
Kinnie was serving as a trusty guard and dog handler. When a break occurred on October 7, 1936, he was on the chase. While searching for the prisoner Kinnie made his second escape and was not captured until April 16, 1943. He did whatever his had to elude the FBI for the seven years he was on the lam after his second escape. At time he lived off the land. He stayed with friends and used different aliases. He eventually made his way back to Virginia where the he love of his life visited a few times. Finally the FBI learned that they were rendezvous at a certain place and nabbed him before Amelia arrived at their meeting place. Mississippi authorities came and transported him back to Parchman.
Incredibly, Kinnie again earned trusty status. On the night of May 7, 1948 Kinnie Wagner walked off Parchman for his third and final escape. He lived as he had always lived as a man on the run until he settled on Kemper County, near the small town of Wahalak. Early in the morning of January 29,1956, twenty two uniformed Mississippi Highway Patrol (MHP) officers, handpicked by the MHP Chief Gwin Cole, along with Cole himself and Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner, Col. T.B. Birdsong gathered at Briggs Five Points General Store in Scooba, Mississippi. The officers traveled to a shack in Wahalak where Wagner had been living for several months. The twenty four top police officers took no chances. With their weapons drawn, two of which were snipers, Col. Birdsong called for Wagner to surrender. Kinnie was now fifty three years old and in failing health after suffering two heart attacks. He had spent most of life in jail or on the run, and he was tired.
At five o’clock in the morning, in the pouring rain, Kinnie Wagner walked out and called to Col. Birdsong. “Okay T.B. Ya’ll don’t get excited,” and gave himself up to the commissioner. It was his last hurrah.
MHP officers immediately transported him back to Parchman where he died of a heart attack two years later. Kinnie Wagner spent a total of thirty one years Parchman. His last request was that he not be buried at there. He is buried next to his mother in the mountains of Virginia.
During the 1920s, my mother lived in Lucedale, Mississippi for a short time as her father worked for the GM&O Railroad there. When she learned of Wagner’s capture in Kemper County, not far very far from where we live in northern Newton County, she told me the story that when she was a child, she was terrified of Kinnie Wagner. She was upset when she learned that he had been living in a neighboring county at the time of his capture. Evidently my grandfather was one of those who believed Kinnie Wagner needed a rope around his neck. But then, so did many others who had small children in south Mississippi.
Kinnie Wagner was probably harmless except to anyone who had him cornered, or to anyone who he believed proposed a threat to him, but he killed five men in his life. One would be hard pressed to convince the families of the five men that he killed, that Wagner was anything less than a murderer. And if one had lived in an area where Wagner might have been hiding out, it would have been only natural to assume the worse, and caution their children about a man with his record of killing.
Murderer or victim? There was probably only one person on this earth who could have truthfully answered that question, and that was Kinnie Wagner. Or could he?
