Deputy Constable George Johnson Kirk

George Johnson Kirk

Deputy Constable George Kirk was shot and killed as he and another officer responded to a train robbery outside of town.

Three men had placed an obstruction across the train tracks, causing an oncoming train to stop. As they attempted to rob the train the men were fired upon by the train crew.

When Deputy Constable Kirk and the other officer arrived at the scene they also engaged the suspects in a shootout and Deputy Constable Kirk was fatally wounded. The 23-year-old suspect who shot Deputy Constable Kirk was shot, seriously wounded, and captured. The other two were apprehended in Proctor the next day.

Deputy Constable Kirk's killer was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He escaped from prison in 1914.

In March 1915 the doctor who attended to the wounds of the killer and Deputy Constable Kirk was traveling on military orders and was on a train near Wilmington, North Carolina, when he overheard passengers talking about an escaped murderer who had been captured near Wilmington and was in jail in nearby Southport. The doctor learned that the murderer, Jesse Walker, had escaped from the Southport Jail on January 29th, 1909, just days after he shot and killed Brunswick County Sheriff Jackson Stanland.

He was captured while attempting to return home to see his wife and child. As the doctor learned more about the suspect and about the man's gunshot wounds from the past he became convinced the suspect was the same man who murdered Deputy Constable Kirk, but had been incarcerated under a different name before escaping.

He went to the Southport Jail where he positively identified the suspect as the same man. The man was convicted of Sheriff Stanland's murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison in North Carolina. In 1919 he escaped from the Central Prison in Raleigh. He relocated to Mississippi where he remarried and assumed a third identity. In 1935 he voluntarily returned to prison and admitted his real identity and past to his wife. On June 6th, 1936, he was paroled in North Carolina and then returned to the Oklahoma Penitentiary to complete his sentence there. He was paroled in Oklahoma on July 24th, 1944.

Deputy Constable Kirk was survived by his wife and child.