Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Kinnie “Kenny” Wagner of Scott, Virginia
In the old newspapers he is not always easy to follow. One paper calls him Kenny Wagner. Another calls him Kinnie Wagner. FBI material used the name William “Two Gun Kinnie” Wagner. Genealogical listings and later obituary notices often give the fuller name William Kenneth Garland Wagner. To search for him in archives, a reader has to follow all of those trails, because the story of Kinnie Wagner was scattered across county jails, prison records, federal files, local newspapers, ballads, and mountain memory.
The strongest thread leads back to Scott County, Virginia. Wagner was born in 1903, and most modern summaries place his early life near Speers Ferry or in the Gate City and Moccasin Gap country. That location matters. Wagner’s later legend was never only a Mississippi prison story or a Tennessee crime story. It was also a Southwest Virginia story, rooted in the ridges and roads between Gate City, Kingsport, and the Clinch Mountain country.
Like many outlaw stories, his life has been retold so often that fact and folklore sometimes stand side by side. The documented record is dark enough without exaggeration. Wagner became known as a trick shooter, a fugitive, a prison escapee, and a man tied to the deaths of several people, including law officers. At the same time, ballads, newspaper features, and local talk turned him into a mountain character larger than the court records alone.
A Scott County Beginning
William Kenneth Wagner was born into a rural Appalachian world where families moved along creek roads, farmed rough ground, worked where they could, and crossed state lines more easily than outsiders understood. Scott County sat close to Tennessee, and the Kingsport area was part of the same lived region for many families. The state line mattered to courts and sheriffs, but less to kinship, work, and movement.
Later accounts say Wagner left home young and became a circus or carnival marksman. The FBI’s Richmond Field Office history describes him as a famed trick-shot carnival worker. That piece of the story helps explain why newspapers were so quick to turn him into a spectacle. He was not simply another fugitive in print. He was the man with the pistols, the man who could shoot for show, the man whose skill with firearms became both his reputation and his ruin.
The nickname “Two Gun Kinnie” followed him because it fit the image. It also helped newspapers sell the story. By the middle of the 1920s, crime reporting had learned how to make folk villains famous. A man with a memorable nickname, a mountain origin, a record of escapes, and a trail through several states was ready-made for headlines.
Trouble in Mississippi and the Road Back North
Wagner’s criminal story moved into the public record through Mississippi. FBI-era material and later summaries place his early trouble in Greene County, Mississippi, where he became wanted after the killing of a deputy sheriff. The exact details vary across retellings, but the result did not. Wagner was on the run.
His flight carried him back toward the Appalachian borderlands. The mountains of Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee offered what fugitives have always looked for: kin, old paths, hidden houses, and rough country where strangers stood out. By 1925, Wagner was again close to home, but the law was close behind him.
The story reached its most violent Appalachian moment on April 13, 1925, near Kingsport, Tennessee. Contemporary and later regional sources identify the dead as Kingsport Police Officer John Smith and Sullivan County Deputy Sheriff Hubert Webb. Kingsport officer George Frazier was wounded. The shooting left Wagner wanted in Tennessee and made his name familiar across Southwest Virginia and upper East Tennessee.
What happened at Kingsport became one of those events retold differently depending on who was speaking. Law enforcement accounts made Wagner a dangerous killer. Some mountain accounts stressed that officers came for him knowing he was armed and wanted. Neither version changes the outcome. Two officers were dead, another was wounded, and Wagner escaped into a region that already knew his name.
Trial, Sentence, and Escape
After the Kingsport shootings, Wagner surrendered the next day near Waycross, Virginia, according to the FBI’s later narrative in The Investigator. He was taken into the Tennessee court system, where the machinery of justice moved quickly. The same FBI-era account places him on trial on April 21, 1925, with indictments connected to murder and felonious assault.
The case could have ended there. It did not. Wagner’s trial and sentence became only one chapter in a longer pattern of capture and escape. Regional timelines place his Sullivan County Jail escape at Blountville on July 10, 1925, when he broke out with several other men before a new trial could settle the case. That escape fixed one of the central themes of his reputation. Kinnie Wagner was not only a gunman. He was an escape artist.
Newspapers followed him closely. One of the most important near-primary finds is the Daily Progress article from June 4, 1926, titled “Letter from Kinnie Wagner.” The article appears to preserve or discuss a letter postmarked from Surgoinsville, Tennessee, and signed with his name. If verified against the original image, it offers something rare in an outlaw story: Wagner’s own version, or at least a version printed under his name while events were still fresh.
Texarkana and Parchman
In August 1926, Wagner’s trail reached Texarkana. The FBI’s The Investigator gives a dramatic account of Sheriff Lillie Barker of Texarkana, Arkansas, receiving Wagner after the deaths of Sam and William Carper and the wounding of Bob Carper. The same account says Arkansas turned Wagner over to Mississippi, where he was tried for the killing of a law enforcement officer and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
Parchman was not just a prison. It was a hard agricultural institution, part farm, part penal colony, and part symbol of Jim Crow punishment in Mississippi. Wagner entered a place that already had its own reputation for violence, discipline, labor, and strange privileges given to trusted prisoners. That context is important because Wagner’s legend did not stop when the cell door closed.
At Parchman, he became part of the prison world. FBI-era accounts describe him as a trusty who handled dogs and helped track other escapees. That detail later became one of the strangest parts of his legend. A man known for running from the law was, for a time, used to help catch other men who ran.
But walls did not hold him permanently. On October 27, 1940, according to The Investigator, Wagner escaped from Parchman after turning a search for another escaped prisoner into his own flight. The FBI article describes him forcing a guard to drive toward Clarksdale, changing clothes, and leaving into the night armed. By 1942, federal process had entered the case through kidnapping and unlawful flight charges.
The FBI and the Scott County Manhunt
The FBI Richmond Field Office history gives one of the cleanest official summaries of Wagner’s federal case. It identifies him as William “Two Gun Kinnie” Wagner, a famed trick-shot carnival worker, and says Richmond agents pursued him on unlawful flight and kidnapping charges. With local police help, they located and arrested him.
The longer FBI-era account in The Investigator places the manhunt in the border country between Kingsport and Gate City. It says leads pointed toward the area near Wagner’s birthplace around Gate City and Moccasin Gap. It also describes his movement through vacant houses and relatives’ homes, with the fugitive changing hiding places in a small mountain area while the dragnet tightened.
The arrest came in April 1943 in Scott County. The Investigator describes agents and Virginia State Police pursuing a car along the Daniel Boone Trail in the Moccasin Gap section on the road to Gate City. After a standoff, Wagner gave himself up. When agents ordered him to remove his coat, they saw two .38 revolvers on him. A search of the car and hideout found more firearms and ammunition.
The official FBI Richmond history says the Richmond agents located and arrested him with local police assistance. The federal account is not neutral in tone. It paints Wagner as a dangerous killer and uses language common to law enforcement writing of the era. Still, it is valuable because it ties the federal case directly to Southwest Virginia and confirms that the manhunt ended in the same mountain country where Wagner’s legend had begun.
Ballads and the Making of a Legend
By the time Wagner was being chased, tried, imprisoned, and chased again, musicians had already begun turning him into song. Vernon Dalhart recorded “Kinnie Wagner” and “Kinnie Wagner’s Surrender” for OKeh. The Smithsonian holds a 78 rpm recording of “Kinnie Wagner’s Surrender” backed with “Billy Richardson’s Last Ride.” The Discography of American Historical Recordings lists the OKeh matrixes connected to Dalhart’s Wagner recordings.
These records matter because they show how quickly Wagner moved from courthouse news into commercial folk culture. Topical songs about crime, disasters, murders, and trials were common in the 1920s. Record companies understood that rural listeners bought songs about real events, especially when those events seemed close to home. Wagner’s story fit that market perfectly.
Lyle Lofgren’s “Kenny Wagner’s Surrender” traces the song tradition through Rev. Andrew Jenkins, Dalhart, Ernest Stoneman, and later old-time memory. The song did what many Appalachian and Southern ballads did. It turned bloodshed into warning. It did not need to excuse Wagner to make him memorable. It only needed to make his fall singable.
That is why Wagner’s memory is complicated. In official files he was a fugitive and killer. In ballads he became a badman with a moral ending. In local legend he was sometimes treated as a kind of outlaw hero, even though the record included dead officers, dead civilians, grieving families, and years of imprisonment. The historian’s job is not to polish him into a hero or flatten him into a headline. It is to show how both the crimes and the legend were made.
Death at Parchman and Return to Scott County
Wagner died at Parchman in March 1958. Newspaper notices and later transcriptions report that he died of heart trouble while still in prison. His body was returned to Scott County for burial, and the old curiosity returned with it. The Kingsport Times-News obituary material reprinted by Lofgren says funeral services were held from the Scott County Funeral Home chapel and that burial was in Wood Cemetery. A Gate City account said thousands viewed the body before burial.
That final scene is one of the most revealing parts of the story. Wagner had spent years away from Scott County, but his death drew people back to the mountain meaning of his life. Some came because they remembered the fear. Some came because they remembered the songs. Some came because they had heard the name all their lives and wanted to see the body of a man who had become more rumor than person.
The coffin closed, but the story did not. Wagner remained in books, ballads, podcasts, newspaper retrospectives, old FBI files, and county memory. His name still appears in multiple forms because his life passed through so many kinds of records. Kinnie. Kennie. Kenny. William Kenneth Wagner. William Kenneth Garland Wagner. Two Gun Kinnie.
Why Kinnie Wagner’s Story Matters
Kinnie Wagner’s life belongs in Appalachian history because it shows how a local man could become a regional legend through the collision of violence, law enforcement, newspapers, music, and mountain memory. He was not important because he should be admired. He was important because his story reveals how Appalachia has often been represented, sometimes by outsiders looking for violent spectacle and sometimes by local people trying to make sense of danger, kinship, and reputation.
His Scott County connection also matters. Wagner’s story moved through Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and federal files, but the mountains kept pulling the narrative back to Southwest Virginia. The FBI searched for him near Gate City. Newspapers called him a native son. Funeral crowds gathered when his body returned. Ballads made his name travel farther than he ever could.
In the end, the most honest way to remember Kinnie Wagner is to keep the facts and the folklore in conversation. The facts tell of killings, trials, escapes, prison, and pursuit. The folklore tells how those facts were reshaped by song, rumor, and memory. Between the two stands a Scott County man whose life became a warning about talent turned destructive, violence turned marketable, and a mountain name that refused to disappear.
Sources & Further Reading
Federal Bureau of Investigation. “FBI Richmond History.” Federal Bureau of Investigation. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://www.fbi.gov/history/field-office-histories/richmond
Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Kenneth Wagner: Murder, Escape, Kidnaping.” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 14, no. 1, January 1945. https://leb.fbi.gov/file-repository/archives/january-1945.pdf
Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Investigator, 1936–1965, FBI HQ 94-3-2. Internet Archive. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://archive.org/stream/FBIPubTheInvestigator19361965HQ9432/FBI%20pub-The%20Investigator%201936-1965-HQ-94-3-2_djvu.txt
“Letter from Kinnie Wagner.” Daily Progress [Charlottesville, VA], June 4, 1926. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=DPAL19260604-01.2.59
“Two-Gun Wagner Is Hunting Game.” Lebanon News [Lebanon, VA], December 14, 1945. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=LN19451214.1.1
“Kinnie Wagner.” Smyth County News [Marion, VA], August 26, 1926. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=SCN19260826.1.8
Wagner, Kinnie. “The Story of My Life by Kinnie Wagner.” Vagabond Gazette, June 27, 1931. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TVBG19310627.1.1
Wagner, Kinnie. “The Story of My Life by Kinnie Wagner.” Vagabond Gazette, August 1, 1931. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TVBG19310801.1.4
Wagner, Kinnie. “The Story of My Life by Kinnie Wagner.” Vagabond Gazette, September 1, 1931. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TVBG19310901.1.5
FamilySearch. “William Kenneth Garland Wagner, 1903–1958.” FamilySearch Ancestors. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/9SDF-H4W/william-kenneth-garland-wagner-1903-1958
Find a Grave. “William Kenneth ‘Kinnie’ Wagner.” Memorial no. 8167458. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8167458/william_kenneth-wagner
Discography of American Historical Recordings. “OKeh Matrix 74001. Kinnie Wagner / Vernon Dalhart.” University of California, Santa Barbara Library. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/2000206165/74001-Kinnie_Wagner
Discography of American Historical Recordings. “OKeh Matrix 80102. Kinnie Wagner’s Surrender / Vernon Dalhart.” University of California, Santa Barbara Library. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/refer/2000206723
Smithsonian National Museum of American History. “Kinnie Wagner’s Surrender; Billy Richardson’s Last Ride.” Accessed June 23, 2026. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1293265
Lofgren, Lyle. “Kenny Wagner’s Surrender.” Remembering the Old Songs. Originally published in Inside Bluegrass, May 2006. https://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/RmOlSngs/RTOS-KennyWagner.html
Sweterlitsch, Richard C. “Kinnie Wagner: A Popular Legendary Hero and His ‘Constituency.’” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1976. Listed in “Recent Dissertations.” Journal of American History 64, no. 2 (1977): 593. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1901934
Gentry, Claude. The Guns of Kinnie Wagner: The True and Authentic Account of Mississippi’s Controversial Marksman. Magnolia, MS: Claude Gentry, 1969. https://www.amazon.com/Authentic-Account-Mississippis-Controversial-Marksman/dp/B0016ZO1Q2
Dykes, Pete. The Kinnie Wagner Story. Kingsport, TN: Pete Dykes, 2007. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kinnie_Wagner_Story.html?id=NOir_v0QGRIC
Wagner, Rick. “Kinnie Wagner Resources.” Kingsport Times News, November 7, 2021. https://timesnews.net/news/82094/kinnie-wagner-resources/
Wagner, Rick. “Kinnie Wagner Becomes an Old Hand at Breakouts.” Kingsport Times News, November 7, 2021. https://timesnews.net/news/82823/watch-now-kinnie-wagner-becomes-an-old-hand-at-breakouts/
Wagner, Rick. “Kinnie Wagner’s Life Included Many Women.” Johnson City Press, November 6, 2021. https://johnsoncitypress.com/news/82266/kinnie-wagners-life-included-many-women/
Southern Mysteries. “Episode 155: Appalachian Outlaw Kinnie Wagner.” December 2, 2024. https://southernmysteries.com/2024/12/02/kinnie-wagner/
Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press, 1997. https://archive.org/details/worsethanslavery0000oshi
Murderpedia. “William Kenneth Wagner.” Accessed June 23, 2026. https://murderpedia.org/male.W/w/wagner-william-kenneth.htm
Scott County Historical Society. “Kinnie Wagner.” RootsWeb. Accessed June 23, 2026. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vaschs2/kinnie_wagner1.htm
Author Note: This article treats Kinnie Wagner as both a documented fugitive and a legend-shaped Appalachian figure, not as a hero to be celebrated. Because his life appears in court records, FBI material, newspapers, songs, and local memory, some claims should be read carefully against the strongest surviving sources.