Meeting his sister and friends on the banks of Holston River, near Kingsport, Tennessee, he engaged in a shootout with five local lawmen, killing two and wounding a third.
He killed two men in barroom brawls and subsequently surrendered to a female sheriff in Arkansas.
She refused to try Wagner, because in Arkansas, murder in cold blood was a capital offense, and she fell in love with him[citation needed].
[1] His most notable escape was his last attempt and involved a clever trick that was not discovered until Wagner was outside the prison walls.
Wagner remained at large in Wahalak, Mississippi, for several years afterward under the alias "Big Jim," and was subsequently placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
In 1956, he was recaptured after a jealous rival informed law enforcement officials of his residence at the house of a female friend.
The East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia stories about Kinnie Wagner propose a far different picture of the gunslinger.
Folklorists have explained that Wagner had been cast into the stereotype of the Southern or Western outlaw: chivalrous to women, generous to the poor, a free desperado.