Sheriff Jackson Stanland

Jackson Stanland

Sheriff Jackson Stanland was shot and killed at Little Shallotte when he and his posse attempted to arrest a man on a warrant for breaking into a store and being a deserter from Fort Caswell.

Members of his posse arrested the suspect and incarcerated him in the jail at Southport. On January 29th, 1909, the man overpowered the guard and escaped the Southport Jail. On March 7th, 1915, he was recaptured in Brunswick County when he tried to sneak back home to see his wife and child.

Two weeks after the man's capture, a doctor who attended to the wounds of Deputy Constable George Kirk in Braggs, Oklahoma, 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 had escaped from the Southport Jail on January 29th, 1909, just days after he Sheriff Stanland.

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 from an Oklahoma prison. The doctor had also treated the man's wounds following his shootout with Deputy Constable Kirk.

The doctor 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.

Sheriff Stanland was survived by his wife and seven children.