Farmer Shoots Chicken Thief
April 12, 1935
Written by Justin Lamb
During the years of the Great Depression, chicken thievery was a rampant problem in Marshall County. It was so bad that Sheriff Burnett Holland ran and won a campaign for sheriff on a platform, among other things, to stop the chicken thievery in the county. However, there were times when victimized farmers would take the law into their own hands and stop the thieves themselves.
At 4am on Tuesday, April 9, 1935, Henry McNatt heard a disturbance outside of his home. McNatt quickly sprang from his bed, pulled on his boots, and made his way to his chicken house. As he approached, McNatt slowly leaned opened the door where he felt the intruder on the other side. Stunned, the intruder whose shirt was stuffed full of chickens, tried to make his way out of the chicken house to make his escape. McNatt held the door shut to keep the intruder from escaping, but suddenly the intruder pushed the door open in a fury which knocked McNatt down to the ground.
As the thief took off running with three large sacks full of live chickens, McNatt pulled his revolver out of his coat and fired one shot hitting the thief. The intruder fell to the ground screaming, “Oh you have killed me!” McNatt ran back to his house to get a lantern and returned to the chicken house to see how badly wounded the thief was. Sheriff Holland was soon notified of the incident. Mistakenly Sheriff Holland believed the chicken thief had been killed by the gunshot wound so he sent county coroner Fred Filbeck to pick up the body. When Filbeck arrived at the McNatt farm, he learned the thief was still alive and commented to McNatt, “I reckon this is the first time the coroner has been sent to fetch a live body.” Filbeck took the wounded man to the public health office at the courthouse and Dr. Sam Henson treated the thief’s gunshot wounds.
The following morning, Fred Filbeck, County Judge Homer Rayburn, and County Treasurer William Kuykendall transported the prisoner to Riverside Hospital in Paducah to received further treatment. On their way, they ran into Sheriff Holland near the Palma Methodist Church where he had discovered an abandoned Chevrolet. It was learned that the car belonged to the intruder and that he had two accomplices. Three large sacks of chickens stolen from other farms throughout the county were also found abandoned along Highway 68.
The two additional accomplices were not found and the wounded thief was convicted for chicken thievery and placed in Marshall County jail. By the end of the Great Depression in the 1940s, the chicken thievery rate in the county began to subside much to the satisfaction of area farmers.