HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL: Local inmate shot to death in 1960 'escape attempt'

Apr. 25—EDITOR'S NOTE — This is the first story in a two-part High Point Confidential series.

HIGH POINT

The oppressive heat of summer will do strange things to a man. So, too, will the allure of freedom to a man who has none.

Still, during the summer of 1960, when Walter Kincaid's family learned the 22-year-old convict from High Point had tried to escape from an inmate road crew — and had been gunned down by a prison guard as he fled — they couldn't believe it.

Why would he run? Granted, Kincaid was no choirboy — he'd been in and out of trouble, and in and out of prison, since he was 17 — but he'd never tried to escape. It seemed too risky. Just bide your time and keep your nose clean, he told himself, and you'll be out soon enough.

And he would've been. Only a few days earlier, Kincaid — who was serving 18 months at Orange County Prison Camp in Hillsborough for receiving stolen goods — had written a letter to his mother back in High Point, telling her he'd been a model inmate and should be released from the medium-security prison in early December.

"Don't worry," Kincaid wrote, "I will finish my time."

He concluded by asking his mother to bring him some of her famous banana pudding on her next visit to the prison.

Confidentially, those don't exactly sound like the words of someone planning an escape.

Nonetheless, The High Point Enterprise and other newspapers reported that during the late-morning hours of July 27, 1960, Kincaid and a crew of fellow inmates were walking along a stretch of rural N.C. 86 in Hillsborough when Kincaid apparently tried to escape. Prison guard James A. Caulder Jr. stopped the fleeing inmate in his tracks with a shotgun blast to the back of the head.

According to newspaper accounts, Caulder told prison authorities he shouted repeatedly for Kincaid to halt, but the inmate ignored him. When Kincaid reached the top of a road embankment, Caulder continued, he shot him. An ambulance was summoned immediately, but Kincaid was already dead by the time it got there.

State prisons director George Randall confirmed Caulder's version of what had happened. Likewise, when the Orange County coroner empaneled a jury, the jury determined Kincaid had been shot and killed while trying to escape, thereby absolving the guard of any blame in the death.

Still, Kincaid's family tried to make sense of the tragedy. More than 60 years later, they're still trying to make sense of it.

"I was only 7 when it happened, but I remember it," says Bobby Spillers, Kincaid's nephew, who lives in Jamestown.

"The whole family was just devastated. I remember going with my mom and dad out to the road where it happened. They had been told that Walter wasn't actually running — he was just going to pick a plum — so they were trying to figure out how it could've happened. And that's a good question: If he was running, why would he run to a plum tree?"

That December, Kincaid's brother Jack — also of High Point — told The Enterprise he had conducted his own investigation after becoming frustrated that the prison guard hadn't been charged. During Jack's investigation, he claimed to have contacted a farmer who had passed by the scene of the killing shortly after it happened.

"The farmer, according to the brother, said he saw several plums lying near the dead youth's hands," The Enterprise reported, confirming the story that Kincaid was merely picking plums when he was killed.

Family members repeatedly protested that Walter Kincaid had "died for a plum," a phrase The Enterprise used to headline a story about the case.

Their message didn't seem to be getting through, however. On two occasions — in December 1960 and again in March 1961 — the Orange County grand jury refused to indict the prison guard. The second time, the jurors issued a statement explaining they were "unanimous in their conviction that the prisoner, Walter Kincaid, was breaking prison regulations and that the guard, James A. Caulder Jr., fired in the line of duty."

That seemed pretty conclusive, except for one little problem. According to The Enterprise, both times when the grand jury convened, they failed to call some of the most crucial witnesses — the other inmates.

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579

EDITOR'S NOTE: Part two of "Con on the Run" will be published in Tuesday's High Point Enterprise.