Robert Murphy, 58, a White male, was serving as a deputy sheriff with the Buchanan County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia when he was shot and killed in Logan County, West Virginia, on August 17, 1905. Murphy had gone to West Virginia in connection with a prisoner who had been arrested in Buchanan County, Virginia, and extradited back to West Virginia. After delivering the prisoner to the Logan County sheriff, Murphy joined the sheriff and a third person for travel along the railroad between Logan and Holden. The three were riding a railroad velocipede, a small rail vehicle used to move along the tracks, when the return journey suddenly turned deadly.
As the group traveled along the line, an assailant concealed at an ambush point beside the railroad fired a single rifle shot toward them. The bullet struck Murphy and killed him. The shooter then fled from the railroad into the surrounding woods.
The circumstances gave authorities little reason to view the shooting as an accident: someone had deliberately taken up a hidden position beside the tracks and fired on the approaching party. What investigators would later determine, however, was that Murphy and his companions apparently were not the people the shooter had originally intended to attack.
A posse was organized to hunt for the fleeing suspect, and the search produced an arrest later that same night. One of the most unusual details of the pursuit was that the suspect’s own father led the posse, apparently without realizing that his son was the person authorities were seeking. The investigation concluded that the suspect had been involved in a quarrel with a different group earlier that evening. He allegedly positioned himself along the railroad intending to ambush those individuals when they passed. Instead, Murphy, the Logan County sheriff and their companion came along the tracks, and the waiting shooter mistook the law-enforcement party for the people with whom he had quarreled. He fired on the wrong group, with the single shot killing Murphy.
The suspect taken into custody that night was charged with Murphy’s murder. The surviving online accounts located for the case do not identify the accused by name, despite describing his capture and the extraordinary role his father played in the posse. They also do not provide a documented later disposition of the murder charge. No reliable online record located in this research establishes whether the accused was subsequently indicted, brought to trial, convicted, acquitted, had the charge dismissed, or received a particular sentence. The available record therefore ends with the arrest and murder charge, while portraying Murphy’s death as the fatal result of a planned ambush in which the attacker apparently confused the deputy’s party with the group he actually intended to confront.
