Robert Henry Crockett, a 35-year-old White/Caucasian man, was serving as a special agent with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Police Department when a routine disturbance aboard an excursion train turned deadly on May 3, 1905. Crockett was aboard a Guyandotte Valley Railroad excursion train traveling near Big Ugly, West Virginia, when trouble developed around an intoxicated passenger. A Lincoln County constable had taken the passenger into custody after the suspect allegedly attempted to shoot a newsboy aboard the train. With a justice of the peace also among those traveling on the train, authorities did not simply wait to reach a courthouse; proceedings against the prisoner were begun inside the railroad car while the train was still underway.
The improvised proceeding quickly became dangerous. While the justice of the peace was dealing with the case against him, the prisoner produced a knife.
Crockett intervened and succeeded in taking the weapon away from him, apparently bringing the immediate confrontation under control. That calm lasted only moments. Someone suddenly extinguished the lights in the railroad car, plunging the compartment into darkness. In the confusion, the suspect obtained or produced a handgun and began firing. Crockett was struck by the gunfire and killed. The sequence indicates that Crockett's fatal encounter grew directly out of his intervention in the earlier disturbance and his effort to disarm a prisoner who was already behaving violently.
The darkness also gave the gunman an opportunity to escape. After shooting Crockett, the suspect jumped from the moving or traveling train car and disappeared into the mountainous country surrounding the railroad near Big Ugly. The surviving online law-enforcement account classifies the suspect simply as having escaped and does not provide his name. This distinction is important when considering the arrest history of the case: the suspect had been arrested before Crockett was killed, but that custody was connected to the alleged attempt to shoot the newsboy. After Crockett's killing, the suspect fled before he could be held on a homicide charge. The available online accounts located for the incident do not identify a later apprehension, a named homicide suspect, a formal murder charge, an indictment, a trial, a conviction, or a sentence arising from Crockett's death. Accordingly, there is no reliable basis in the available online record to claim that his killer was ever brought to justice.
Crockett's death was recorded as a line-of-duty death caused by gunfire, with May 3, 1905, listed both as the date of the incident and the end of his watch. What had begun as the handling of a disruptive passenger on an excursion train escalated into an extraordinary scene in which an arrest, an attempted onboard judicial proceeding, a knife attack, a disarming, the extinguishing of the car's lights, and a fatal shooting unfolded in rapid succession. Crockett left behind his parents and two siblings. The enduring account of the case is therefore one of a railroad police special agent who stepped into an already volatile confrontation, successfully disarmed the prisoner once, and was then killed when the darkness allowed the prisoner to turn the train car into a deadly escape route before vanishing into the West Virginia mountains.
