James P. Gibson, Deputy Sheriff

Nowata County Sheriff's Office

Shortly after noon on Friday, September 29, 1916, two prisoners, Mark Foreman and Sonny Powell, attacked Sheriff James Mayes in the Nowata County jail in an attempt to escape. As Deputy Gibson ran to assist the sheriff, Foreman got control of the sheriff’s gun and shot Gibson fatally. Taking the dead deputy’s gun the pair escaped. The pair was arrested less than three hours later. At 8:30 P.M. that night a large mob of citizens broke the pair out of jail and lynched them. Powell was hanged from a tree across the street from the county court house and Foreman was hanged from a nearby light post.

Hugh A. Owen, Deputy Sheriff 

Nowata County Sheriffs Office 

On the afternoon of Wednesday, October 12, 1938, Sheriff Hugh Owen, Deputy Bill Lupfer and Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Roy Kannaday were searching for two men who had committed an armed robbery near Nowata the previous night. After identifying two suspects, they traced the men to a house ten miles east of Nowata. When Sheriff Owen ordered the men to come outside and surrender, they refused.  He then forced the door open and was shot in the chest with a shotgun as he entered the house. Sheriff Owen died on the way to the hospital and the suspects escaped.

 Alvie Chester Wright, 25, was arrested near Poplar Bluff by Missouri Highway Patrol troopers on October 15 and Leslie R. “Whitey” Cameron, 24, was captured near the Arkansas border four days later. Both suspects were taken to the State Prison in McAlester to prevent a lynching and they were tried in Bartlesville the following January. Both men alleged that they were drunk at the time of the shooting and Wright, the one suspected of having fired the fatal shot, also said he was under the influence of morphine. Both men were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.