Unsolved Murder of Irby Hurt
Written by Justin Lamb
One of Marshall County’s most intriguing mysteries is the tragic murder of Irby J. Hurt which occurred in the late summer of 1930. An ideal citizen of the county, Hurt’s murder shocked the entire county, and nearly nine decades later, the case has yet to be solved.
On the morning of August 7, 1930, Mr. Irby Hurt began the day as usual when he made the walk to his janitorial job at the Bank of Hardin. When Hurt arrived, he picked up his broom and began to sweep the floors like he had done so many times when two men came from behind the counter and held Hurt at gun point. The unknown men demanded that Hurt open the safe, but to their frustration, Hurt did not have the combination. Minutes later, Hurt was forced to leave the bank with the robbers. Hurt was last seen alive around 6:45am.
Around 8am, bank cashier D.E. Booker noticed the bank door was wide open as he arrived at work. When he walked into the bank, Booker noticed Hurt was nowhere around and a bank customer claimed they saw Hurt leave the bank with two strangers and walk south behind a row of houses into the Clark’s River Bottoms. Booker wasn’t alarmed because he presumed Hurt, who was an avid fisherman, had finished his job early and went fishing. Hours passed and Hurt didn’t return.
When he did not arrive home that evening, Hurt’s wife contacted the Marshall County Sheriff’s office and Sheriff Louis Lilly organized a search. When no sign of Hurt was found, two detectives were brought in from Louisville who began using bloodhounds to search for his whereabouts. The hounds followed a trail to the county line to Dexter where they began to run around in circles. According to the Paducah Sun-Democrat, detectives assumed that Hurt got into a car where the hounds lost their trail.
Above: Bank of Hardin
Sheriff Lilly and the detectives continued to search the area over the next few weeks, but to no avail. “It was like Hurt just disappeared into thin air,” Sheriff Lilly was quoted as saying in the Tribune-Democrat. Then in early October, a badly decomposed body was found in the swampy bottoms of Dexter, about one mile south of Hardin. Officials, using dental records, identified the body as that of Irby Hurt who had disappeared almost two months earlier. There was a bullet hole present in his skull just behind the left ear. Officials believed that Hurt was the victim of two potential bank robbers who led him to the bottoms, made him kneel on the ground and shot him in the back of the head.
Several people in the town were questioned and terror filled the already shaken community of Hardin. Some men began carrying a weapon for protection. Women refused to go out at night alone and children were told not to wander far from home. Blinds were pulled early and doors were even locked in the once peaceful community. Officials and citizens tried everything to break the case and bring those responsible to justice. However, no one could identify the two men seen with Irby Hurt on the morning of August 7 and the case quickly went cold. The Bank of Hardin eventually closed in 1934, but many amateur detectives in the city of Hardin continued to search the area to find any possible clue that might help solve this baffling case.
Last known photograph of Irby Hurt (left) at his home in Hardin.
In July of 1948, the case made its way back to the front pages of area newspapers when. Albert Lee, a local merchant in Hardin, brought forth a gun to then Marshall County sheriff Walker Myers. Lee told the sheriff he was walking along the Dexter bottoms when he discovered a rusted pistol approximately fifteen feet from where Hurt’s body had been found sixteen years earlier. Sheriff Myers was shocked with the discovery and he reopened the Hurt case asking for any information about the gun. He opened the chamber and found that the gun had five unfired bullets and one used cartridge in it. Sheriff Myers was certain it was the gun that killed Hurt. The serial number on the gun had been filed away, but Sheriff Myers discovered a number on a tiny spot beneath the barrel. The number 40391 was sent to the Shapleigh Hardware Company in St. Louis, Missouri to be traced and Sheriff Myers found out that the gun had been sold by the Simmons Hardware Company in 1912. The name of the original owner was traced back to a resident in Puryear, Tennessee. With the new found information, Sheriff Myers made a trip to Puryear and discovered that the original owner of the pistol had moved to Hardin in 1912, but passed away in 1916—– fourteen years before the murder of Irby Hurt. Once back in Marshall County, Sheriff Myers began questioning the citizens of Hardin about the identifying the owner of the gun, but no one had ever seen the gun before. With no other leads, the case was once again stalled.
For decades to come, residents of Hardin often speculated as to why killed Irby Hurt on that early August day in 1930. To this day, still no one knows who killed Irby Hurt.