Jesse C. Walker was born in North Carolina on September 22, 1882. Walker was an army deserter who shot and killed the sheriff of Brunswick County, North Carolina in November 1908. He was then incarcerated, spending a short stint of his thirty-year prison sentence at the prison farm in Halifax County, where he joined efforts to report alleged prison abuses in 1919. Later that year, he was transferred to the main state prison in Raleigh, from which place he escaped, beginning a new life in Mississippi. He died in Harrison County, Mississippi on July 26, 1946.