Deputy Kinser was shot and killed in a shoot out during a manhunt for two men.

Two men who were wanted for the murder of a section foreman in Memphis, had escaped from Memphis police, exchanged gunfire with police in Cabool, Missouri and again with officers in Willow Springs after the officers followed the men to Slabtown north of Willow Springs. The men escaped, then made their way northward to the Marshfield area. An alarm was sent out and search was commenced involving several departments including that directed by Greene County Sheriff Alfred Owen and Webster County Sheriff Henry S. King. Sheriff Deputies Kinser and Ollie Crosswhite encountered the men in a wooded area a short distance south of the Springfield-Marshfield Road about two miles west of Marshfield. Deputy Crosswhite reported that they were ambushed as they entered where they were suddently fired upon. Deputy Crosswhite was wounded, shot in the finger and again in the leg, then fired on the two suspects, wounding one in the hip and one in the groin. Deputy Crosswhite crawled to Deputy Kinser and discovered he had been killed in the gunbattle.

One the two suspects, Henry Smith, was shot and killed by a posse on May 18th and buried in potters field in Marshfield. Deputy Crosswhite would be killed several years later in the Young Brothers Massacre. The second suspect, Worden Trotter, was later apprehended, charged and prosecuted in September 1925. The charges were dismissed by Judge Skinker not allowing the trial to go to the jury. He cited jurisdictional grounds that under the given circumstances the deputies had pursued the suspects outside of their jurisdiction.

Deputy Kinser was predeceased by his wife, Brockie, and survived by his sons, Rex and Max Kinser. Interred: Dodson Cemetery, Mentor, Missouri.