George Kearns

George Kearns was a food inspector for the Chaco Chicken processing plant in Dudley, Arkansas. Kearns, who had been sent by the federal government sometime in late 1994, was unpopular in town, for one due to his status as an outsider, as well as his repeated calls to the USDA for Chaco Chicken's repeated breaches in quality ensurance. 
He had been living in the town for six months with his wife Doris, when on April 12 he and another plant worker, Paula Gray, drove to the forest on the outskirts of town under the pretense of pursuing a sexual liasion. Unbeknownst to him, Paula and the rest of Dudley were part of a life-prolonging cannibalistic cult and after luring him into the woods with a game of hide and seek, Kearns was surrounded by several torch-wielding cultists and killed by a tribal mask-wearing executioner. His body consumed during a ritualistic bonfire and his skeletal remains dumped in a nearby river. Ten weeks after his disappearance, the FBI sends out Special Agents Mulder and Scully to investigate, uncovering the town's dark secret in the process. 
As is revealed through the episode, the murder George Kearns proved to be the undoing for a large number of the cult members, as Kearns was suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, with his flesh inadvertantly leading to a small-scale outbreak and infecting dozens of Dudley citizens with the fatal illness. ( "Our Town")
== Trivia ==
* Although seen only briefly, Kearns' personnel file can be seen in the beginning, listing his height at 5'10" ft,, his birthplace as Little Rock, Arkansas, and, bizarrely, his nickname, "Pookie".
Category:The X-Files characters
Category:Crime victims
Category:Deceased characters