William Rawlings Livres

During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, the city of Columbus, Georgia, was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community's finer neighborhoods. Despite intensive efforts on the part of police the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed to elude capture. After the last murder in April 1978, the case went cold. In the spring of 1984, a series of fortuitous events connected to an unrelated murder and a stolen pistol led to the capture of Carlton Gary, who had recently escaped from a South Carolina prison. Following a dramatic trial in 1986, Gary was convicted of three of the seven Columbus murders and sentenced to death, a penalty that would not be carried out until 2018. This convoluted tale of crime and punishment is punctuated by dramatic twists and turns including issues of race, alleged conspiracy and misconduct on the part of the police and the judiciary, and errors in DNA analysis.

On August 31, 1972, Hellen Hanks, a pretty thirty-four-year-old mother of three disappeared from her place of employment at Wilcox Advertising in Valdosta, Georgia. After a brief investigation by local and state authorities, the case went cold. In the fall of 1980, a farmer clearing a field south of town discovered a buried object, a box containing the dismembered remains of the missing woman. After several months of investigation, police arrested Foxy Wilcox, his son Keller Wilcox, and two long-term African American employees of Wilcox Advertising. Keller was charged with Hanks's murder, and the others with concealing a death. The Wilcoxes were members of a prominent and wealthy Valdosta family. The true story of this horrific murder has all the elements of a work of suspense fiction: money, power, sex, race, and the haves vs. the have-nots. Multiple lives were forever changed. The outcome would have been totally different if the box had been buried only six inches deeper.

Fifty years after the end of the Civil War, William Joseph Simmons, a failed Methodist minister, formed a fraternal order that he called The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Organized primarily a money-making scheme, it shared little but its name with the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction Era. With its avowed creed of "One Hundred Percent Americanism," support of Protestant Christian values, white supremacy, and the rejection of all things foreign, this new Klan became, for a brief period of time in the mid-1920s, one of America s most powerful social and political organizations. Shamelessly adopting the symbols of the hooded robe and burning cross from the movie, The Birth of a Nation, and exploiting the sense that America was headed in the wrong direction, the order spread rapidly to every state in the nation. While often using intimidation and violence against its foes, the Klan was responsible for the election of supportive politicians at all levels of government. Following a disastrous attempt to influence the presidential election of 1924, and with increasing public awareness of the Klan's corrupt and violent nature, the order faltered, becoming a mere wisp of its former self by 1930. This original and meticulously researched history of America's second Ku Klux Klan presents many new and fascinating insights into this unique and important episode in American History.