Five years before Lizzie Borden and her axe became famous, nine members of the Woolfolk family were killed with an axe at their home near Macon in Georgia’s first mass murder. Richard Woolfolk, his wife Mattie, their six children, and a visiting relative, were all slaughtered as they slept. Suspicion immediately fell on Tom Woolfolk, […]
In July 1979, two 14-year-old boys went missing. When police found the bodies of Edward Hope Smith and Alfred Evans, it began a two-year nightmare that held Atlanta in the grip of fear. A serial killer was on the loose, and in the end at least 28 children, teenagers, and adults were victims in what […]
Truman Capote made the Clutter family murders in Kansas famous in his book In Cold Blood. Georgia’s counterpart was the Alday family murders, one of the most notorious cases in Georgia history. Carl Isaacs and two other men escaped from a Maryland prison in May 1973 and picked up Carl’s 15-year-old brother Billy. They killed […]
In Savannah it’s “the book.” John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was published in January 1994. The non-fiction account of antiques dealer Jim Williams’ trial for murdering Danny Hansford became a major bestseller. Waves of welcome tourists flooded Savannah, searching for the places and characters Berendt made famous: the Mercer House […]
“Now he belongs to the ages.” That was said of Abraham Lincoln. It applies no less to Martin Luther King Jr. King was planning a “Poor People’s March” on Washington in 1968 when he went to Memphis to help striking black sanitation workers. The civil rights leader had broadened his approach, speaking out against poverty, […]