Unsolved: Murder in the Solid South - Paperback

by M. B. Spears (Author)

UNSOLVED: A Murder in the Solid South is set in the early and mid-1950s, near the end of an era fastened upon the people of the Old Confederacy by a long-ago war and military occupation. Power was County by County, and what County you lived in could shape your life ... or your death. One night there came into our innocence a killing cowardly and brutal, a murder for hire.Clues were obliterated. Witnesses were excused, maligned, or overlooked. Tossed between astonishment, hope and cynicism, we were accused of "vicious rumors" --but were our rumors as vicious as the truth?

Author Biography

The most notorious unsolved murder in our state's fraught history went down in Darlington County in the 4th Judicial District of South Carolina in the dark of April 3, 1952. This book is a protest and an anniversary marker, written 63 years after the killing night. The recollections of many who experienced the crime and its investigation close up and variously have since been woven into UNSOLVED. These, along with one last startling revelation, are forthwith included in this 2018 Final Edition of UNSOLVED: A Murder in the Solid South. What difference, at this point, does an political murder from the past make? More than you might think. Old sins cast long shadows; no one can forget what will not be forgotten. M B Spears and her contemporaries had their lives changed by this crime and what followed it. As hope for closure evaporated, "normal" life shifted, showing them once and for all that they couldn't trust the manmade justice system as it existed in the Solid South. Among ordinary thinking people in the victim's church-going, Bible-believing, agricultural community, acceptance of entrenched local leaders crumbled into dust and was replaced by distrust of those who would defend the indefensible. Seeing the Pee Dee region from across the sea for 18 years clarified for M B Spears how and why Solid South crime(s) went unsolved. Some warn it's best to let sleeping ghosts lie. Others develop over time a need to liberate those ghosts by tearing apart the thickened covering of lies. Their experiences and recollections have built UNSOLVED. In the course of 3 years since first publication, probably for the first time in the history of publishing, a book has evolved into a detective.