NEW RELEASE!
As an author always in search of good stories to tell, especially those based on facts and lost to history, I was immediately drawn to two unusual stories that were headline-screamers when they made news more than one hundred years ago.
Both murders occurred within a few miles of each other in quiet farming communities in Catawba County, North Carolina. The details of the crimes were as different as night and day and the outcomes were entirely different, but they shared a common theme: love, lust, and jealousy.
White Beauty, Black Beast
“Aunt Sarah” Eller Wycoff served most of her life in North Carolina’s state prison as an accessory to cold-blooded murder. She refused pardons from five governors that would have set her free and allowed her to go home. Three years before she died at age 78, the death-bed confession of someone she knew decades earlier was her final ticket to freedom, but again she refused a pardon and decided to stay behind bars.
State prison was her home.
A model prisoner from the moment the steel doors closed behind the beautiful young woman in 1879, she spent the last 20 years of her life confined to her tiny cot and a wheelchair, keeping a lifelong promise to keep her lips sealed about the illicit affair she had with her lover, a formerly enslaved black man who was hanged for the conspiratorial murder of her husband.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Kohler Holdsclaw, a love-stuck soldier just home from World War I, was making plans to build a new life with his sweetheart. Totally out of the blue one day, she sent him a cold letter stating that she was calling off their wedding because she had been “ruined” by a married, respected, older man they both knew.
An enraged Holdsclaw took matters into his own hands and ended up as a wanted man. He spent two decades on the run.
This two short-story collection was an Amazon new release Best-Seller!
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