And He Shall Devour

In Cold Blood set in the Jim Crow Delta. The killer inspired Hannibal Lecter.

A small town in the Mississippi Delta, 1934.
A tall stranger stands under an oak tree, watching a yellow house on a quiet street. Inside, a young couple - Aurelius and Louella Turner - are living the quiet life of a small Delta town. She is five months pregnant. He works the cotton compress six days a week. They kiss their son goodnight on a Saturday evening. By Sunday morning, they are dead.

Alonzo Robinson murdered the Turners with an axe, committed acts so terrible the newspapers couldn't print them, and set in motion a crisis that brought six hundred National Guardsmen to town with machine guns and tear gas to protect order. He was tried in a single day, convicted in five minutes, and hanged in the jail yard while the town held its breath.

The town did what small towns do with their worst stories. It buried this one.

Ninety years later, the silence is almost complete. But the historical record survives - fractured, contradictory, scattered across crumbling newspapers and courthouse files and the fading memories of people who half-remember what they were told never to talk about.

And He Shall Devour reconstructs the Robinson case from the inside, alternating between the voices of the people who lived it - the sheriff who held the town together, the housekeeper who found the bodies, the killer who wrote love letters to women he'd never met - and the author's own investigation into a story his neighbors didn't want told.

This is a telling of the true crime case that haunted the town where Thomas Harris created Hannibal Lecter.

This is what the Delta buried. This is what the ground gave back.