The man no one believed The untold story of the Georgia church murders

Journalist Sharpe's riveting debut recounts how he helped solve a decades-old double homicide. In 1985, a white man entered the vestibule of southern Georgia's Rising Daughter Baptist Church during Bible study and gunned down Black deacon Harold Swain and his wife, Thelma. The incident rocked sleepy Camden County, and both the sheriff's office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation spent years fruitlessly trying to identify the suspect or his motive. Nearly 20 years later, a new group of officers took a crack at the case and eventually arrested Dennis Perry, who'd previously been cleared of the crime, based largely on one woman's testimony. Perry spent the next 20 years in jail, until the Georgia Innocence Project asked Sharpe to report on their efforts to free him. Here, Sharpe details the web of corruption involving Camden County sheriff Bill Smith he unearthed while digging into the case. He also chronicles the days before and after the crime, paints vivid portraits of key suspects and investigators, and explains how focusing on another suspect helped overturn Perry's conviction. The result is a gripping, infuriating, and enlightening work of true crime whose real-world impact can be felt on every page. (Aug.)

Carefully reported account of a double murder in south Georgia, and of justice long delayed. In March 1985, writes investigative journalist Sharpe, a white man, whom witnesses described as having long blond or light-brown hair, came to the door of a Black church and, when it was opened, shot a deacon and the deacon's wife to death. That there were witnesses left alive suggested to investigators that it was a hit, but the witnesses' description of the killer didn't help much; as Sharpe quips, "You could've brought in entire Southern rock bands for questioning." As details emerged, race entered into the picture, though at first the detectives "didn't think racism made much sense as a motive." Complicating the case was barely disguised corruption in the local sheriff's department and pressure to put someone in jail quickly. In the end, as Sharpe chronicles, the wrong man went to prison, even though the prosecution, as that man lamented, had misplaced key artifacts of evidence and witnesses for the prosecution offered accounts full of discrepancies and contradictions. Working with the Georgia Innocence Project, Sharpe helped gather enough evidence--especially DNA evidence, not usable then--to call for a new trial, with the wrong condemned man freed and the likely killer arrested "four months shy of the forty--year anniversary of the murders." A skillfully constructed spiderweb of a true-crime, cold-case narrative. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.