Crooked snake : the life and crimes of Albert Lepard / Lovejoy Boteler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boteler, Lovejoy, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lepard, Albert, 1934-1974.

Lepard, Albert.

Murderers--Mississippi--Biography.

Murderers.

Escaped prisoners--Mississippi.

Escaped prisoners.

Mississippi.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

ix, 206 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2019]

Summary:

"In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred. Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard is the true story of Lepard, sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of seventy-four-year-old Mary Young in 1959. During the course of his sentence, Lepard escaped from prison six times in fourteen years. In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer's life using both historical records and personal interviews--over seventy in all--with ex-convicts who gravitated to and ran with Lepard, the family members who fed and sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the law officers who hunted him, and the regular folks who were victimized in his terrible wake. Throughout Crooked Snake, Boteler reveals his kidnapper's hardscrabble childhood and tracks his whereabouts before his incarceration and during his jailbreaks. Lepard's escapes take him from Florida to Michigan to Kansas, California, and Mexico. Crooked Snake captures a slice of history and a landscape that is fast disappearing. These vignettes describe Mississippi's countryside and spirit, ranging from sharecropper family gatherings in Attala County's Seneasha Valley to the twenty-thousand-acre Parchman farm and its borderlands teeming with alligator, panther, bear, and wild boar."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Jackson

Newport

Trouble

Mary Young

Turning a cup

The burning

The running

The trial

Parchman

Down in the swamp

The long escape: Part I

The long escape: Part II

Maximum security

The cotton field

Riverdale Farms

On the road

Memphis

Vitalis

Shaw's store.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Boteler, Lovejoy. Crooked snake.

ISBN:

9781496821706

149682170X

OCLC:

1048660350