Janie Sharp had been murdered while walking home along a wooded country lane on a hot July afternoon in 1910 near the backwoods community of Rural Hill, Mississippi. Suspicions fell immediately upon a young man, Swinton Permenter, not yet eighteen himself. A two-year ordeal ensued that included a trial and conviction, a Supreme Court ruling that overturned the conviction, suspicions cast upon others, the murders of two men and a second trial that was a sensation across Mississippi and the South.