Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South

In August 1932, the city of Natchez, MS, was roiled by the brutal murder of Jennie Merrill, the scion of a former Confederate family whose feud with her neighbors was legendary. Richard Dana and Olivia Dockery, the neighbors, were also former Confederate aristocracy but had been reduced to penury and living in a mansion with their livestock. They were immediately arrested, but suspicion soon fell on George Pearls, an African American resident recently returned to Natchez, and Emily Burns, his sweetheart. One dead suspect (Pearls), and one coerced confession (Burns) later, the charges against the "Goat Castle" residents were dropped. Cox (history, Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte; Dreaming of Dixie) uses public records and primary sources to dig beneath the romanticized story of a blood feud between genteel, down-at-the-heels Southern aristocracy to the ugly politics of the Jim Crow South that saw an undoubtedly innocent woman get a life sentence as an accessory to murder. Moreover, Dana and Dockery spent years profiting off their notoriety while Burns, whose sentence was later suspended, spent eight years in jail after confessing under threat of a horsewhipping.