Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/Public Domain
On November 17, 1948, police were called to the home of society matron Idella Thompson on tony Deer Creek Drive in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. The house was quiet, but as they made their way further inside, they discovered a grim scene.
Idella was lying dead in her bathroom, which was “as bloody as could be,” Leland police chief Frank P. Aldridge said. Next to her lay a pair of pruning shears, the kind home gardeners everywhere use to cut roses and manicure their flower beds. It was the obvious weapon responsible for over 150 small, bloody cuts that covered Idella’s body.
What happened next shook the community, and has echoed through the generations. When Beverly Lowry began to report on the murder that colored her childhood in Greenville, MS, for her latest book Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta, she found a town still hesitant to speak of what happened even though over seventy years had passed. But perhaps even more surprising than the murder is what the town did about it.