Murder In A Rear View Mirror
I took 2017 off and did not publish any books of my own, but
2018 is going to see multiple titles from my Laurel Hill Publishing company.
Already, Avis Turner’s fourth book Alzheimer’s
Up Close is out about her experiences as a care giver for her late husband
Elbert. This is a subject that strikes close to home for me as my mother
suffers with dementia. I brought out Bonnie Turner’s The Eyes of Freya, the first of three in a Science Fiction/Fantasy
genre. I worked with Doug Stegall and the Rangeley Ruritan Club to do a
history/photo book about the Henry County community of Rangeley, Virginia,
which has raised thousands of dollars already for the club.
In 2018, I will be bringing out books ranging from the Civil
War, the Papers of J. E. B. Stuart, which covers 1833 until 1854 to World War
Two with the letters from Philmore Minter, who served in Company H, 116th
Regiment, 29th Division, who fought on D-Day and lived to tell about it. It is
the third book I have worked on with Philmore’s son, David Minter.
This bring us to my new book Murder In A Rear View Mirror: Stories of True Crime, which will be available
Memorial Day weekend at the Hillsville Flea Market. There are two flea markets,
the big one everyone knows about during Labor Day weekend and the smaller one
on Memorial Day weekend. I will be donating some of the proceeds from this book
to the efforts to restore the Sidna Allen house, which is owned by the Carroll
County Historical Society.
This is my first true crime book and it covers stories of
true crime that have interested me over the years. The title has two meanings.
First, an actual murder seen by one of Laurel Hill Publishing’s authors,
Jennifer Gregory, who saw a murder in the rear view mirror in Collinsville,
Virginia. The second meaning is to look back, in a rear view mirror, at multiple
cases of murder that are well known and some that are not.
The book begins with Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 and ends
with the reaction to it over the last decade. Each chapter in the book tells the
story of a specific crime from the 1912 Hillsville Shootout to the summer went
I around with Judge Woody Lookabill selling his book on the Gina Hall murder by
Steve Epperly.
Other prominent crimes with a chapter dedicated to them
include the 1929 Charlie Lawson murder of his family in Stokes County, North
Carolina, and the killing by Dennis Stockton of Kenneth Arnder in Kibler Valley,
Patrick County, Virginia. Two stories from Martinsville include the Shootout on
Fayette Street from the late nineteenth century and the Martinsville Seven from
1949.
Mount Airy is the subject of multiple chapters including two
bombings involving lover’s triangle, one of Franklin Street and another through
the mail by a dentist. Another story involves the mistaken murder at what today
is the Spencer’s building, but was Mount Airy Knitting when it occurred.
Two murders from my hometown of Ararat, Virginia, include
the murder of J. E. B. Stuart’s great-grandfather, William Letcher, during the
American Revolution in 1780 and the murder of a girl named Sadie, which became
famous for the lynching of her supposed killer by a vigilante mob in the late 1800s. Two cases from Patrick County include the “Tragedy at
Fayerdale, ” which happened at present day Fairy Stone State Park and “Ex Parte
Virginia,” which involved the children of Kittie of the Reynolds Homestead.
At 400 pages, the book will sell for twenty dollars and will
be available online soon and is available for pre-order now. I will be at the
VFW Lot during the Hillsville Virginia Memorial Day Flea Market Friday through
Sunday along the gate the front beside my Scentsy gals in their big purple
tent.
All these books are available at my website www.freestateofpatrick.com, which
has a link to pre-order the autographed books and all the other books I have
written.
