The victim was sixty-eight-year-old society matron Idella Long Thompson, found crumpled in a pool of blood on her bathroom floor. The year: 1948. The place: Leland, Mississippi, a drowsy little Delta town girded by cotton fields and bisected by Highway 61. And the murder weapon: a pair of pruning shears. “They were all metal, from the tip of the blades—curved, shaped something like a hawk’s beak—to the blunt end of the handles,” writes Beverly Lowry in. “The murderer would have had to stand close to the victim, within inches, to hack into her body as repeatedly as Idella Thompson had been. At least 150 times, the coroner would report.”
