Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Written by Beverly Lowry

Narrated by Beverly Lowry

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.

In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free.
 
In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.


Cover images: (pruning shears) Tragedy-of-the-Month, 1949, Triangle Publications, Inc.; (background) Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780593590140

Reviews for Deer Creek Drive

[muddyboy · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

On the surface this is a book analyzing the murder of an elderly socialite in Mississippi with the blame falling on her seemingly caring model daughter shocking all who knew the family. The mother was stabbed over one hundred times with pruning sheers. Ruth (the daughter) who reports the murder says she interrupted a Negro man committing the deed. When there is no evidence of this she becomes the primary suspect, No one came up with any other alternatives. The author intersperses her personal story as she grows up nearby during this time - an unneeded interruption from the book's main focus.

[mm_jones · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story of a 1948 murder that shocked a Mississippi Delta community. A well-placed member of society was accused of murdering her own mother. Tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, she was released after only six years.
The author portrays the release as white privilege, a symbol of the esteem white women were given in the South. Or possibly just money. Interwoven throughout the book is the author's own less wealthy upbringing in the same location.
Unfortunately too much extraneous detail was included in the narrative making it difficult to follow the storyline. I would have appreciated a much more straightforward rendition.