Lesa Shaul is a professor of English at the University of West Alabama, but she grew up on Sand Mountain and this lively true crime study, thoroughly researched in public records and interviews, is untainted by the dust of academe or of any variety of literary theory.
Just before midnight, May 17, 1951, four lawmen drove up to the home of Aubrey Kilpatrick outside Boaz, to serve a warrant for his arrest. He had been in a fight earlier that day and his combatant had sworn out the warrant. The trip was essentially unnecessary. Kilpatrick had agreed to drive to the jail in the morning and be served, and he would have done it. As fractious and difficult as he was, Kilpatrick was a man of his word. Nevertheless, Zeke Boyles, an over-eager sheriff, gathered up three other officers and drove to Kilpatrick’s just before midnight.
What happened next was violent and difficult to sort out. Kilpatrick was shot dead. Three of the law enforcement officers were also killed, and Kilpatrick’s 16-year-old son James arrested for their murders. There was no doubt he had shot them, but why? And who shot Aubrey? A good deal of this book is an investigation into what actually happened in that front yard. Newspapers of course loved this story. It was sometimes described as an ambush by the Kilpatricks, sometimes as the result of a feud, Hatfield and McCoy style.
On the one hand there was that legal warrant. On the other hand, Kilpatrick’s wife, Elizabeth, and eight children were in the house and he and his son, in popular opinion, were entitled to defend their home against invaders in the middle of the night, to stand their ground. Shaul does a fine job, first, of creating sketches of several of the main characters, but especially Aubrey Kilpatrick: a rough and violent man, a snappy dresser, horse trainer, the owner of 200 acres with several tenant farmers, handy with a gun and a popular bootlegger.
Shaul explains. Alcohol, in 1951, was still illegal in parts of Alabama, especially on Sand Mountain. Kilpatrick, an enterprising fellow, would drive to moonshiners in Tennessee, load up his car with gallon jugs, bring it home, and pour it into sterile pint bottles prepared by his wife, which his son James would deliver to neighbors, a moonshine “DoorDash.” Shaul does a good job of explaining the unusual culture of that rather remote spot. Life there was church and family, the land, hard work, and a resistance to authority, especially distant authority like the U.S. government, but also the law generally.
Shaul follows, in detail, the numerous complicated and dramatic trials of James—who shot which gun when—and his innocent penpal romance with Ann Scott, also a teenager, while still behind bars. Her faith and affection gave him the strength to survive Draper Prison, and they lived a long and happy life together.
