The Winston County Library will host a book signing for author Lovejoy Boteler from 11:30 a.m. til 1 p.m., Friday, July 19 in the library meeting room.
The friends of the library will provide a brown bag lunch for the first 20 people.
Boteler is the author of "Crooked Snake, The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard."
In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.
“Crooked Snake” is an unusual study, part biography and part memoir. Albert Lepard was born in 1934 and shot dead in early 1974, fifteen years after being sent to Parchman, an institution from which he escaped six times. Lovejoy Boteler acknowledges his peculiarly personal connection to his subject:
“I don’t know how many people were kidnapped in Mississippi in 1968” he observes, “but I was one of them. I was taken from my family farm that June by two escaped convicts from Parchman Penitentiary – John Parker, convicted of armed robbery, and Albert Lepard, sentenced to life for murder.”
Albert Lepard was reared on the hardscrabble side of Attala County, on Seneasha Creek. (Seneasha descends from the Choctaw word meaning “crooked snake.”) He was sentenced to life in prison in 1959. He and a cousin pistol-whipped and robbed an elderly lady, his mother’s aunt, then burned down her house around her. Lepard spent the rest of his short, hot-headed life at Parchman – whenever he was not on outside it, on the run.
In early 1961, after returning from a Christmas furlough, Lepard made his first escape, a headlong dash down the freezing Sunflower River. He reached his brother-in-law’s farm at Zumbro Plantation. His relatives took him in, then called prison officials. They captured Lepard asleep in a hay barn.
In late 1963, during his most spectacular escape, Lepard and a fellow inmate drove around the country for four months: to Florida, Virginia, Michigan, Kansas and California. By Christmas Eve, Lepard was home in Attala County. His uncle called the sheriff, a highway patrolman set up a roadblock, and Lepard was back in Parchman by Christmas morning. .
In the summer of 1964, Lepard was again at large. This escape ended with little fanfare. With race riots in eastern cities, civil rights workers killed in Neshoba County, and American troops arriving in Vietnam, little coverage was given to a local news item, “the story of a wild shootout in the Mississippi Delta at Hopson Plantation between a Parchman posse and four escaped convicts. Two were killed.”
In June 1968, a stolen pickup truck carried Lepard and inmate John Parker to Riverdale Farms, just outside Grenada. They walked up to a field where eighteen-year-old Lovejoy Boteler was working. They begged a drink of water, badgered him into giving them a lift, stuck a pistol in his ribs, and took him along as they drove to Memphis. Then they turned Boteler loose, and, enigmatically, gave him money as they parted: a handful of dollar bills, and two silver dollars hidden in the pickup truck’s glove compartment.
Boteler has interviewed dozens of witnesses and dug through newspaper morgues in Mississippi and Tennessee to bring Lepard to life on the page.
