In 1902, on a prairie in southwest Louisiana, six members of a farming family are found murdered. Albert Edwin Batson, a white, itinerant farm worker, rapidly descends from likely suspect to likely lynching victim as people in the surrounding countryside lusted for vengeance. In a territory where the locals were coping with the opening of the prairies by the railroad and the disorienting, disruptive advances of the rice and oil industries into what was predominantly cattle country, Batson, an outsider, made an ideal scapegoat.

Until You Are Dead, Dead, Dead tells the story of the legal trials of Batson for the murder of six members of the Earll family and of the emotional trial of his mother. She believed him innocent and worked tirelessly, but futilely, to save her son's life. More than two dozen photos of Batson, his mother, and the principals involved in his arrest and convictions help bring this struggle to life.

Jim Bradshaw, Washington, Louisiana, retired as an editor and writer for the Lafayette Daily Advertiser in 2008, but he continues to write his popular C'est Vrai column for syndication. Author of three previous books on Louisiana, he has written for newspapers and magazines for more than forty years, and his columns have received national and regional awards.
 

Danielle Miller, Sulphur, Louisiana, lived and worked around the world before taking a job with the Calcasieu Parish Public Library System in 1991. She is a researcher and translator in French genealogy.

ISBN: 9781628460995

Hardcover

192 pages

6 x 9

University Press of Mississippi, 2014