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authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro. *
    No one expected a relatively successful and independent man like Walter to follow every rule. Occasionally drinking too much, getting into a fight, or even having an extramarital affair—these weren’t indiscretions significant enough to destroy the reputation and standing of an honest and industrious black man who could be trusted to do good work. But interracial dating, particularly with a married white woman, was for many whites, an unconscionable act. In the South, crimes like murder or assault might send you to prison, but interracial sex was a transgression in its own unique category of danger with correspondingly extreme punishments. Hundreds of black men have been lynched for even unsubstantiated suggestions of such intimacy.
    Walter didn’t know the legal history, but like every black man inAlabama he knew deep in his bones the perils of interracial romance.Nearly a dozen people had been lynched in Monroe County alone since its incorporation. Dozens of additional lynchings had taken place in neighboring counties—and the true power of those lynchings far exceeded their number. They were acts of terror more than anything else, inspiring fear that any encounter with a white person, any interracial social misstep, any unintended slight, any ill-advised look or comment could trigger a gruesome and lethal response.
    Walter heard his parents and relatives talk about lynchings when he was a young child. When he was twelve, the body of Russell Charley, a black man from Monroe County, was found hanging from a tree in Vredenburgh, Alabama. The lynching of Charley, who was known by Walter’s family, was believed to have been prompted by an interracial romance. Walter remembered well the terror that shot through the black community in Monroe County when Charley’s lifeless, bullet-ridden body was found swinging in a tree.
    And now it seemed to Walter that everyone in Monroe County was talking about his own relationship with Karen Kelly. It worried him in a way that few things ever had.
    A few weeks later, an even more unthinkable act shocked Monroeville. In the late morning of November 1, 1986, Ronda Morrison, the beautiful young daughter of a respected local family, was found dead on the floor of Monroe Cleaners, the shop where the eighteen-year-old college student had worked. She had been shot in the back three times.
    Murder was uncommon in Monroeville. An apparent robbery-murder in a popular downtown business was unprecedented. The death of young Ronda was a crime unlike anything the community had ever experienced. She was popular, an only child, and by all accounts without blemish. She was the kind of girl whom the entire white community embraced as a daughter. The police initially believed that no one from the community, black or white, would have done something so horrific.
    Two Latino men had been spotted in Monroeville looking for work the day Ronda Morrison’s body was found, and they became the first suspects. Police tracked them down in Florida and determined that the two men could not have committed the murder. The former owner of the cleaners, an older white man named Miles Jackson, fell under suspicion, but there was no evidence that pointed to him as a killer. The current owner of the cleaners, Rick Blair, was questioned but considered an unlikely suspect. Within a few weeks, the police had tapped out their leads.
    People in Monroe County began to whisper about the incompetence of the police. When there were still no arrests several months later, the whispers became louder, and public criticisms of the police, sheriff, and local prosecutor were aired in the local newspaper and on local radio stations. Tom Tate was elected the new county sheriff days after the murder took place, and folks started to question whether he was up to the job. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) was called in to investigate