THE ABDUCTION OF MRS. RUBY LOWERY STAPLETON

Nall and Allen offer a startling true-crime account of a cold-case murder exposes the hidden horror of everyday American violence.

“Teacher May Be Kidnap Victim” read the headline of Arkansas’ Hope Star newspaper. The story outlined the disappearance of Mrs. Ruby Lowery Stapleton, a former graduate and beloved teacher at Harding College on October 8, 1963. The Associated Press carried the account, and while it’s unlikely the story made much of a ripple outside of Searcy, Arkansas, where the crime took place, Ruby’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body rattled that community. This exceptionally researched true story, explored in raw-boned detail, lays out the facts and avenues of investigation with little additional color or editorializing. What emerges is a revealing look at lives of quiet desperation. For example, the authors write that, as the local police and FBI followed various leads and questioned suspects, they discovered that Ruby’s estranged husband secretly carried on affairs with men, yearning to find true love. Other suspects had explosively violent backgrounds and cause unease as they appear in the narrative; for example, the authors relate the strange case of a voyeur who habitually harassed and stalked women, who broke down in tears when arrested, and who tried to bribe officers with a check for $173.05, so that they wouldn’t turn him over to the state police. In another section, Nalla and Allen tell the story of an enlistee in the U.S. Air Force who violently abused his wives, confessed to the murder of another woman, and was declared by a psychiatrist to be a sociopath “with tendencies towards sexual perversion and sadism.” These are just a couple of the people that police found during their investigation, but who ultimately were ruled out as suspects in Ruby’s death. The most harrowing takeaway from this work is that her vicious murder was just one of a great many horrific, misogynistic acts peppering the South in the years surrounding her death.

A riveting and unblinking tale of murder and pervasive violence.