THE WIREGRASS

An immersive look at the 1999 murders of two teenage girls in rural Alabama.

In his first book, journalist Kessler, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, takes a complex dive into a double murder that shocked its Deep South community and the nation. J.B. Beasley and Tracie Hawlett were two 17-year-old high school students from Dothan, Alabama, who were found dead by gunshot in the trunk of Beasley’s car on Aug. 1, 1999. The case remained unsolved for 14 years until a truck driver, Coley McCraney, was convicted of the crime in 2023. Kessler, a meticulous researcher, approaches the story sideways, not head on, opening the book in 2015, when three cows owned by a rancher named John Carroll are poisoned in apparent retaliation for a website Carroll ran, a kind of “WikiLeaks for Wiregrass,” exposing the community’s deep mistrust of its police force, which had dealt drugs, been violent, and pursued local teenage girls for decades. Kessler traces this mistrust back further, to a region with a legacy of racial violence, noting a 1950 lynching that was ruled a suicide. Kessler gives us a nuanced understanding of the region, a “historically poor,” agrarian corner of the Bible Belt known for its “bad soil,” tracing how poverty and isolation shaped both the crime and its long unraveling. The book lingers closely on the lives of those affected, including Patti Simpson, Beasley’s legal guardian, and Jeanette McCraney, the wife of the man now serving life without parole for a double murder he says he doesn’t remember.

A meticulous, urgent account of a case officially closed, but far from settled.