NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

Colonel Wood came out of the Marines, studied law in his middle years, and then opened up a practise in his native town in the red hills of Georgia. Almost his first case was a court-appointed client- James Fulton Foster- accused of robbing and murdering a local citizen, Charlie Drake, a charge based only on the positive identification of Mrs. Drake. His book here is a plainspoken account of his two year struggle to free Foster, a father of seven with a previous penitentiary record, with an alibi based on three rather vulnerable witnesses. After a verdict of guilty- and a death sentence- was returned, there was a certain amount of local protest- that Foster had not been given a ""fair shake"", and for the next months Wood was able to continue his attempts to free Foster with the insubstantial backing of a ""Save Foster"" Fund (Wood ended up as broke as his client). Finally via another criminal who talked, the real murderer was identified; a gun was found to back up the evidence; and a confession clinched it.... Wood's case is interesting- not as an anatomy of murder but rather as a dogged, public spirited attempt to see that justice is served and secured. This is certainly worthy, and possibly the playback of the case will attract a greater audience than seems likely.