In 1968, during Albert Lepard's fifth escape from a life sentence at
Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years
old, from his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades
later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began
researching his kidnapper's nefarious, sordid life to discover how and
why this terrifying abduction occurred.
Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard is the true story of
Lepard, sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of
seventy-four-year-old Mary Young in 1959. During the course of his
sentence, Lepard escaped from prison six times in fourteen years.
In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded
murderer's life using both historical records and personal
interviews--over seventy in all--with ex-convicts who gravitated to and
ran with Lepard, the family members who fed and sheltered the fugitive
during his escapes, the law officers who hunted him, and the regular
folks who were victimized in his terrible wake.
Throughout Crooked Snake, Boteler reveals his kidnapper's hardscrabble
childhood and tracks his whereabouts before his incarceration and during
his jailbreaks. Lepard's escapes take him to Florida, Michigan, Kansas,
California, and Mexico. Crooked Snake captures a slice of history and a
landscape that is fast disappearing. These vignettes describe
Mississippi's countryside and spirit, ranging from sharecropper family
gatherings in Attala County's Seneasha Valley to the
twenty-thousand-acre Parchman farm and its borderlands teeming with
alligator, panther, bear, and wild boar.
