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  • Published: 5 September 2023
  • ISBN: 9781984898364
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $40.00

Deer Creek Drive

A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta




The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.

“Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John Grisham

In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free.
 
In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.

  • Published: 5 September 2023
  • ISBN: 9781984898364
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $40.00

About the author

Beverly Lowry

The author of six novels—and of Crossed Over, the story of her friendship with Karla Faye Tucker—Beverly Lowry is the director of the Creative Nonfiction Program at George Mason University. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Also by Beverly Lowry

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Praise for Deer Creek Drive

“Few stories are more fascinating than a grisly small-town crime where no one can agree on what happened—or why—and which is solved, only to remain troubling many years later. Add matricide and an incendiary time period, and you have Beverly Lowry’s new book . . . Lowry’s granular re-creation of the time and place valuably captures its sensibility . . . The significance of this story lies in its irresolution, in showing how, like bigotry, a violent crime will continue to cast a shadow over a community for generations.”—Suzanne Berne, The Washington Post