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.

This book is the continuing story that began with the Mystery of the Iatt Lake Monster—Revealed!, subtitled Squatchland: The Dartigo Creek Valley Project, where I discovered a tribe of Bigfoots living across the street where I was renting a Cajun-style shotgun house with a rusty tin roof across from a well at the foot of a clean, clear swamp created by three crooked creeks. After a violent initial encounter, David made friends with Mo Cho Rook, the king of the Crooked Snake tribe. Then after moving to the other side of the parish, members of the tribe followed him and made camp across the road from his new habitation where he made friends with Nebehkakun, the local clan leader, who told David much about the tribe and the various local clans. Over one hundred Bigfoots moved to live in his yard, hence the title Squatchland II: Under the Sign of the Crooked Snake. David takes us deep into the forest to visit local clans and shows pictures of each creek valley with what looks to be tall upright walking creatures. David also shows 5 different types of Bigfoots and pictures of each.* Get yours in Gloss only from Xlibris.com.

Annual report of the Bureau of ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution