Murder Creek: The "Unfortunate Incident" of Annie Jean Barnes
Joe Formichella

For dates and times of signings for Murder Creek, please see our events calendar.

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Formichella examines all aspects of the unsolved crime that inspired Suzanne Hudson’s 2004 novel In a Temple of Trees. When Annie Jean Barnes died one evening in 1966 outside an exclusive camp house near small-town Brewton, AL, it seemed all the wealthy town fathers were culpable. But at the behest of those who were likely responsible, the crime was swept under the rug and details ignored by investigators.

The publication of Hudson’s novel, however, brought the ghost of Annie Jean back to life. Joe Formichella, in classic investigative style, reopens the case and questions a multitude of crime experts, law enforcement officers, and citizens alike—including many who, so it was said, would never speak about the “unfortunate incident” of Annie Jean’s death.

A gripping tale of how the upper class often gets its way through violence and coercion.

ABOUT JOE FORMICHELLA

Joe Formichella is a Hackney Literary Award winner and Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in Grassland Review, Red Bluff Review, and the Southern literary anthologies Stories from the Blue Moon Café II and Climbing Mt. Cheaha. He is the author of The Wreck of the Twilight Limited, a novel, and Here’s to You, Jackie Robinson, an historical account of the all-black Prichard Mohawks, an amateur baseball team formed in the 1950s, shows how those young players succeeded despite the degradations and persecutions of the Jim Crow South. He lives in Fairhope, Alabama.