floor and shelves were stacked with thousands of pages of FBI
documents, autopsy reports, wills and last testaments, crime scene
photographs, trial transcripts, analyses of forged documents,
fingerprints, studies on ballistics and explosives, bank records,
eyewitness statements, confessions, intercepted jailhouse notes,
grand jury testimony, logs from private investigators, and mug
shots. Whenever I obtained a new document, such as a copy of the
Hale letter that Red Corn had shown me, I would label it and place
it amid the stacks (my pitiful version of a Hoover filing system).
Despite the darkness of the material, each new discovery gave me
some hope that I might be able to fill in gaps in the historical
chronicles—those spaces where there seemed to exist no recorded
witnesses or voices, only the silence of the grave.
Crime scene photograph of Blackie Thompson, who was gunned
down in 1934 after he escaped from prison Credit 70