Wednesday, November 8, 2000

By CAL BEVERLY
Publisher

The morning after ...

Are we all bleary-eyed and election-weary? I suspect so, although I'm writing this column a full day before the vote counting begins.

And, with the total blindness of foresight, I'm predicting that a fresh Republican wind will be blowing through Washington in the coming weeks. Note to prosecutors: Confiscate all those Clinton administration hard drives before they all suffer inexplicable erasures.

What a strange election year locally: In one local school board race, a Democrat ran as a Republican and a Republican ran on the Democratic ticket.

Peachtree City voters are looking forward to next year's mayor and council races to let the incumbents know what most in the city think about their Wal-Mart, Home Depot and West Village decisions.

State politics are upside down. A Democratic governor embraces many GOP positions on school reform, gets it enacted by a Democrat-controlled legislature, enrages the educrats and teachers' lobby and shakes up the status quo. Meanwhile, a Republican state school superintendent stumps the state sounding all the world like a teachers' union and NEA advocate. Strange times.

Need some relief from the political circuses? How about a good murder mystery or eight of them, to be precise?

"Murder in the Peach State" is the second true-crime book from Major Bruce Jordan, longtime chief investigator for the Fayette County Sheriff's Department, and it will grab and keep your attention if you'll give it a chance.

Jordan will be signing his book this Friday night at the local Barnes and Noble and at several area bookstores over the next few weeks.

Each of the eight chapters covers a homicide investigation, beginning with Atlanta's notorious 1913 Mary Phagan-Leo Frank case and concluding with 1991's grisly headless, handless body discovery in neighboring Spalding County.

Jordan's successful first book (with more than 10,000 sold) focused on Fayette County's big murder cases, while his second encompasses solved crimes ranging from northeast Georgia's Jackson County to southwest Georgia's Muscogee County. In between, Jordan documents some hair-raising encounters with evil and some solid detective work.

I should emphasize that "solved" means that someone was tried and convicted for the crimes, although in at least one case, the trained investigator turned author asserts an innocent man was wrongly convicted, leading to a heinous lynching, a continuing blot on the state's reputation.

One of the most horrifying chapters details how a Jasper County farmer kept slaves in 1921! and, when he thought federal agents were closing in on him, methodically murdered 15 black men, 11 of them within a two-week span.

Perhaps the most suspenseful as well as the most meticulously documented story is that of the Columbus Strangler, who terrorized women in the Chattahoochee River city during the 1970s and '80s. Jordan's account is first-rate reportage, reminiscent of that granddaddy of all true-crime books, Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

The sense of dread and overarching fear that gripped Columbus is vivid and palpable in Jordan's story. A few minutes into reading this chapter, you want to get up and check the lock on your back door.

I have some quibbles with the book. I confess I wanted more of the confident storytelling I saw in the Strangler chapter. I could have skipped the lackluster tales of the poisonous Macon widow and the bizarre redneck murder on Spalding's Troublesome Creek.

But these are quibbles. Jordan excels in setting the scene and giving perspective on both the times and the people associated with some of the state's most infamous crimes. He's especially good at the telling details, the little things that give substance to a good story. I suspect this volume will show up gift-wrapped under more than a few Christmas trees this holiday season. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to his next effort.

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