Murder for Breakfast: The True Story of Alma Petty Gatlin and the Preacher Who Betrayed Her

Murder for Breakfast: The True Story of Alma Petty Gatlin and the Preacher Who Betrayed Her by Link, Phil. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781878086945.

Flamboyant evangelist Thunderbolt Tom Pardue couldnt believe his ears. He had struggled long and hard with his conscience before going to the police in the small town of Reidsville, N.C., home of Lucky Strike cigarettes, but he thought he had no choice. He had come to report that one of his flock, Alma Petty, confessed to him that she murdered her father with an ax at the breakfast table. But the police didnt believe him. They dismissed him as a crackpot. Pardue was not to be deterred, however. He found somebody who did believe him: the youthful Rockingham County solicitor, Allen H. Gwyn. Alma, who was twenty, pretty and popular, denied everything. But she couldnt account for her father, Smith Petty, a cotton mill overseer, who drank heavily. He had disappeared. Gwyn was convinced that Smith Petty was dead, and he was determined to find his body. But suspicious mounds of fresh earth that sheriffs deputies investigated all turned out to be graves of animals. Soon after reading an English mystery novel about a body found in a basement, Gwyn sent Sheriff Chunk Smith to dig beneath the coal pile under the the Petty home on Lindsey Street. Phil Link, a neighbor of the Pettys, was twelve at the time. He watched through a basement window as the badly decomposed body of Smith Petty was dug up. He never forgot that incident, or the excitement and national attention that Almas murder trial brought to his hometown in 1928. He spent years researching this thrilling story of murder and betrayal, and he comes to a conclusion strikingly different from the jurys verdict that shocked the town and the nation.