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Carregando... Hanging the Peachtree Bandit: The True Tale of Atlanta's Infamous Frank Dupre (2014)de Tom Hughes
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The crime that led to "the first significant challenge to capital punishment in Georgia" and inspired the Grateful Dead song "Dupree's Diamond Blues" (Atlanta INtown). On December 15, 1921, gunshots echoed across Atlanta's famous Peachtree Street moments before a handsome young man darted away from Kaiser's Jewelers. Frank DuPre left in his wake a dead Pinkerton guard and a missing ring. As Christmas shoppers looked on in panic, he raced through the Kimball House Hotel and shot another victim. The brazen events terrified a crime-filled city already on edge. A manhunt captured the nineteen-year-old, unemployed DuPre, who faced a quick conviction and a hanging sentence. Months of appeals pitted a prosecutor demanding some "good old-fashioned rope" against "maudlin sentimentalists" and "sob sisters." Author Tom Hughes recounts the true harrowing story behind the legend of one of the last men hanged in Atlanta. "Revisits the crime, the trial, and the execution that captured newspaper headlines for months."--WABE.org Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)364.152Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Offenses against persons HomicideClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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Unfortunately, he was too incompetent to manage the robbery cleanly. As he tried to escape the jeweler's, the shop's security guard moved to stop him -- and a desperate DuPre pulled a pistol and shot him to death, then shot and wounded another man outside. He fled to Tennessee to pawn the ring, then to Detroit -- but he was too foolish to cover his tracks, and was apprehended, sent back to Georgia, convicted of murder, and hanged in 1922. He was barely nineteen.
This became the subject of at least two folk songs, "Frank Dupree" (Laws E24, written by Andrew Jenkins, and banal), now largely forgotten, and the genuinely-traditional and still-popular bluesy "Dupree" (Laws I11), perhaps now better known as "Betty and Dupree." Over the years, many folk songs have been investigated, but this one, oddly, never gained much attention until, almost a century after the fact, Tom Hughes decided to investigate. The result is this book.
It's thin, but it's impressive. I think Hughes has found out most of what can be learned. He investigated DuPre's rather sad family history, and his father's early death just three years after his son's execution. He found details about DuPre's criminal history and his escape attempt. He even managed to find out something about the life of Betty.
That's the one really big hole that I still wish could be filled. What was it that brought these two star-crossed lovers together? DuPre was uneducated, young, and unemployed; several examiners thought him mentally subnormal. Betty seems to have been strange herself, with wild emotions and an inability to follow instructions. Even for eighteen-year-olds, their actions were incredibly reckless. What caused it? And what did Betty do in the next fifty years? What did she think about all those recordings of her story, some (those based on the Jenkins song) purely moralizing and with no basis in fact, others a little more reliable and more sympathetic but still based on third-hand evidence? We can't know; by the time she turned twenty, she was forgotten and all but buried away, and never talked to anyone seeking the history of the song. There are hints about her in what we know, but they are only hints.
But that's not Hughes's fault. The only fault I can find with this book is that I wish it had more photos, and that it had done a better job of reproducing those it does contain. This book may leave you wanting more -- but this is all there is to be had. ( )