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HARRY BRUNDIDGE HAD NO IDEA WHAT HE WAS GETTING INTO when his editor dispatched him to some place called Mountain View, Arkansas. Brundidge was what today we might call an entertainment reporter. In fact, he had just spent the previous week in Hollywood, interviewing actors and directors, hobnobbing with celebrities. Yet here he was in the middle of the rural Ozarks at some rambling motel called the Dew Drop Inn-no electricity and no running water. Every two-bit burg between Winslow and Lynchburg in those days boasted a Dew Drop Inn, the pinnacle of smalltown wordplay.1
But Brundidge and his fellow big city reporters were determined to bring a little of the modern, urban world with them. At night, Brundidge pranced around the Dew Drop in his silk, orange-striped pajamas, usually draped with his favorite Japanese kimono. The local boys had doubtless never witnessed such a sight. The Kansas City Star's Connell Carlson couldn't match Brundidge's eccentricities, but he knew how to have a good time, nonetheless, prohibition be damned. He made it out of town after only narrowly escaping a public drunkenness charge.2
A Kansas City reporter could be forgiven a swig or two of the hard stuff that frigid December of 1929, especially with an assignment that would make the most level-headed of the human race doubt the existence of sanity in the world. Harry Brundidge and Connell Carlson had become entangled in one of the most bizarre cases in the history of American jurisprudence- the Arkansas Ghost Trial, the mystery man of the Ozarks murder, the case of Connie Franklin.
By the time Harry Brundidge stepped off the Missouri Pacific train at Sylamore and watched terrified as his taxi driver lurched onto the decrepit two-car ferry for the passage across the swollen White River, the trial he was to cover was national news, if not international news. The furor over the Connie Franklin case had begun some four weeks earlier when the Associated Press (AP) caught whiff of the arrest of a gang of men for the brutal slaying of a young man in rural Stone County, Arkansas. The AP's succinct story hit the nation's newspapers on November 25, 1929. The headline in the New York Times read: "Murder by Torture Laid to...