T. A. POWELL

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COLD CASE MURDERS…

 

While it is not my intention to begin any book with a riddle for levity’s sake, it is my intention to ask you to use your intellect from page one. You see, some murders are prompted by basic emotions that a killer’s motivation most obvious. Other murders are committed out of a need to serve a higher purpose such as; personal or ideological loyalty and/or religious martyrdom. But the Columbus Stocking Strangler murders will never rise to the elegance of such, no matter how much the perpetrators of these atrocities might insist. These graphic slayings of seven elderly white women were executed for a series of reasons that for almost 4  decades have gone undecipherable and in the end, were simply part of a much larger puzzle that until now has remained hidden; the terror of the un-holy trinity… the Lords of the Harvest.

So let us continue with the riddle.

What is another word for Thesaurus? Thought provoking, isn’t it? For how do you describe something that in essence exists only to describe everything else, but not itself? Thus, you have the reason why the title for this book could be nothing other than, Lords of the Harvest. The word harvest is defined as the process of gathering crops from the fields, to be used as provisions for a later time. But in Columbus, Georgia in 1977, the word harvest took on another meaning and the tools that were used to harvest these ‘matured’ victims will not only shock you…but lead you to other horrors, once shrouded in mystery and considered as stand-alone or disconnected serial murders until the discovery of their unholy secret…the red key. Now, almost 40 years later, we dip our shovels back into the cold swollen earth that swallowed these victims and ask those who died beneath the crush of the killer’s knees and the stockings in his hands, to tell us their stories and point the way to other harvested souls from a network of serial killings that have spanned not only multiple decades, but reached across the four corners of this country as well.

TA Powell

 

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