Chapter 1: The Tryst Murders

Auburn Brevard Moore gave every appearance of a man trying to get out of town fast. That chilly and overcast Alabama morning, the 39-year-old married father of three took a taxi into downtown Birmingham. He had important business to handle before leaving town that night. It was January 19, 1927: Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee’s 120th birthday, a state holiday. Banks were closed. The state legislature had taken the day off, suspending contentious debate over a “Monkey Bill” prohibiting the teaching of evolution in state schools. Honoring Lee, the South’s “Gentleman General,” Birmingham’s schools conducted ceremonies exalting him and his right-hand man, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whose 103rd birthday would arrive two days later.
The state’s newspapers provided giddy accounts of the exploits of Lee and Jackson, recasting the “Lost Cause” of the War Between the States as something noble, misunderstood and, alas, unfinished. There was a sense that the Old South was rising again, with Lee ascending as a prophet of state’s rights. “The question of state’s rights has struck several blows, even in several Northern states, and has vindicated [Lee],” proclaimed The Birmingham News in that afternoon’s edition. The newspaper also asserted that the right to own slaves was not the cause behind the “Lost Cause,” rather that it was the grander doctrine of state’s rights that had driven “politicians from the halls of legislation to the battlefields.” When “it seemed that many of them would undermine the rights of states,” the South seceded “to uphold and maintain such rights.”
The reconstituted and still virulently racist Klan had emerged as a dominant player in Alabama politics. Boasting a membership of 10,000, Birmingham’s Robert E. Lee Klavern No. 1 was the largest and oldest operating klavern in the United States. Civically and politically minded, the Lee klavern operated an orphanage called “Klan Haven,” published a weekly newspaper, and sponsored a drum and band corps. Its members included at least half the city’s police force, several judges, and other city and county officials. It was imbued with considerable political clout. More than half of Birmingham’s registered voters were Klansmen.
Espousing anti-immigrant nativism and pro-morality regulation, the revisionist Klan had made vast gains in local, county, state and federal offices in the November 1926 election. Klansmen now occupied the governor’s office, the attorney general’s office, and both U.S. Senate seats. Two days before, Bibb Graves, the Exalted Cyclops of the Montgomery Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan, was sworn in as the new governor of the Heart of Dixie. Taking the oath of office on the exact spot Jefferson Davis stood swearing his oath as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, Bibb Graves vowed to restore “old-time morality” in government. Cotton, meanwhile, had restored the wealth and political power of the state’s planter class, known as the “Big Mules,” just as Birmingham’s booming post-Civil War steel industry was transforming the state into an industrial powerhouse. Arriving late to the Progressive Era, Alabama was poised to become the last state in the union to abolish the convict leasing system, an industrial-age form of slavery. The state had recently abandoned hanging as its means of capital punishment. A new form of execution, an electric chair, was under construction at a newly constructed prison outside Montgomery.
None of this likely mattered much to A.B. Moore that day. He had more pressing matters on his mind. Southern Railway officials had hastily summoned him to a meeting scheduled for the following morning in New Orleans to determine his future with the company. Moore had worked as the railway supervisor at Birmingham’s Finley Yard prior to his promotion as superintendent of safety and sanitation. Responsible for the Southern’s lines connecting Birmingham, Memphis, Chattanooga, Meridian, and New Orleans, the position provided him a comfortable $4,000 annual salary, equivalent to about $74,000 in 2026. He was socially well-connected: a Scottish Rite Mason, a member of the Kamram Grotto Order of Masons, an Elk, and a 25-year member of Birmingham’s 35th Avenue Baptist Church. He also moved in the same circles as law enforcement officials.
But A.B. Moore also lived a secret life. And that life was falling apart. There had been troubles at home. His wife, the former Cora Geiler—“Bobby” to those closest to her—had run in Chattanooga’s circles of high society. She still figured prominently there. Two months prior, she left A.B., returning to her parents’ home in Chattanooga, and took their three children with her. Less than a month before his 40th birthday, Moore was broke. It is not clear if he was still employed with the railway at the time. He had been receiving mail at Southern Railway’s Birmingham superintendent’s office, but it is not known where he had been living since his family’s departure. His mother and sister lived in Birmingham, and they hadn’t seen him in months. That afternoon, he walked into the offices of Sims, Deedmeyer and Bondurant in the First National Bank Building. Following a meeting with George P. Bondurant, U.S. bankruptcy court referee, Moore filed for bankruptcy, declaring a $ 1,100 debt—about $$20,350 in 2026 dollars —with no personal funds or property. He left Bondurant's office with little more than $50—$925 in 2026—and took a taxi to Birmingham’s Terminal Station, purchased a ticket on the Queen and Crescent Limited for the late-nighter to New Orleans, stashed his suitcase at the station, and took a taxi to a loan broker’s office. Alone, broke, and perhaps homeless, Moore used the broker’s phone to call Ruby Thornton. He had to see her one last time. It is not clear exactly how long the affair had been going on. It began sometime during the previous six months, after Thornton’s husband abandoned her and their 10-year-old daughter Lorrimer.
John Cleve “J.C.” Thornton had been unable to hold down a steady job. He and Ruby’s marriage was besieged with trouble, exacerbated by the intensive care required for their disabled son, John Cleve, Jr. Stricken with polio at birth, curly-haired “Little Cleve” was unable to move or even speak. He was five when he died in 1925. At some point, the Thorntons moved in with Ruby’s parents, James and Nena “Granny” Thomas. James Thomas was a carpenter and an alcoholic who would disappear, sometimes for days. It was “Granny” who kept the family fed and clothed, operating a boarding house out of the Thomas’ two-story home in Birmingham’s Woodlawn suburb. Ruby helped her mother by cooking and cleaning for boarders. In the summer of 1926, J.C. Thornton was working as an insurance agent when police arrested him on charges of check fraud. He posted bond and fled Birmingham.
In an era when an abandoned wife could be stigmatized, even blamed, for a husband’s departure, 33-year-old Ruby Thornton faced the prospect of a lonely future. It is not known how she met A.B. Amid her new suitor’s promises of marriage and dreams of spending their lives together in a beautiful bungalow, Ruby had recently filed for divorce from J.C. Her petition, filed for reasons of abandonment, was rejected. Alabama law required a two-year separation before divorce could be granted on those grounds.
Like Ruby, A.B. Moore had known family tragedy and scandal. In the early 1910s, Moore’s youngest brother accused his brother-in-law of cruelty toward his sister and challenged him to a duel. Haynie Moore, barely out of his teens, and Roland Shugart ended up killing each other. In 1923, a Jefferson County Grand Jury indicted his brother George Moore on charges of embezzling money from the city payroll during his tenure as Birmingham Street Commissioner. To avoid arrest, George left Birmingham and joined his oldest brother Samuel in Kansas. Nearly four years to the day of his brother's indictment, A.B. “Auburn” Moore was bankrupt, engaged in an illicit affair, and facing an uncertain future. He told Ruby he was going away, unsure when, or if, he would return. He wanted to see her that night. And though Ruby knew her mother wouldn’t like it, she told him to come by before 9.
Ruby put on a simple, light blue gingham dress over orange silk undergarments and nude-colored hose. She wore black velvet slippers. It was a chilly evening, in the 40s with rain possible, so she put on her good coat, lavishly woven and stylishly cut, brown with a fur collar.
A.B. donned a white, long-sleeved dress shirt and a gray, three-piece suit with black dress shoes. He hooked the chain of a white-gold pocket watch around a vest button and tucked it into the vest pocket. It was inscribed with the initials “A.B.M.,” but it did not belong to him. He had given it to his oldest son, but 17-year-old A.B. Moore, Jr. returned it before leaving with his mother for Tennessee. Moore’s “calling card passbook”—or wallet—held business cards, money, and train tickets for later that night. He slipped the wallet inside his breast coat pocket. Like many men of his day, he was known to carry a pistol.
Recently, Moore had either loaned or given his 1925 Chevrolet Sedan to Ruby. He used a taxi to get around town. That night he arranged to have his driver of choice, M.M. Austin, take him to Ruby’s house. Austin was discreet and knew the route, frequently transporting Moore to Ruby's and back to wherever he had been staying. Moore arrived just before 9 p.m. and paid Austin $1.95 plus tip for the fare, instructing him to return at 11:15 p.m. This gave A.B. just enough time to catch the 11:50 train. Austin handed him a written receipt for the fare. Moore put it in his pocket and headed for the front door of the brown, two-story home.
As far as Nena Thomas knew, Ruby had been dating A.B. for no more than a month. Nena—57 years of age and versed in the old ways of courtship—was displeased. She wanted her daughter to wait until the divorce was finalized. Furthermore, she strongly suspected Moore was not coming clean about himself. He generally avoided talking to her and danced around her questions. He would not come inside when he knew she was there. When he did have to speak with Nena several nights before, he took young Lorrimer on his knee and used the child to block eye contact with her. Nena did not believe him when he said he was a bachelor. She did not buy his story of being disappointed by a love affair when he was younger, with no romantic relationship since.
Nena told her husband James about a recent premonition of doom involving A.B. Moore and Ruby. It was something she couldn't fully explain or grasp—an evil rustling among the darkest groves of intuition, just beyond articulation, but very real. She felt angry when Moore arrived at the Thomas' front door that Wednesday night. “I don't want you to see Ruby anymore, Mr. Moore,” she said. “I think you should wait until she has been granted a divorce.” Moore said nothing. It was a puritanical age when divorce was taboo. Non-married couples had few places to go to engage in intimacies. When they did, it was at great risk. Robbers and bands of violence-prone moralists were known to prowl the dark woods just beyond the eastern edge of the city, among the few places of privacy available to “petting parties.”
Ruby put her coat on quickly and said goodbye to Lorrimer, her father, and her 17-year-old brother Wesley. She rushed to the door to rescue Auburn from her mother. Mrs. Thomas followed the couple out as they headed down the walk to Moore's sedan, pleading with her daughter to stay. Ruby dismissed her request. “But, Mother, Auburn is going away tonight, and I don't know when I'll get to see him again.” Her mother persisted, and Ruby ignored her. A.B. finally spoke up, “We won't be gone more than an hour or two, Mrs. Thomas. This is the last time I am coming to see Ruby.”
He drove them to Red Mill Road, a secluded byway off Ketona Road, about four miles north of the city. It was a place frequented as a “lovers’ lane.” Clouds blanketed the nearly full moon of January. The dense thicket of trees, cold and bare, hid them from a time that would not tolerate what they were doing.

Chapter 1: The Tryst Murders

Auburn Brevard Moore gave every appearance of a man trying to get out of town fast. That chilly and overcast Alabama morning, the 39-year-old married father of three took a taxi into downtown Birmingham. He had important business to handle before leaving town that night. It was January 19, 1927: Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee’s 120th birthday, a state holiday. Banks were closed. The state legislature had taken the day off, suspending contentious debate over a “Monkey Bill” prohibiting the teaching of evolution in state schools. Honoring Lee, the South’s “Gentleman General,” Birmingham’s schools conducted ceremonies exalting him and his right-hand man, General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whose 103rd birthday would arrive two days later.
The state’s newspapers provided giddy accounts of the exploits of Lee and Jackson, recasting the “Lost Cause” of the War Between the States as something noble, misunderstood and, alas, unfinished. There was a sense that the Old South was rising again, with Lee ascending as a prophet of state’s rights. “The question of state’s rights has struck several blows, even in several Northern states, and has vindicated [Lee],” proclaimed The Birmingham News in that afternoon’s edition. The newspaper also asserted that the right to own slaves was not the cause behind the “Lost Cause,” rather that it was the grander doctrine of state’s rights that had driven “politicians from the halls of legislation to the battlefields.” When “it seemed that many of them would undermine the rights of states,” the South seceded “to uphold and maintain such rights.”
The reconstituted and still virulently racist Klan had emerged as a dominant player in Alabama politics. Boasting a membership of 10,000, Birmingham’s Robert E. Lee Klavern No. 1 was the largest and oldest operating klavern in the United States. Civically and politically minded, the Lee klavern operated an orphanage called “Klan Haven,” published a weekly newspaper, and sponsored a drum and band corps. Its members included at least half the city’s police force, several judges, and other city and county officials. It was imbued with considerable political clout. More than half of Birmingham’s registered voters were Klansmen.
Espousing anti-immigrant nativism and pro-morality regulation, the revisionist Klan had made vast gains in local, county, state and federal offices in the November 1926 election. Klansmen now occupied the governor’s office, the attorney general’s office, and both U.S. Senate seats. Two days before, Bibb Graves, the Exalted Cyclops of the Montgomery Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan, was sworn in as the new governor of the Heart of Dixie. Taking the oath of office on the exact spot Jefferson Davis stood swearing his oath as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, Bibb Graves vowed to restore “old-time morality” in government. Cotton, meanwhile, had restored the wealth and political power of the state’s planter class, known as the “Big Mules,” just as Birmingham’s booming post-Civil War steel industry was transforming the state into an industrial powerhouse. Arriving late to the Progressive Era, Alabama was poised to become the last state in the union to abolish the convict leasing system, an industrial-age form of slavery. The state had recently abandoned hanging as its means of capital punishment. A new form of execution, an electric chair, was under construction at a newly constructed prison outside Montgomery.
None of this likely mattered much to A.B. Moore that day. He had more pressing matters on his mind. Southern Railway officials had hastily summoned him to a meeting scheduled for the following morning in New Orleans to determine his future with the company. Moore had worked as the railway supervisor at Birmingham’s Finley Yard prior to his promotion as superintendent of safety and sanitation. Responsible for the Southern’s lines connecting Birmingham, Memphis, Chattanooga, Meridian, and New Orleans, the position provided him a comfortable $4,000 annual salary, equivalent to about $74,000 in 2026. He was socially well-connected: a Scottish Rite Mason, a member of the Kamram Grotto Order of Masons, an Elk, and a 25-year member of Birmingham’s 35th Avenue Baptist Church. He also moved in the same circles as law enforcement officials.
But A.B. Moore also lived a secret life. And that life was falling apart. There had been troubles at home. His wife, the former Cora Geiler—“Bobby” to those closest to her—had run in Chattanooga’s circles of high society. She still figured prominently there. Two months prior, she left A.B., returning to her parents’ home in Chattanooga, and took their three children with her. Less than a month before his 40th birthday, Moore was broke. It is not clear if he was still employed with the railway at the time. He had been receiving mail at Southern Railway’s Birmingham superintendent’s office, but it is not known where he had been living since his family’s departure. His mother and sister lived in Birmingham, and they hadn’t seen him in months. That afternoon, he walked into the offices of Sims, Deedmeyer and Bondurant in the First National Bank Building. Following a meeting with George P. Bondurant, U.S. bankruptcy court referee, Moore filed for bankruptcy, declaring a $ 1,100 debt—about $$20,350 in 2026 dollars —with no personal funds or property. He left Bondurant's office with little more than $50—$925 in 2026—and took a taxi to Birmingham’s Terminal Station, purchased a ticket on the Queen and Crescent Limited for the late-nighter to New Orleans, stashed his suitcase at the station, and took a taxi to a loan broker’s office. Alone, broke, and perhaps homeless, Moore used the broker’s phone to call Ruby Thornton. He had to see her one last time. It is not clear exactly how long the affair had been going on. It began sometime during the previous six months, after Thornton’s husband abandoned her and their 10-year-old daughter Lorrimer.
John Cleve “J.C.” Thornton had been unable to hold down a steady job. He and Ruby’s marriage was besieged with trouble, exacerbated by the intensive care required for their disabled son, John Cleve, Jr. Stricken with polio at birth, curly-haired “Little Cleve” was unable to move or even speak. He was five when he died in 1925. At some point, the Thorntons moved in with Ruby’s parents, James and Nena “Granny” Thomas. James Thomas was a carpenter and an alcoholic who would disappear, sometimes for days. It was “Granny” who kept the family fed and clothed, operating a boarding house out of the Thomas’ two-story home in Birmingham’s Woodlawn suburb. Ruby helped her mother by cooking and cleaning for boarders. In the summer of 1926, J.C. Thornton was working as an insurance agent when police arrested him on charges of check fraud. He posted bond and fled Birmingham.
In an era when an abandoned wife could be stigmatized, even blamed, for a husband’s departure, 33-year-old Ruby Thornton faced the prospect of a lonely future. It is not known how she met A.B. Amid her new suitor’s promises of marriage and dreams of spending their lives together in a beautiful bungalow, Ruby had recently filed for divorce from J.C. Her petition, filed for reasons of abandonment, was rejected. Alabama law required a two-year separation before divorce could be granted on those grounds.
Like Ruby, A.B. Moore had known family tragedy and scandal. In the early 1910s, Moore’s youngest brother accused his brother-in-law of cruelty toward his sister and challenged him to a duel. Haynie Moore, barely out of his teens, and Roland Shugart ended up killing each other. In 1923, a Jefferson County Grand Jury indicted his brother George Moore on charges of embezzling money from the city payroll during his tenure as Birmingham Street Commissioner. To avoid arrest, George left Birmingham and joined his oldest brother Samuel in Kansas. Nearly four years to the day of his brother's indictment, A.B. “Auburn” Moore was bankrupt, engaged in an illicit affair, and facing an uncertain future. He told Ruby he was going away, unsure when, or if, he would return. He wanted to see her that night. And though Ruby knew her mother wouldn’t like it, she told him to come by before 9.
Ruby put on a simple, light blue gingham dress over orange silk undergarments and nude-colored hose. She wore black velvet slippers. It was a chilly evening, in the 40s with rain possible, so she put on her good coat, lavishly woven and stylishly cut, brown with a fur collar.
A.B. donned a white, long-sleeved dress shirt and a gray, three-piece suit with black dress shoes. He hooked the chain of a white-gold pocket watch around a vest button and tucked it into the vest pocket. It was inscribed with the initials “A.B.M.,” but it did not belong to him. He had given it to his oldest son, but 17-year-old A.B. Moore, Jr. returned it before leaving with his mother for Tennessee. Moore’s “calling card passbook”—or wallet—held business cards, money, and train tickets for later that night. He slipped the wallet inside his breast coat pocket. Like many men of his day, he was known to carry a pistol.
Recently, Moore had either loaned or given his 1925 Chevrolet Sedan to Ruby. He used a taxi to get around town. That night he arranged to have his driver of choice, M.M. Austin, take him to Ruby’s house. Austin was discreet and knew the route, frequently transporting Moore to Ruby's and back to wherever he had been staying. Moore arrived just before 9 p.m. and paid Austin $1.95 plus tip for the fare, instructing him to return at 11:15 p.m. This gave A.B. just enough time to catch the 11:50 train. Austin handed him a written receipt for the fare. Moore put it in his pocket and headed for the front door of the brown, two-story home.
As far as Nena Thomas knew, Ruby had been dating A.B. for no more than a month. Nena—57 years of age and versed in the old ways of courtship—was displeased. She wanted her daughter to wait until the divorce was finalized. Furthermore, she strongly suspected Moore was not coming clean about himself. He generally avoided talking to her and danced around her questions. He would not come inside when he knew she was there. When he did have to speak with Nena several nights before, he took young Lorrimer on his knee and used the child to block eye contact with her. Nena did not believe him when he said he was a bachelor. She did not buy his story of being disappointed by a love affair when he was younger, with no romantic relationship since.
Nena told her husband James about a recent premonition of doom involving A.B. Moore and Ruby. It was something she couldn't fully explain or grasp—an evil rustling among the darkest groves of intuition, just beyond articulation, but very real. She felt angry when Moore arrived at the Thomas' front door that Wednesday night. “I don't want you to see Ruby anymore, Mr. Moore,” she said. “I think you should wait until she has been granted a divorce.” Moore said nothing. It was a puritanical age when divorce was taboo. Non-married couples had few places to go to engage in intimacies. When they did, it was at great risk. Robbers and bands of violence-prone moralists were known to prowl the dark woods just beyond the eastern edge of the city, among the few places of privacy available to “petting parties.”
Ruby put her coat on quickly and said goodbye to Lorrimer, her father, and her 17-year-old brother Wesley. She rushed to the door to rescue Auburn from her mother. Mrs. Thomas followed the couple out as they headed down the walk to Moore's sedan, pleading with her daughter to stay. Ruby dismissed her request. “But, Mother, Auburn is going away tonight, and I don't know when I'll get to see him again.” Her mother persisted, and Ruby ignored her. A.B. finally spoke up, “We won't be gone more than an hour or two, Mrs. Thomas. This is the last time I am coming to see Ruby.”
He drove them to Red Mill Road, a secluded byway off Ketona Road, about four miles north of the city. It was a place frequented as a “lovers’ lane.” Clouds blanketed the nearly full moon of January. The dense thicket of trees, cold and bare, hid them from a time that would not tolerate what they were doing.