In 1927, a married railroad official and a woman caught in a forbidden relationship were found brutally murdered on a lonely road outside Birmingham, Alabama.
The killings of Auburn Moore and Ruby Thornton became known as the Tryst Murders, a sensational case filled with sex, scandal, fear, rumor, and public outrage.
But the story did not end with the murders.
As newspapers fed the frenzy and investigators chased conflicting theories, the case moved through the machinery of Jim Crow Alabama, where race, class, police power, political pressure, and public morality all shaped the search for someone to blame. At the center of what followed was Horace DeVaughn, the man whose conviction would lead him to Yellow Mama, Alabama’s newly built electric chair.
In The Alabama Tryst Murder Mystery, S. Thorne Harper looks beyond the headlines to examine the crime, the investigation, the shifting evidence, the press coverage, and the larger world that made the case possible. This is not a fast, flashy true crime retelling. It is a careful, deeply researched account of a double murder, a questionable prosecution, and a state eager to prove the power of its new instrument of death.
The result is a true crime history about more than who pulled the trigger. It is about how a violent event becomes an official story, and what that story can hide.
Praise for The Alabama Tryst Murder Mystery
“It would be accurate to say S. Thorne ‘Sam’ Harper has written a beautiful, well-researched book about Alabama’s first execution in the electric chair known as Yellow Mama. It would also be accurate to say he has, through the little known case of Horace DeVaughn, captured in dramatic detail the state’s century long love affair with death. I am, frankly, jealous.”
— John Archibald, author of Shaking the Gates of Hell and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize
