“Only very rarely does one of our stories—one of us—change the course of human events. Joshua Sharpe asked the right questions, refusing easy answers.” —Anna Quindlen, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and best-selling author



The riveting story of a 1985 double murder, a long-overdue investigation, and the fight to exonerate an innocent man.

In 1985, a white man walked into a South Georgia church and brutally murdered Harold and Thelma Swain, two pillars of the area’s Black community. The killer vanished into the night. For fifteen years, the case remained unsolved. Then authorities zeroed in on Dennis Perry, a carpenter who grew up nearby. Convicted with devastatingly flawed evidence, Perry received a double life sentence.