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A Dark and Bloody Ground: Outlaw Love, a Miser's Hoard-Lust, Greed, and Killing from the Beaches of Florida to the Mountains of Kentucky
A Dark and Bloody Ground Outlaw Love a Miser's HoardLust Greed and Killing from the Beaches of Florida to the Mountains of Kentucky Author:Darcy O'Brien Kentucky never more deserved its Indian appellation “A Dark and Bloody Ground” than when a small-town physician, seventy-seven-year-old Roscoe Acker, called in an emergency on a sweltering evening in August 1985. Acker’s own life hung in the balance, but it was already too late for his college-age daughter, Tammy, savagely stab... more »bed eleven times and pinned by a kitchen knife to her bedroom floor in Fleming-Neon. Three men had somehow managed to breach Dr. Acker’s alarm and security systems and made off with a substantial amount of the cash that he had stashed away in a sage over his lifetime.
The killers—part of a three-man, two-woman gang of the sort not seen since the Barkers—stopped counting the moldy bills when they reached $1.9 million. They found that all the cash came in handy shortly afterwards when they were caught and decided to lure Kentucky’s most flamboyant lawyer, the celebrated and corrupt Lester Burns, into representing them.
And caught they were, because they refused to lay low, as advised by the gang's most crafty and unlikely member, Sherry Sheets Pelfrey Wong Hodge. Sherry, a former prison guard, had hooked up with chronic criminal Benny Hodge and begun a relationship based on love, credit card scams, and ingenious robberies that kept them comfortably in the middle class. Focusing on Sherry and Benny's bizarre relationship and ten-year crime spree, which had its roots in the Appalachia that bred them and the New South where they blazed their trail, Darcy O'Brien delivers a work of fascinating psychopathology.« less