If the black community was disdainful of Lena Baker, Ernest B. Knight was just as embarrassing to Cuthbert's whites. He was, people would later say, a cruel and abusive man, a loudmouth and a braggart, a failed farmer who ran a barely successful gristmill at the edge of town, who, it was said, always wore a pistol strapped across his chest. He was also, according to those who have studied the case, a drunkard.

It's not clear when Knight first met Baker. What is clear is that when he was in his mid-sixties, the old man took a fall and broke his leg, an injury from which he never fully recovered. Lena Baker was hired to care for him. Officially, according to court testimony given at the time of Baker's trial by Knight's son E.C., Baker's job was "to wait on him." But there's little doubt that a relationship developed. Though it was illegal at the time, there is ample evidence that Baker as black woman, and Knight, a white man old enough to be her father, became intimate.

"For whatever reason, he was enticing her," Vodicka says. "I think he was probably forcing her to do whatever he wanted done, and making demands of her, sex, whatever, in exchange for alcohol."

It was, says Prof. Phillips, a complex relationship. In a way, she says, "I think it was a love-hate thing," a classic abusive relationship in which Baker, it seems, was torn between her desire to flee from Knight and the need, if not for Knight himself, at least for the liquor he so freely provided.

Then, as now, Cuthbert was a small town and the kind of place where rumors travel quickly. There were whispers everywhere about the "unnatural" liaison between Baker and Knight. On at least two occasions, according to court records, officers from the Randolph County Sheriff's department in one instance Sheriff W.E. Taylor himself visited Baker's home hoping to catch the couple in a compromising position. Both times, Knight was present, but explained that he had simply come by to fetch his laundry. The rumors became so persistent that, according to his own testimony, E.C. Knight took matters into his own hands. At first, he confronted his father. He "told me that was his business."

Then he turned to Lena.

"She was going in and out there and drinking and some of the neighbors complained about it," he testified. "I went to Lena and said, 'Lena, this has got to stop.  I don't want to hurt you, don't want to have any trouble with you and you stay away from my Daddy. Don't come back to this house never no more'."

"Two days later, I drove by, and she was there. I took her and beat her until I just did leave life in her," he said.

But all efforts by Knight's family to break up the relationship failed. Even when Knight's older son, A.C., persuaded Ernest Knight to move to Tallahassee, Fla., to manage a rooming house, Lena Baker followed. "It was a love-hate relationship that we see a lot of even today," Phillips says. "On the one hand she didn't want to be around him, on the other hand, she did. Of course he abused her, but also, he bought her liquor."  When A.C. Knight learned that Baker was there, he too visited the woman. "I gave her 12 hours for me not see her in Tallahassee or Leon County again."

Baker returned to Cuthbert, and a short time later, Ernest Knight followed her back.