Paul Ray Massengill was just about 40 when in the late 1990s he was named to head the police department in Oliver Springs. In many respects, he was a child of the new South, a man who by his own account felt a deep need to redress wrongs that had, in some cases in the old days, been committed in the name of justice and order. "I'm looking for justice," he said in an interview with APBnews.com in the winter of 2000. "That's why I got into law enforcement."

Sheriff Massengill, sisters' grave

 

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To Massengill, the Richards and Brown case had always been troubling, and when Sam Brown approached him with what he described as new evidence the statement from the old man, who remained so fearful even then that he declined to allow his name to be released - Massengill seized on it and opened a new investigation.

There were some in town, many perhaps, who did not want the case reopened. "I was told, I guess two weeks after I opened this investigation to let it die," Massengill said, "that there would be a lot of people unhappy, (but) I didn't really care."

It would be easy to ascribe nefarious motives to the desire that Massengill abandon his investigation. It would fit easily into the myth that powerful people had conspired all those years ago to kill the women and their handyman and then carry the secret to their graves. But less sordid motives are possible as well. Fairness and accuracy is one. Memories become cloudy over the years, and like everything else, they can become contaminated by the creeping fog of myth. Evidence erodes. Witnesses and suspects get old and wither and die, leaving behind only their descendants who share their names but no part of their deeds.

Massengill saw things differently. As he sat in his office, surrounded by yellowing newspaper clippings and old files on the case, Massengill came to believe with all his heart that Powder Brown had been wrongfully accused of murders he did not commit and that the time had come, at long last, to clear his name.

"From day one I could have told you that the kid was innocent," Massengill said.

"There was just too much to say that he didn't do it," Massengill continued. "Here's a kid that died 60 years ago that was blamed for a murder he didn't commit... he was a victim. And even though he's not here, some of his family, I'm sure somewhere down the road, would... appreciate it, knowing that he's not guilty."

In November 2000, Ray Massengill and Sam Brown and others, some of them reluctantly, began to peel away the layers of myth that surrounded the killing.