If Powder Brown did not kill the Richards sisters himself, who did?

Massengill and Sam Brown, the radio reporter, had a theory. Sam Brown could not be reached for comment, but according to Massengill, they believed that the two sisters and Powder Brown were targeted for death by at least one member of another prominent family, and that perhaps others, maybe even a local official or two, conspired, if not in the killing, at least in its cover-up.

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There was, of course, no evidence to support the theory. Even Massengill admits that now. As he put it, "I realized by the time we cleared Powder and really worked on it that actually proving who the trigger person was ...was probably going to be impossible."

All the same, nearly a year after Sam Brown first interviewed the old man who had fled from Oliver Springs six decades earlier, he and Massengill, amid much hoopla, held a press conference at which they identified the person they believed had committed the murders.

They had an extravagant theory. They concluded that the sisters had been murdered as part of an elaborate plot to obtain a piece of land the Richards family held.

Many in town were outraged at the two men's conclusions, Lynch said. First, it strained credibility. If that had been the motive for the killing, how would the killer or killers benefit? With the two women dead, the property, all their property, reverted to the two surviving siblings. Even if the killer had planned to add Miss Mary to the roster of the dead, and had, perhaps been surprised by Powder Brown, that would still not win the killer that land. It would then have reverted to Joe Richards, then living in Atlanta, far from the reach of the small-town killers.

No, the scenario didn't make sense, many in the area said.

To some of them, it seemed as if the myth of Powder Brown had been replaced by an equally pernicious myth, one that seems to always surface in small-town crimes, particularly in the American South, Lynch said. The wealthy land-owner, who holds unbridled sway over the mechanisms of law and government, commits a heinous crime, or hires someone to do it, and then escapes scot-free. Hover around the back fences of any small southern town long enough, and you'll hear some version of the same story linked to some local crime.

In the end the uproar over the pronouncement, which prompted threats of lawsuits and exacerbated the already simmering tensions between Massengill and the elected officials in Oliver Springs, may have made it even more unlikely that the real killer will ever be found, some say. People who might have been willing to talk about their memories of that time retreated. Others, even those who might have remained willing to discuss the case, in some instances had their memories compromised by the constant drumbeat of media coverage surrounding the case. More than one person familiar with the case complained that people who were old enough to remember the crime sometimes found themselves unable to differentiate between their own memories and snippets of information they had gleaned from the press.

One of the reasons that it was possible to vilify Powder Brown for all those years was because the hard evidence in the case, evidence that could have been used to exonerate him, was so terribly compromised in the moments after the bodies were discovered. Scores, perhaps hundreds of people tramped through the murder scene in what some have described as a kind of gruesome carnival of morbid curiosity, contaminating the crime scene beyond repair. Now, six decades later, a modern, media-driven version of the same kind of grand guinol had happened again. And once again, it obscured the truth, this time, perhaps forever.

It has been three years since Powder Brown was cleared of the crime. In that time, Massengill has left the police department, and Sam Brown has left WNOX radio. To a great extent, the public pronouncements on the case have ceased, but still, the mystery of who killed the Richards sisters and Powder Brown remains as divisive and fraught with myth as ever. Most people involved in the investigation have given up hope that the crimes will ever be solved.

In the end, there are still some who cling to the myth that Powder Brown was the killer. Others still accept the notion, without proof, that the Richards sisters died as a result of some internecine battle between the local oligarchs and that Powder Brown was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are other theories as well, however. Though she also can not support it with facts, Lynch wonders whether the questions of innocence and guilt may be muddier than anyone has dared to imagine.

Perhaps, Lynch says, Powder Brown was angry enough with the sisters to seek some kind of retribution, and perhaps he had talked about it to someone who agreed to throw a scare into the women. Perhaps the situation simply got out of hand, she said.   "I don't think he would set them up to be murdered, I think that's going a bit too far ...There was nothing in his character to make me think he'd do that," she said, acknowledging it was her opinion only.

There is at least one other theory that has gained attention over the years, perhaps in some measure because it lacks the mythic scope of the prevailing notions about the crime, but also because it is, in its way, more terrifying. What if the act had simply been random? It has long been rumored that on the day of the killings, two convicts had been released from a nearby prison, and that they had been taken to Oliver Springs, one to catch a train to Chattanooga, the other, according to a report compiled by the Oliver Springs historical society,  to catch a bus to Jefferson City.

"It was told," the historical society report continued, that "Powder liked to talk to the convicts that were turned looseand brought to Oliver Springs to catch a bus or train. He was always asking them what they had done to get into prison."

What if Powder Brown, chatting casually with a pair of strangers had inadvertently whetted a criminal's appetite for mayhem, mentioning, even innocently, the middle-aged matrons who lived alone in the big house in town, some have wondered.

In its own way, that would be more terrifying. It would mean that the kind of violence that visited Oliver Springs on that February afternoon 60 years ago could have happened to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And that is what myths are made to counter.