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From his office high in the Citizens Bank Building at Fourth and Broadway in Paducah, Kentucky, Thomas S. Waller, senior partner at Waller, Threlkeld & Whitlow, Attorneys at Law, sat facing the window and gazed into the distance beyond the Ohio River, deep in thought. A large man, known for his trademark dark suits and Kentucky Colonel string ties, Waller was renowned as a quick study with penetrating insight. One of the South’s most prominent attorneys, his appointment calendar was filled months in advance. Yet he had cancelled all appointments for this day and asked his secretary to hold all calls. After a while he swiveled back to his desk and noted today’s date on his calendar pad—Thursday, February 25, 1943. He had circled the date in red months before on the day when Warden Buchanan came to see him in confidence.

For over fifty years Tom Waller and Jess Buchanan had been the closest of friends. They had grown up together in Union County. Each held the other in utmost esteem, each respected the other’s opinion. In matters of law, Jess Buchanan always sought Tom Waller’s counsel. In matters of politics, Waller usually deferred to Buchanan’s instincts. But on that day four months ago when Buchanan came to see his old friend, Waller sensed that there was more to the visit than a question of politics or legal fine points. The warden was in torment.

The two old friends talked for most of the morning. At the end, Tom Waller agreed to honor Buchanan’s request: Yes, he would study the Miley Case in detail to try to detect any flaw in the case against Robert Anderson.

Now, Waller pulled a heavy file from his HOLD basket. Compiled from news clippings, court records, and transcribed private conversations, the file was marked MILEY CASE. He had read every word of every document at least a half-dozen times. Still, he decided to spend the remainder of this day doing so again. He opened the file and started at the beginning:

The crime that tormented the warden and occupied Tom Waller occurred during the pre-dawn hours of September 28, 1941. At 4:15 that Sunday morning, J. M. Giles, manager of the Ben Mar Sanatorium in the fashionable northeast section of Lexington, Kentucky, was awakened by the repeated ringing of his doorbell accompanied by faint cries for help. He threw on a robe, went to the front door, and opened it to horror. A woman, barefoot and dressed in a blood-drenched nightgown, took a feeble step inside and collapsed into his arms. Giles recognized her at once. She was Mrs. Elsie Miley, 52, director of the Lexington Country Club just across the highway. Barely able to talk, she gasped out a tale of being beaten, shot, and robbed.

“Marion . . .,” the woman cried, “shot . . . please, get help.”

Giles yelled for a member of his staff to summon an ambulance and the police, and began rendering first aid to the stricken woman.

The prestigious Lexington Country Club was situated on lush bluegrass acreage on Paris Pike, three miles from downtown. Fifteen minutes after being notified, Lexington police entered the clubhouse to find wires cut, phones ripped from the walls, and furniture smashed. Upstairs, the door to Mrs. Miley’s apartment was splintered from its hinges. Inside was carnage. The entry hallway and bedrooms had been ransacked. In the master bedroom the floor and bed were blood-soaked. At the head of the hallway, officers made a more gruesome discovery: lying dead in a pool of blood, clad in pajamas, was twenty-seven-year-old Marion Miley. She had been shot at close range in the back and again in the top of her head. An autopsy would show that she died at approximately 2:30 A.M. Physicians speculated that her mother had lain in a state of shock for over an hour before acquiring enough strength to make her desperate crawl for help.

Within hours, the murder in Kentucky was headline news throughout the United States and Europe, for Marion Miley was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic.

A winning athlete since age eighteen, Marion had risen steadily through the ranks of female golfers. Along the way she won every major American tournament open to women, garnering a reputation for being “cool under fire—a golfer without nerves.” In her early twenties she represented the United States in major European tournaments. Hailed by sportswriters as being on a par with her good friends Patty Berg and “Babe” Didrickson, both of whom she defeated in competition, Marion was officially ranked the number-two woman golfer in the country. She was well on her way to becoming number one. Vivacious, outgoing, and strongly competitive, the pretty brunette star was once asked by a reporter in London how it felt to be ranked among the top women golfers in the world.

She replied, “Why stop with women?”

It was that kind of spirit that endeared her to competitors and fans alike.

As news of Marion’s murder spread, golf patrons around the country reacted in shock, then anger. Spearheaded by the game’s most famous amateur, Bing Crosby, celebrities by the score contributed generously to the reward for the capture of her killer.

Slipping in and out of consciousness, Elsie Miley whispered a fractured account of what had happened. She had been awakened by the sound of something breaking. Police later determined that she had heard one of the intruders knock over a lamp at the head of the stairs. Then two men burst into her apartment, grabbed her roughly, and demanded to know where she had hidden the money. Before she could reply, one of the men shot her. In a voice so weak that the police detective had to place his ear directly over her mouth, she murmured a meager description of her assailants: two men, one tall and slender, the other shorter and stocky.

Had she seen which one of the men shot Marion? the detective asked.

Mrs. Miley nodded. But before she could speak again, she lapsed into a final coma. On October 1, three days after she had been shot, and seven hours after her daughter’s funeral, Elaine Miley died.

With no usable fingerprints found at the scene, investigators combed the Country Club area for any hint as to the killers’ identities. For the first couple of days, it was a fruitless search. Then, in rapid succession, two important clues emerged.

Each morning, while most people in Lexington were still sleeping, newsboy Hugh Cramer, 17, rose to deliver papers. The Lexington Country Club was on his route. Between 3:00 and 3:30 A.M. Sunday, he tossed Mrs. Miley’s paper onto the stoop of the clubhouse. There were three cars parked in the driveway. He recognized two. One was Mrs. Miley’s. The other belonged to her daughter Marion, who, Cramer knew, lived with her mother between tournaments. The third car, standing with its door open, was strange.

At first, Cramer didn’t consider the third car unusual. There had been a dance at the club the night before. Sometimes, after a social event, club members would leave their cars and ride home with friends. But as news of the Miley murders spread, Cramer remembered that third car and notified police.

Could he describe the car? police asked.

Like any teenage car buff, Cramer could. It was a 1941 Buick Sedan, two-tone blue and gray. He didn’t notice the plates, but was sure he would have had they been from outside Kentucky.

Police released an all-points bulletin on the Buick.

The second clue was even more incriminating. During a questioning, two Lexington men brought in for interrogation told investigators that a couple of weeks earlier, a scar-faced ex-convict they met in a bar tried to enlist them to help rob the Country Club. The ex-con’s name: Tom Penney.

Tom Penney was well known to Lexington police. The black-sheep son of a law-abiding family, he had been a troublemaker for years. At sixteen he was sent to reform school for car theft. Paroled, he pulled off a series of minor crimes until, in 1930, he was convicted of the armed robbery of a grocery store during which he shot two men. Following his release he worked around Lexington as a part-time carpenter but could not hold any job for long. Mean and belligerent, he was the principal suspect in several open cases on the police blotter. He was currently out of jail on another parole.

On the heels of the all-points bulletin on the Buick, police issued another on Penney.

The second APB was not necessary.

On October 9, eleven days after the Miley shootings, two police officers in Fort Worth, Texas, parked their patrol car in a vacant lot near an intersection where a number of speeders had been reported. Moments later, a blue-gray Buick with Kentucky plates roared through the four-way stop without slowing. The officers gave chase.

At the first wail of the siren, the speeder pulled to the side. While one officer radioed headquarters, the second approached the parked Buick. The driver was a tall, slender man with a jagged scar across his left cheek. His eyes were bloodshot and his speech was slurred. His drivers license identified him as Thomas Penney of Lexington, Kentucky.

The officer had just started back to the patrol car to check out the drivers license when the second officer replaced the microphone on the dash and stepped out. “We’ve got a hot one. That’s the car in the Miley murders.”

Both officers approached the car with their weapons drawn and ordered the driver to step out with his hands up. While one kept Penney covered, the other searched the Buick. From beneath the front seat he withdrew a .38-caliber revolver—loaded and cocked.

Penney’s confession was so effusive that it aroused suspicion. As one investigator would later testify, the fleeing Kentuckian was “just too damned eager to talk.” He had indeed taken part in the Miley murders, Penney admitted. Without prompting, he named an accomplice: Robert Anderson of Louisville. The Buick, Penney said, belonged to Anderson.

Robert H. Anderson was well-known to the Kentucky officials. Proprietor of a blue-collar Louisville nightclub, The Cat and Fiddle, he was respected by his business associates and patrons alike. On weekends, Louisville swarmed with soldiers on pass from nearby Fort Knox. Anderson ordered his bartenders to serve the boys in uniform drinks at half price, and occasionally to serve one on the house. Among the GIs it was well known that any one of them down on his luck could always count on a sandwich and beer, gratis, at Bob Anderson’s place. More than once, Anderson paid the bus fare so that a soldier in danger of being listed AWOL could return to the fort on time.

The personable proprietor also had a dark side to his nature. Quick to anger, he could resort to violence on the slightest provocation. He kept a BB-filled blackjack behind the bar and wasn’t hesitant to use it to whip a rowdy customer into line. Once, learning that a local con artist was hustling soldiers in a back room with loaded dice, Anderson beat the man to a bloody pulp and tossed him into the alley behind the club with a warning to never step foot in The Cat and Fiddle again. Neither the con artist nor any of the others who suffered Anderson’s wrath dared complain to authorities.

Arrested by Louisville police on the day Penny implicated him, Anderson was indignant. He heatedly denied any involvement in the crime. He admitted knowing Tom Penney from the days the two of them served time together in the state reformatory. Following Penney’s latest release from prison, Anderson said, he had helped the ex-con with an occasional odd job and sometimes with an outright grubstake. More recently, Anderson admitted, he had been buying contraband whiskey from Penney, whose latest scam was hijacking delivery trucks serving one or more of the many distilleries around central Kentucky.

Why would Penney falsely accuse him? officers asked.

Anderson had an explanation. In September, he said, Penney arrived at The Cat and Fiddle with twenty cases of scotch. He said he needed a lot of money quick and offered to sell the whiskey at half his usual price.

“I tasted it,” Anderson said. “It was green.” He refused to buy.

“Penney got hot under the collar. He cussed me out and swore he’d get my ass. Check with my customers who were there that night, they’ll tell you. The guy was hollering so loud you could have heard him across the river in Indiana. I kicked him out of the club. I guess this ridiculous murder rap is his attempt to get revenge. Hell, why would I have to pull off a robbery? My club’s doing okay. Besides, if I had done it, do you think I’d be sitting here waiting for you coppers? I’d be in South America by now.”

Did he own the Buick?

“Yeah, and I reported it stolen over a week ago.”

The story checked out.

Where was he on the night of the murders?

“Where I am every Saturday night,” Anderson replied. “At my club.” He produced witnesses to corroborate the claim.

On the day the Lexington officials delivered Penney from Fort Worth back to Lexington, investigators informed him that his accusation against Bob Anderson leaked like a sieve. It would be his word against Anderson’s, and Anderson had a better story.

Penney thought for a moment. “What if there were two witnesses against him?”

Wary, investigators nonetheless agreed that a second witness would probably seal Anderson’s fate.

“There is a second witness,” Penney volunteered. “Raymond Baxter. He helped me plan the caper.”

Raymond Baxter was also well known to Lexington authorities. A confessed drug addict, he had been arrested on several occasions. Over the years he had lived hand-to-mouth, shifting from one menial job to another until two years ago, when he found a permanent niche—greenskeeper at the Lexington Country Club. He had been hired by Elsie Miley who, to the consternation of her friends, welcomed the pitiable Baxter like a son.

Arrested within the hour, Baxter confessed to taking part in the crime. Asked if Bob Anderson had been involved, Baxter wavered. Pressed, he finally asked, “What did Tom say?”

“He fingered Anderson,” police replied.

“Yeah? Well, sure, Bob was in on it, too.”

Cooperative to a fault, Penney led police to Fontaine Ferry Park in Louisville, where, from beneath a shrub he pointed out, they dug up a sack in which Mrs. Miley kept club receipts. In the sack were two pistols, one a .32-caliber, the other a .38. Ballistics tests revealed that the two bullets that killed Marion Miley and the three that killed her mother had all been fired from the same gun—the .32 pistol.

With two witnesses against him, Anderson was indicted along with Penney and Baxter for first-degree murder.

At Anderson’s trial, Penney turned state’s evidence. He testified that he and Baxter planned the robbery one evening at a night club near Lexington. Baxter had mentioned the large amount of money that Mrs. Miley took in each week at the Lexington Country Club. He said the money was stored downstairs over the weekend in an unguarded cash box. The pickings were too easy to pass up, Penney testified. He offered Baxter a share of the loot if he would simply leave the club house door unlocked one night. Baxter agreed.

The following day, Penney testified, he hitchhiked to Louisville and went to The Cat and Fiddle at 1901 West Main Street. He’d done business with the owner, Bob Anderson, before. He drank a few beers, then mentioned the Lexington caper to Anderson. “It’d be worth ten, maybe fifteen grand.”

Anderson was excited about the idea, Penny testified. The nightclub owner demanded to be cut in on the deal. “Next Saturday night I hitchhiked back to Louisville and waited on a side street until Bob picked me up.”

Prosecuting Attorney Jim Park, a tall, esteemed Kentucky attorney with a reputation for being scrupulously fair, questioned Penney about the events of that night.

“What time was the pick up?”

“Eleven o’clock,” Penney replied.

“In the 1941 Buick?”

“Yes.”

They drove to Lexington, Penney continued, where they marked time at a local bar. Shortly after 2:00 A.M. they left the bar and drove out Paris Pike to the Country Club.

“Bob was driving?” Park asked.

“Yes,” Penny replied.

As they approached the gates, Penny said, Bob turned off the lights and drove onto the grounds. There were two cars parked in front of the darkened clubhouse. He and Bob discussed the two cars, Penny said, and finally decided that they both belonged to Mrs. Miley.

They parked beside the two cars, tied handkerchiefs to their faces, and pulled on gloves. They went to the door that Baxter had agreed to leave open. It was locked.

The locked door infuriated Anderson, Penny testified. Bob cursed and threatened to “get Baxter” for the oversight. They went around to the side of the building, where Anderson jimmied a basement window, Penny said. He crawled in, then unlocked the kitchen door and let Anderson in. They located the main power switch, turned off all the power, then, working with flashlights, located the clubhouse office and the cash box. The box was empty.

“This time, Bob went into a real rage,” Penny said. “He tore that office to shreds trying to find where the old woman had hidden the money.”

Unsuccessful, Anderson threw the bolt to the front door, Penney said, ran to the car, and returned with two pistols. He handed one of the guns to Penney, then grabbed an iron counterweight lying loose beneath one of the windows. Anderson rushed up the stairs and Penny followed, knocking over a floor lamp at the head of the landing. When they reached the apartment door, it was locked.

“Bob began beating the door with the iron bar. When it splintered open, there was a woman standing just inside in her nightgown. Bob grabbed her and demanded to know where the money was hidden. Before she could answer . . . he shot her.”

Just at that moment, Penney testified, someone grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. A fist slammed into his face and he fell to the floor.

Stunned, Penney said he glanced up to see Anderson shoot the unexpected second person, a younger woman, in the back. The young woman took a single step toward Anderson, then collapsed. “Bob reached down and shot her in the top of the head.”

The older woman, who had watched her daughter being shot, was still alive. “Bob began to pistol-whip her, demanding money. She pleaded with him to stop. She said all the money she had was in a sack in her dresser.”

Anderson kicked the woman back to her bedroom, Penney said, then ransacked the dresser until he found the sack.

“How much money did it contain?” the prosecutor asked.

“A hundred and forty dollars,” Penney replied.

They tore the place apart, Penney said, but didn’t find another cent.

The older woman had collapsed and didn’t seem to be breathing. Convinced that both women were dead, Penney testified, he and Anderson fled the clubhouse.

“Bob ordered me to drive. When we got to the gate we spotted another car pulling out of the club driveway just ahead of us. Bob began to cuss. He was afraid the driver might have spotted the Buick. We drove back to Louisville and buried the sack and the guns in the park. Then Bob gave me some money and told me to high-tail it out of the state with the car.”

“Where did you go?” the prosecutor asked.

“Florida,” Penney replied. Then, after a couple of days, he headed for Texas. He didn’t know that the day he left Louisville, Anderson reported his car stolen.

On October 9 Penney was captured in Fort Worth.

It was damning testimony and the prosecuting attorney was determined to set the most damaging points in the juror’s minds.

He asked, “Once again, who was armed with the thirty-two pistol?”

“Anderson,” Penney replied.

“He shot the two women?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he begin shooting?”

“To keep the old woman from screaming.”

The prosecution rested.

Unlike Penney and Baxter, whose indigence compelled them to trust their fates to court-appointed attorneys, Anderson hired one of the most prestigious legal firms in Louisville. To discredit the state’s star witness, Anderson’s attorneys laid Penney’s sordid history of arrests, convictions, and tainted prison record before the jury. Then they turned to a specific attack on his testimony.

Defense: Why did you say in Fort Worth that Anderson was your only accomplice, then once back in Lexington change your story and say that Baxter was your accomplice?

Penney: Baxter was an accomplice.

Defense: Isn’t it true that Baxter was your only accomplice?

Penney: No. Baxter wasn’t even in the clubhouse. Anderson was with me.

Defense: Did you make a deal with the prosecution?

Penney: No.

Defense: Isn’t it true that you agreed to testify against Anderson in exchange for a life sentence?

Penney: No.

Defense: Do you hope for a life sentence?

Penney: No, no hope. Most likely I’ll burn.

Taken aback by this response, the defense changed the line of questioning.

Defense: Isn’t it true that on September twenty-third, five days before the murders, you had a heated argument with Bob Anderson over a business deal?

Penney: Yes.

Defense: And you swore to get even.

Penney: Yes.

Defense: And naming him as your accomplice in this crime is your way of getting even, isn’t it?

Penney: No. He was my accomplice.

Defense: Isn’t it true that on the night before the crime you went to Mister Anderson’s place of business and stole his car to use in the crime?

Penney: No, it’s not true.

Throughout the cross-examination, Penney stuck to his story. Then Baxter took the stand and corroborated Penney’s testimony in detail.

On re-direct, Prosecutor Park suggested that by reporting his Buick stolen, Anderson was using a ploy to cover up the fact of its disappearance. As for the witnesses who saw Anderson in The Cat and Fiddle on the night of the murders, the latest sighting was at 10:30 P.M., leaving ample time for him to have met Penney at 11:00 P.M. as Penney testified.

Unlike the juries for Penney and Baxter, who reached guilty verdicts in minutes, Anderson’s jury deliberated for twenty-four hours. At last, persuaded by Penney’s testimony and Baxter’s corroboration, they returned a verdict of guilty.

Sentenced to die in the electric chair, the three men were transferred to the state penitentiary in Eddyville.

Anderson’s conviction was not hailed universally. News accounts reported a widespread feeling that the trial revealed a conspiracy to convict Anderson regardless of the law and the evidence. Nonetheless, the Court of Appeals upheld the sentences. The executions were scheduled for shortly after midnight, New Year’s Day, 1943.

Around the country and in Europe, Marion Miley’s friends and mourners were satisfied. In Lexington, the police blotter was closed on the case.

Then, a bizarre turn of events transformed the cut-and-dried case into a cause célèbre.

During the year immediately following his capture, Tom Penney underwent an extraordinary transformation. At the urging of two nuns who visited him in the Lexington jail before and during the trials, he began to study Scripture. Previously contemptuous of religion, totally devoid of a spiritual nature, he was nonetheless a voracious reader. During every spare moment, he pored over material the nuns supplied him. At last, to the skepticism of those who knew him best, he requested formal instruction in Catholicism.

No man could have been better suited to the priestly task he was about to undertake than Father George Donnelly. Tall, eloquent, with an air of no-nonsense authority, Father Donnelly was nonetheless a patient and understanding tutor. From the outset, Tom Penney recognized that he could place full trust in the fair-complexioned curate with the silky white hair. In January 1942 the priest and the convict began to spend long hours together in Penney’s cell. Some prominent members of the Church hierarchy frowned on Father Donnelly’s dedication of so much time to the convicted killer and told him so. Unintimidated, the priest persevered. Over the course of the next twelve months, first in Lexington and continuing in Eddyville, he methodically guided Tom Penney to what Catholic historians would later chronicle as one of the most dramatic acts of repentance and reversals of character in modern Church history.

And it was in the bloom of his new-found faith that Penney dropped the bombshell that turned the Miley case topsy-turvy. Two weeks before the scheduled executions, Penney requested a private meeting with Warden Buchanan. That afternoon in the warden’s office, Penney said, “I lied about Bob. He wasn’t in on the murders. I stole his car like he said. He messed me up over a liquor deal and I wanted to get even. I’m sorry and want to make amends.”

His testimony at the trial had otherwise been true, Penney claimed, except for the name of his accomplice.

“Who was the accomplice?” Buchanan asked.

“Buford Stewart,” Penney replied. “We were pals. We pulled off a couple of hijackings together before the Miley caper.”

A small-time Louisville bartender, Buford Stewart had a police record for a series of minor offenses.

The warden dismissed Penney and had Raymond Baxter brought to his office. “Willie,” the warden said, “Tom says he lied about Bob Anderson. He says he wasn’t your accomplice in the murders.”

“Who’d he say was?” Baxter asked.

“You tell me,” Buchanan countered.

The little man gave a wry grin. “Did he say . . . Buford Stewart?”

Warden Buchanan called Anderson’s attorneys at once. Next morning at the prison, in the attorneys’ presence, Penney and Baxter repeated their new version of the crime. That afternoon, Penney penned a deposition by hand that matched his court testimony in nearly every detail except one—Buford Stewart’s name replaced Bob Anderson’s.

Once again the Miley case became the hottest crime story in Kentucky and beyond. Editorial sentiments ranged from “I told you so” to disdain of the new story, and with reason. Buford Stewart could not defend himself. On February 2, 1942, four months after the Miley murders, the thirty-four-year-old bartender had been killed in a street brawl in Louisville.

Anderson petitioned for a stay of execution. The state’s attorney advised caution. Naming a dead man as an alibi was a timeworn trick.

But the alibi had not come from Bob Anderson, the beneficiary. It had been volunteered by Tom Penney, who had nothing to gain other than, as he claimed, “a clear conscience.” Impressed with Penney’s sincerity, the Court of Appeals granted Anderson a stay, with the stipulation that he file at once for a new trial.

The ruling put the state in a quandary. If Penney and Baxter were executed as scheduled, the state would lose its only witnesses—albeit recanting witnesses now—against Anderson. With no alternative, the state petitioned for and won a stay of execution for Penney and Baxter.

It was a brand new ball game.

Then, as abruptly as he had rekindled the issue, the increasingly mercurial Penney dropped another bombshell. Two weeks after exonerating Anderson, Penney requested a news conference. To reporters assembled before his death-house cell he said, “I have made my peace with God. My conscience is clear.”

Then, in a ringing declaration, he announced: “From this moment on I will say no more about the Miley case, ever.”

Anderson and his attorneys were stunned. Surely Penney’s new stance didn’t mean that he would refuse to testify at Anderson’s upcoming hearing for a new trial?

Indeed, it did, Penny proclaimed.

Nonetheless, Anderson’s petition had been granted and the hearing had been scheduled.

On January 24, 1943, Warden Buchanan, accompanied by prison officials and state police, delivered Anderson, Penney, and Baxter to Lexington, where the convicted trio appeared before the Fayette County Court considering Anderson’s petition for a new trial. True to his word, Penney stood mute throughout the hearing, refusing to discuss the case or explain his silence. Defense attorneys were perplexed. Anderson was enraged.

In light of Penney’s lack of corroboration, the court refused to accept his handwritten deposition exonerating Anderson. With no new evidence to consider, Anderson’s appeal for a new trial was denied. The execution date for all three men was rescheduled for early Friday morning, February 26.

“Tonight,” Tom Waller uttered to himself as he closed the MILEY CASE file and placed it back in his HOLD basket.

The veteran attorney sat back in his seat, reflecting once again on the material he had just re-read. Which of Penney’s conflicting stories about Anderson was true? It was no secret in the legal profession that many lawyers, including some in his own firm, doubted Penney’s original testimony indicting the Louisville tavern owner. It was simply too pat, too seemingly contrived for vengeance, coming as it did so soon on the heels of Penney’s ringing declaration to “get even” with the Louisville nightclub owner. The doubters were relieved when Penney refuted his original accusation against Anderson, then dumbfounded when he turned mute.

And Baxter? Waller mused. That insignificant, puppet-like little man. Who could rely on anything he said? Was he even mentally competent? Though an admitted accomplice in the robbery, he had forgotten his one simple chore—to leave a door unlocked. Had he truly committed a capital offense?

What a quandary. Surely the case hinged on something yet unknown, something most probably locked away forever in Tom Penney’s brain.

Forever?

Perhaps not. There was an important figure in what remained of the Marion Miley murder case—Warden Jesse Buchanan. Waller thought back to the day Buchanan came to see him in torment over the prospect of executing an innocent man. Doggedly persistent, as always, the warden was searching for the truth that day, and he would undoubtedly search for the truth until the last moment.

After all was said and done, Waller reflected, if anyone could solve the riddle of Tom Penney, Jess Buchanan was the man to do it.