Six Inches Deeper: The Disappearance of Hellen Hanks

Rawlings (A Killing on Ring Jaw Bluff) provides a chilling account of one of the South’s most controversial murder cases. One day in 1972, Hellen Hanks, a 34-year-old white mother of three, disappeared from Wilcox Outdoor Advertising in Valdosta, Ga., where she worked as a secretary. Eight years later, a farmer clear-cutting some land dug up a metal box that turned out to hold human bones. (He told police that had it been buried six inches deeper, the plow would have never unearthed it.) Ernest “Foxy” Wilcox, the advertising company’s 73-year-old white owner, and his 29-year-old son, Keller, were arrested for Hanks’s murder, along with two African-American employees, who were the last people to see her alive. Despite defense claims at the 1982 trail that the police had threatened the two black employees into testifying that Keller asked them to dig a hole the day Hanks disappeared, Keller was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. Then, in 1985, a federal judge threw out the conviction due to lack of evidence. But the state won an appeal, and Keller went back to prison and stayed there until he confessed to the crime in 2006. In 2008, he was released on parole. It was a case with no clear answers, no real evidence, and conflicting testimony—and it’s left open whether Keller, after denying he did it for three decades, only confessed to get parole. Rawlings’s meticulous stick-to-the-facts style will keep readers turning the pages. (Mar.)