Deer Creek Drive cover art

Deer Creek Drive

A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

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Deer Creek Drive

By: Beverly Lowry
Narrated by: Beverly Lowry
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About this listen

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.

In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free.

In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.

Cover images: (pruning shears) Tragedy-of-the-Month, 1949, Triangle Publications, Inc.; (background) Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries

©2022 Beverly Lowry (P)2022 Random House Audio
Murder State & Local United States Mississippi

Critic Reviews

Winner of the Willie Morris Award for Nonfiction

“Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John Grisham

“Beverly Lowry’s Deer Creek Drive stands out for its richly layered narrative, one that weaves a tale based in the Mississippi Delta’s past and connects it with the author’s own personal history on the same landscape. This is a vivid portrait of a world of privilege and willful blindness that would be recognizable to Willie Morris, since this story reveals the way bigotry, as well as a violent crime, echoes across time and memory.” —Ralph Eubanks, judge for the Willie Morris Award in Nonfiction

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