Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South by Karen L. Cox (review)

Karen Cox's newest book, Goat Castle, demonstrates the author's versatility and virtuosity as a writer. Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, stepped out of the academic monograph and into the world of true crime. Goat Castle is the strange story of the 1932 murder of Jennie Merrill of Natchez instigated by her eccentric neighbors, Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery and carried out by George Pearls, an African American drifter. It is also the story of Emily Burns, an African American woman wrongly sent to prison for a crime she did not commit. However, this is more than just a murder story. What makes it all the more interesting is that Cox keeps the best elements of the genre and weaves in a subtle, yet powerful, scholarly approach. This work is also a history of Natchez in the Great Depression, an analysis of the appeal of the southern gothic for a national audience, and an example of the racial injustices of the Jim Crow South.

The opening chapters focus on character development, beginning with a place and not a person—Natchez, a once powerful antebellum community which, by the 1930s, epitomized the faded aristocracy of the mythical Old South. Cox then moves to the murder victim Jennie Merrill, a progressive woman who was well-educated and widely traveled. Merrill never married but helped her father when he was a U.S. ambassador. The press characterized her simply as an elderly aristocratic recluse. The last two characters are Merrill's neighbors Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery, who live at Glenwood, the ancestral home of Dana. Known in the press as the "Wild Man," Dana was a middle-age man that was mentally unfit to care for himself. He was living in absolute squalor in his family home, which the press called Goat Castle because of the many farm animals roaming in the home. Because Octavia Dockery lived with Dana and the goats, she was nicknamed the "Goat Woman." She was the unpaid caretaker who was scratching out a living and doing what she could to keep herself and Dana on the property. She was constantly getting into endless legal wrangles with her neighbor Merrill, typically over the goats. There was the sad story of Emily Burns, a poorly paid domestic who grew up in Natchez and was widowed at a young age. By her thirties, she lived with her mother and worked as a laundress, later meeting the much older George Pearls, an outsider from Chicago who was persuaded by Dockery to rob Merrill. Along with Dockery and Dana, Pearls coaxed his new friend Emily to come to the Merrill home where the robbery turns into a murder. With the characters in place, Cox details the murder and the subsequent investigation, which made Dana and Dockery into media sensations and quietly put the innocent Emily Burns in jail. The final chapters explore how the eccentric couple of Goat Castle profit from their notoriety by opening their decrepit home to curious tourists.

There is so much to enjoy in this work because it appeals on several different levels. The book has all the hallmarks of a great crime story with twists and turns, character motivations, and last minute reveals with a lively narrative. It is a bizarre story that seems like it should be fiction. Yet, this account is rigorously researched, with Cox using a wide range of primary sources—not just newspapers but collections in state and local archives, court ledgers, and extensive oral interviews. It is more than a good well-told crime story—Cox contributes to the history of the twentieth-century South and provides a nuanced portrayal of a Deep South society in the middle of an economic crisis. She demonstrates how the southern gothic landscape of Goat Castle appealed to outsiders...