Tag: Remembering Ella

Book Buzz: Local True Crime

Usually the Book Buzz posts are a round-up of new-ish books in the library, but today we’re doing something a little different!

A couple of weeks ago, Jason Harmon reached out to our library system to let us know he would be appearing on the new Ozarks-themed podcast Ozarkian Folk Chronicles.

Back in 2003, he worked with David McElyea on his memoir When Money Grew on Trees: The True Tale of a Marijuana Moonshiner and the Outlaw Sheriff of Madison County, Arkansas. Written under the pen name of David Mac, the book recounts how McElyea grew an illegal marijuana farm in Madison County in the 1980s and 1990s under the protection of the then-sheriff Ralph Baker. It recounts both McElyea’s and Baker’s rise and fall, and it is a perennial favorite with patrons in our library system.

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Nita Gould’s Remembering Ella (2018)

Remembering Ella

One of the more infamous crimes in our local area is the gruesome 1912 murder of Ella Barham in rural Boone County, which is just next door to us here in Berryville. I must confess, I had never actually heard of the crime until I read this book. Author Nita Gould has family ties to the case–Ella is a cousin, though one who died long before Gould was born. As Gould quickly learned when she started researching the case, local oral tradition of the case is unreliable and contradictory, so she instead turned to the extensive news coverage of the crime and court files to detail the murder of the vivacious eighteen-year-old and the subsequent arrest and trial of one of her neighbors. Thank you to Julie for ordering this book for me!

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