Today’s Nonfiction book review is on Murder in McComb: The Tina Andrews Case by Trent Brown. It is 305 pages long and is published by LSU press. The cover is a green sepia picture of where Tina Andrews was found with her fourth grade school picture in it. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime, race and societal politics in the Deep South, and in-depth investigative journalism. There is mild foul language, no sex, and description of violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the dust jacket- What remained of the badly decomposed body of 12 year old Tina Marie Andrews was discovered underneath a discarded sofa in the woods outside of McComb, Mississippi, on August 23rd, 1969. Ten days earlier, Andrews and a friend had accepted a ride home after leaving the Tiger’s Den, a local teenage hangout, but they were driven instead to the remote area where Andrews’ was eventually murdered. Although eyewitness testimony pointed to local police officers, no one was ever convicted of this brutal crime, and to this day the case remains officially unsolved. Contemporary local newspaper coverage notwithstanding, the story of Andrews murder has not been told. Indeed, many people in the Macomb Community, more than 50 years later, hesitate to speak of the tragedy.
Trent Brown’s Murder in McComb is the first comprehensive examination of this case, the extended trials that followed. Brown also explores the public shaming of the state's main witness, a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, and the subsequent desecration of Andrews' grave. Set against the uneasy backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Brown’s study deftly reconstructs various accounts with the murder, explains why the jury's reached the verdict that they did, and explores the broader forces that shape the community Andrews live and died.
Review- This is an in-depth journalistic investigation into not only the officially unsolved murder of Tina Andrews, but also the society that she was born into that made her murder unsolved. Tina Andrews was 12 years old when she was out late and accepted a ride with her friend, by two men one of whom was believed to be a police officer. Instead of taking the two girls home the two men took them to the oilfield a bare patch in the woods, in order to have sex with them. Which the two girls were not interested in and tried to get away, the only witness surviving was Tina's friend and the two men who killed her. Brown is coming some fifty years after the murder and the trials to try and reconstruct what exactly happened that night in August 1969. Of course local gossips thinks that the two men, one of whom was tried twice and found innocent once, were the ones who did it. But because Tina Andrews came from a very poor family, her friend identified them was also seen is not a very good person, and the accused men were both out upstanding police officers, they got away with murder; at least everyone in the city of McComb thinks that. Brown doesn't try to say who did what but instead tries to reconstruct what happened. What made the community turn against two young girls in such a way. This was at times a difficult book to read, not because of the writing style but because we're talking about two children, one of them was murdered and the other was slandered in her community because she didn't live up to some standards. If you're looking for a true crime book that examines more than just the crime scene but the community that enabled crime and the murderer to get away with it I highly recommend this book.
I get this book a Four out of Five Stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrow this book from my local library.
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