“Yes, sir. I done yard work for her sometimes, and I painted her house last year.”

“Ever have any problems with her?”

“No, sir. Not nary a one. Me and her got along like two peas in a pod.”

“Where were you that night, Mr. Dockery?”

“I was a-campin’ on the Nolichucky River more’n two miles from her house.”

“In November?”

“Yes, sir. My mama’s got a cabin down there. It’s got a fireplace and all. I go there a lot.”

“Anyone with you?”

“No, sir. I was all by my lonesome.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dockery. Please answer the prosecutor’s questions.”

It was the shortest direct examination of a criminal defendant I’d ever seen, and it was smart. Up to that point, the prosecution had been able to establish only that Billy Dockery had done landscaping work for eighty-six-year-old Cora Wilson. They established that Dockery had camped along the Nolichucky River about two miles from Ms. Wilson’s home the night she was beaten and tortured to death, a fact the defense did not dispute. They established that a length of nylon rope found around Ms. Wilson’s neck was the same kind of rope found in the back of Billy Dockery’s truck. The prosecutor’s expert witness could not go so far as to say the rope was an exact match, only that it was made of the same material, of the same weave and circumference, and manufactured by the same company. Unfortunately for the prosecution, the defense subpoenaed an executive from the company that made the rope, and he testified that more than fifty thousand feet of that very same rope had been sold within a twenty-five-mile radius of the courthouse in the past five years.

The prosecution’s star witness in the case, a seventeen-year-old named Tommy Treadway, had initially confessed to breaking into the house with Dockery that night but refused to sign a statement. Treadway told the police that he left when Dockery began to torture Ms. Wilson. But Treadway was released on bond after he agreed to testify against Dockery and wound up driving his car off the side of a mountain in Carter County a month before the trial. His death was ruled an accident.