The made-for-TV movie Murder in Coweta County is based on a true crime book of the same title, written by Margaret Anne Barnes. Set in 1948 in rural western Georgia – unlike Maycomb or Yoknapatawpha, Coweta County is a real place – the film dramatizes a murder case that involved a wealthy local landowner, the stubborn sheriff of an adjacent county, and an eccentric fortuneteller. Directed by a longtime TV director, the film’s cast is led by country singer Johnny Cash, and in a very unusual role reversal, Andy Griffith plays the bad guy.

Murder in Coweta County opens with a black screen and a two-paragraph text flows in from the bottom. We find out that we are watching a story set in 1948 and that its subject is “The Kingdom,” a petty empire run by a corrupt man who was above the law. After being given a moment to read this, we are brought to a rural field lined by trees. The first thing we see is a pistol tucked into the waist of a man’s pants. Then we meet John Wallace (Andy Griffith). He is standing beside an old pickup, and two men come out of the woods, loading boxes into the bed then covering them with burlap. They give him cash, which he counts. Just then, another car comes up, and the local sheriff Hardy Collier gets out. We see others in the car, but they stay put. We expect that Wallace and the two men might be in trouble – they are trafficking in moonshine, of course – but Collier greets Wallace casually, looks in the truck, and advises the drivers which route to take to avoid being caught. Wallace never shows any sign that the sheriff is a threat, and from this scene, we also know that he isn’t. Over in the car, the sheriff has brought a black man who they have caught making moonshine as well. The man is frightened at what will happen to him, and we see Wallace put a gun to his head then slam his hands in the heavy car door before the scene ends.

While the opening credits roll, we see the choir of a country church singing, then John Wallace and Hardy Collier are coming up the road in the sheriff’s car. Wallace is dropped off in front of the church, which has just let out, and he starts smiling and glad-handing. Here, we get another look at what a scoundrel this guy really is: skipping church to sell moonshine, then proudly handing over his dirty money to the preacher to buy new pews!

Later, in the backwoods, two black men are working at a still, making moonshine. Just then a young white man named Wilson Turner startles them and laughs as he walks up. He is proud because he has been running moonshine on the side, and the other two warn him against such a bad idea. Turner is one of Wallace’s sharecroppers, and he is making extra money to support a wife and child. His mood is jovial, then John Wallace appears. At first, Wallace jokes about having seen the revenuer’s car turned over in ditch, knowing it was Turner who he was chasing, then his tone changes. He wants Turner’s money, since Turner didn’t get approval first. Turner pleads that he needs the money for his wife and child, so Wallace hits him, throws him on the ground, and takes the money. He tells Turner that he has gotten greedy and that he should leave Wallace’s land. Turner protests that he has crops in the field, but Wallace replies that it is his field. Wilson Turner has to go.

Next we see Turner, he is packing up his truck in front of an old tin-roof shack, while his sad-faced wife holds their young child nearby. Turner walks to the field and looks out at it. He has an idea. Come nightfall, he steals one of Wallace’s cows as repayment for the money that was taken. Too bad for him, though, he is soon arrested in an adjacent county as he is unloading the cow from his truck.

This begins the ordeal that will result in Wilson Turner’s death. His immediate concern on being arrested is that he will be returned to Meriwether County, where John Wallace will be able to get to him. Well, that’s exactly what happens. He is awakened in his cell to find out that he is being transferred, and John Wallace is there at the cell door with the officers. In that second jail, in Meriwether, he first begs the woman who cooks in the jail to call his wife, then he hollers out the window a woman walking by on the sidewalk to get her to notify his wife. The first woman denies his request, and the second woman ignores it. Soon, the woman working in the jail just comes and tells him that he is free, that she was instructed to let him out at noon. So, he can leave. Turner is frightened by this strange turn of events, but chooses to walk through the open door.

Outside, Turner’s truck is waiting, but he finds that it is out of gas. With no choice, he heads for a gas station, only to find that John Wallace and three other men are waiting for him there. He quickly realizes that this is an ambush and tries to get away. Of course, they chase him. Down rural two-lane roads, they speed past a gang of convicts doing road work – this will become important later – and over a bridge with a sign that reads “Coweta County.” This will also become important, but soon. Wilson Turner runs out of gas and barrels into the large dirt parking lot of the Sunset Tourist Camp. There, Wallace and his goons accost Turner, and during the struggle, Wallace pistol-whips him so hard that the gun goes off. He does this right in front the people who have come out of the cafe to see what is going on.

And it is these witnesses who call the law, and we meet Sheriff Lamar Potts (Johnny Cash), who is sitting in a town-square cafe with his deputy. He gets word about the attack and kidnapping, and they speed away to investigate. Potts hears the details of how the man was hit in the head and how the gun went off. A deputy then tells Potts that they got a partial license plate on the tan four-door that carried Turner away and that they ran Turner’s license plate to figure out his identity. All of the signs point back to John Wallace.

As the investigation continues, Potts finds out who at least one of the men was – Herring Sevill – and that he was involved another murder over a card game. John Wallace fixed those charges for him. Over in Meriwether County, Potts and his deputy talk to Sheriff Collier, who provides an alibi for Wallace and who says that Wallace is out of town on business. Potts assures him, however, that he has jurisdiction, since possible-murder took place in Coweta County, and thus he will not be deterred. Collier is to bring Wallace and Sevill to Coweta County the next morning. Seeking to investigate further, Potts goes to a nearby store, where a local woman would have been in position to see the events from her doorway. Yet, she repels Potts resentfully and insists that John Wallace is a fine, upstanding man.

At this point, Sheriff Collier knows that he has to warn Wallace. He rides out to a field, where Wallace has two black men helping him remove a tree. (This is the first of two keenly un-Southern scenes where men do heavy work while a mule just stands there.) Wallace is unabated, telling his friend/accomplice that Wilson Turner had to be killed; otherwise, every other sharecropper would be stealing property, too. He says that Potts ought to understand that. But Collier explains that Potts doesn’t see it that way. Wallace seems genuinely confused now, and Collier continues. He tells the story of a Potts tracking a black man, who killed his wife, all the way to Kansas. The way Collier puts it, If Potts can find that guy all the way out in Kansas, then he can certainly find Turner’s body nearby.

So John Wallace decides to visit the fortuneteller Mayhayley Lancaster under the cover of darkness. He arrives, driven by Herring Sevill, to the woman’s cabin, which is guarded by numerous unruly dogs. She lets him in to her dim shack, where her strange sister is giggling manically under the bedclothes. For a fee, Mayhayley will look into the fire to see the future. Wallace wants to know whether Potts will bring Turner’s body, and she tells him in half-riddles what he does not want to hear. Wallace then storms out and, in the car, tells Sevill, “He can’t find the body if there ain’t no body.”

Now, two things will go on at the same time, and the scenes will cut back and forth. Potts conducts his search, starting with Wallace’s house, while Wallace destroys the evidence of his crime. Potts and his men drive out of Wallace’s home down a long red-dirt road, but only his wife is home. She is very civil and ladylike, allowing them to search the house, while she waits. But Wallace is not there. She adds in a vague way that John Wallace has another woman that she sometimes stays with. But he’s not with a woman on that particular day. Out in the woods, Wallace has the same two black men from the still earlier, and they are looking for an abandoned well. It is where Wilson Turner’s body has been hidden. They throw a grappling hook down in the well, hook the body, and pull him out. (This is the second strange scene with a mule. Wallace’s brings a mule with them, walks it through thick woods, then he has the men pull the rope while the mule just stands there.) The two helpers are horrified, but Wallace instructs them to tie him to a pole, which they will hoist onto their shoulders. Wallace will make them carry Turner’s body through the woods to another location. They do this while Potts and his men are questioning Turner’s family, who fear for their safety. Meanwhile, John Wallace and his reluctant helpers burn Turner’s body and methodically put his ashes in a nearby stream.

By this time, Murder in Coweta County is near its halfway mark, and Sheriff Potts is beginning to tighten his grip on John Wallace. Sheriff Collier shows up in the morning with Wallace and Sevill, and Wallace is all smiles, sure he will beat the rap. But Potts has his bloody clothes from searching the Wallace home, and the jacket has blood down the back where he has thrown a body over his shoulder. Wallace thought he was coming in to laugh off the charges and go home, but now he and his accomplice are under arrest. Moreover, because the killers had the audacity to show up in the car they drove when they committed the crime, Potts has that, too. The only thing to do now is assemble a great big posse to go out and find the body of Wilson Turner.

They good guys search high and low, in fields and in woods, asking questions of people who may know something. Potts even visits Mayhayley Lancaster to ask her about whether John Wallace came to see her and wanting answers. The big break comes with the arrest of another accomplice, who is a member of Wallace’s family. He has his whole family guarding his front door, but Potts assures them that he will kill at least one of them if they try to act. Once three of them are in custody, the various things that each has said begin to work against all of them. In the jail, Sheriff Potts stands in front of their cells to explain how the evidence and their own statements have aid him in understanding Wilson Turner’s murder.

The only thing remaining is to find the body. With the help of a cagey old revenuer and tracker who has wanted to bust Wallace for years, a large posse searches high and low. While this search is going on, Potts finds himself alone in the woods and is met by spooky backwoods character who wants to share information. The man is wary of talking, since he knows that it can get him killed. But he has found Potts in an isolated location, where no one will know he did, so he spills the beans. The man points Potts to the two black men he is looking for, the ones at the still, the ones who helped to move the body, the ones who helped burn up the body and dispose of it in the stream.

With their help, Potts unravels Wallace’s scheme. Before long, Potts finds the two men, and together they reveal the site where the body was destroyed. And there is still evidence: ashes and bone shards. The final nails in the coffin for John Wallace come when the surly jail cook tells Potts about the instructions to let Turner out of jail and when the heart attack-prone Sheriff Collier is cornered in his office. The only thing left is a trial.

And the whole town comes out for the trial! The old guys who play dominoes on the sidewalk are there, and Mayhayley Lancaster has come to testify. The gallery is packed. We know that Wallace is pinned down when he two accomplices refuse to testify in his defense. Their lawyers stand and announce their intention to stay in the gallery and stay silent. John Wallace’s last hope is to use his charisma and his standing in the community to weave an elaborate tale about how he isn’t guilty, though the facts might indicate that he is. But it doesn’t work. He is found guilty and sentenced to death.

Though the first ninety-percent of the movie are pretty trite and predictable, the final minutes make this Southern movie and its story more interesting. John Wallace e sits in a jail cell awaiting the electric chair, but he is all smiles. He isn’t worried, because they just don’t give white men the chair. He is just waiting on a pardon from the governor, when he will go home and resume his life . . . but the pardon doesn’t come. A shocked John Wallace’s face is covered with the cloth hood, and he is electrocuted. As the film closes out, we learn that Hardy Collier, the sheriff who saw these dark days coming for “The Empire,” died of a heart attack before his trial could happen.

Though I did not watch this movie when I was a boy in the 1980s, I had heard about the story prior to watching it as an adult. In the early 2000s, I was working at NewSouth Books during the time we published Dot Moore’s Oracle of the Ages, which tells the story of Mayhayley Lancaster, played here by June Carter Cash. Lancaster was a character no one could make up, if she hadn’t been real: a one-eyed woman who was a fortuneteller, a lawyer, a midwife, probably a bookie, and even a candidate for state legislature. June Carter Cash does a good job in her role, but I also have a hard time believing that anyone could accurately convey a person so strange and formidable. One significant problem with the portrayal is that the film’s description notes a one-eyed fortuneteller but June Carter Cash, even in somewhat ghastly make up, clearly has two eyes.

As a document of the South, the movie sticks to the facts pretty well, though its have a few moments when a Southerner would notice something and go, Huh? One thing is the way that Johnny Cash’s character speeds into downtown and burns rubber into and out of parking spots. Small  town Southerners would definitely not care for that kind of driving in an area where so many people are walking. The story is also a bit stranger and more colorful than this milquetoast TV movie allows for. So,for those who may be interested in the real story, Barnes’ book is still available, in both used and new copies. An online search will even turn up some results, including Georgia State University’s archives with an Atlanta Journal-Constitution photo of the real John Wallace and Lamar Potts walking into the courtroom.