Personally Speaking with Karen L Cox
Event Date:
February 19, 2019 – 6:30 PM to February 20, 2019 – 8:59 PM
Location:
UNC Charlotte Center City, 320 East 9th Street
Karen L. Cox is a history professor and the founding director of the graduate public history program at UNC Charlotte. In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery — known in the press as the “Wild Man” and the “Goat Woman,” enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor Jennie Merrill at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was killed. The crime drew national coverage when it was learned that the alleged murderers shared their decaying antebellum mansion with goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate “Goat Castle.”