The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders

Journalist Sharpe’s riveting debut recounts how he helped solve a decades-old double homicide. In 1985, a white man entered the vestibule of southern Georgia’s Rising Daughter Baptist Church during Bible study and gunned down Black deacon Harold Swain and his wife, Thelma. The incident rocked sleepy Camden County, and both the sheriff’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation spent years fruitlessly trying to identify the suspect or his motive. Nearly 20 years later, a new group of officers took a crack at the case and eventually arrested Dennis Perry, who’d previously been cleared of the crime, based largely on one woman’s testimony. Perry spent the next 20 years in jail, until the Georgia Innocence Project asked Sharpe to report on their efforts to free him. Here, Sharpe details the web of corruption involving Camden County sheriff Bill Smith he unearthed while digging into the case. He also chronicles the days before and after the crime, paints vivid portraits of key suspects and investigators, and explains how focusing on another suspect helped overturn Perry’s conviction. The result is a gripping, infuriating, and enlightening work of true crime whose real-world impact can be felt on every page. (Aug.)