Half past two on a Monday afternoon, the third of March, 1952, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Augustus Shoals comes home and finds his wife sitting on the side of the bed with her head down. She tells him what his cousin did that morning — and the cousin, on the other side of the wall, hears every word of it, and calls through the boards: "If you fool with me, I will take my old scatter gun and shoot you through the wall." Shoals answers him: "No, don't do that, Pannell. Meet me out doors."

The house is three rooms in a line, split down the middle by one-by-twelve boards and paper, with two doors that open onto the same yard. Pannell is sixty and over six feet tall. Shoals is fifty-nine that day, arthritic since 1947, and out of work. The two men are cousins, and they have known each other all their lives.

This is the story of a killing the record has argued about ever since — the gun, the hour, the bullet, and the spelling of the dead man's name — of the wife who was in that house from ten in the morning until the officers came for her, and of where it ended sixteen years later, somewhere nobody in that courtroom would ever have guessed.

Content note: this episode carries a killing, a courtroom and a prison. It also quotes 1952 newspapers in the language they were printed in — including the word they used for these men in every headline. When you hear that word, that is 1952 talking, not me. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

The case file — the front pages, the court opinion, the documents — is at Section29.com.

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Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com