HerKentucky Whiskey Glass Rating: 🥃🥃🥃🥃

Publisher’s synopsis: On October 26, 1961, after an evening of studying with friends on the campus of Transylvania University, nineteen-year-old student Betty Gail Brown got into her car around midnight―presumably headed for home. But she would never arrive. Three hours later, Brown was found dead in a driveway near the center of campus, strangled to death with her own brassiere. Kentuckians from across the state became engrossed in the proceedings as lead after lead went nowhere. Four years later, the police investigation completely stalled.

In 1965, a drifter named Alex Arnold Jr. confessed to the killing while in jail on other charges in Oregon. Arnold was brought to Lexington, indicted for the murder of Betty Gail Brown, and put on trial, where he entered a plea of not guilty. Robert G. Lawson was a young attorney at a local firm when a senior member asked him to help defend Arnold, and he offers a meticulous record of the case in Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? During the trial, the courtroom was packed daily, but witnesses failed to produce any concrete evidence. Arnold was an alcoholic whose memory was unreliable, and his confused, inconsistent answers to questions about the night of the homicide did not add up.

Since the trial, new leads have come and gone, but Betty Gail Brown's murder remains unsolved. A written transcript of the court proceedings does not exist; and thus Lawson, drawing upon police and court records, newspaper articles, personal files, and his own notes, provides an invaluable record of one of Kentucky's most famous cold cases.

HerKentucky review: Betty Gail Brown was a Lexington native, a Transylvania University student, and a member of the Delta Theta Chapter of Phi Mu. She was on campus late one Thursday night in October studying for a biology exam; the following morning, she was found dead in her car. Intense media coverage, a thorough police investigation, and a prolonged trial ensued. In Who Killed Betty Gail Brown?, Mr. Lawson, longtime criminal law professor at UK College of Law, recreates the crime, the investigation, and the legal proceedings from his perspective as the defense attorney for the accused killer, an alcoholic drifter named Alex Arnold.

I was immediately drawn to this story because I love any story about Lexington's past, and I loved my years as a Phi Mu in the Transy chapter. Of course, I needed to read about what happened to my sorority sister!

The book is extremely respectful of Miss Brown, and takes pains to explain why the author and his law partner were committed to the belief that Mr. Arnold was, in all likelihood, not the killer. Professor Lawson's most-read work is Kentucky's Penal Code, and I will say that the story is, at times, very lawyerly and dry. There is no sensationalism in the work -- in fact, there are times when more details would have aided the story -- and the book often reads like the recitation of facts in a legal brief. It's an interesting exercise for a reader: I find myself coming to the story with an interest in Lexington history, and the victim's school and sorority, while the author is interested in finding answers to an unsolved crime and legal proceedings that ended in mistrial. It's an interesting exercise in perspective. For example, I found in follow-up research that the victim was a niece to the late Kentucky-born actor Harry Dean Stanton. I found this detail fascinating; of course it was omitted from the narrative of the book because it had nothing to do with the story.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes stories true crime, legal nonfiction, or Lexington history. If you're familiar with Transylvania's campus, it's eerie to think that this terrible crime took place in an area where you've walked so many times. Professor Lawson tells a great story from the perspective of his own involvement in the story, and his own uncertainty about who actually killed Miss Brown.

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