The Family Album




This photo of Sam Hugh standing on the front porch of the home on Logtown Hill came from the family album.

 

Since 1981, the date of Ruie Ann Park's death, and now, the year 2015, a lot has happened to me.  I wrote a fiction novel about the Park murder, but I couldn't get an agent to represent me.  I wrote four more books, and I had the same result.  I taught writing classes at Westark, the community college that is today the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, or UAFS for short.  Because of those classes, I began to get assignments for various local magazines, and now I write a monthly book review and an occasional article for Do South magazine, out of Fort Smith.  The assistant editor of Do South, Marla Cantrell, took her first writing class from me, and we've been friends ever since.

My husband died of his own hand in 1996, and I went to work at the Fort Smith Public Library, where I managed Miller Branch Library for almost fifteen years.  When I retired, at the urging of Katy Boulden, the former owner and my part-time employer, of Vivian's Book Store, I returned to my original goal of writing about the Park murder.  But this time, I was going to tell the story for real.  It would be a true-crime novel.

I re-read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and studied the way he told that story of the Clutter family massacre.  I went to the Crawford County Court House and got pertinent records.  I interviewed many people who knew the Park family, in particularly those who were friends of the Park children, Sam Hugh and Linda.  Rusty and Linda Myers gave me the Park family album that they had rescued from an abandoned home scheduled for demolition.  That album told me much about the Park family, and I studied each picture.  That album told me more about the Park family than I could ever find out from anybody. 

And then I was ready.