Author Joshua Sharpe grew up in Camden County. (Photo by Max Blau)
On the evening of March 11, 1985, shots rang out inside Rising Daughter Baptist Church in Camden County, Georgia. When police arrived at the scene, they found 66-year-old church deacon Harold Swain and his 63-year-old wife, Thelma, dead on the floor of the predominantly Black church’s entryway. Though a dozen witnesses were present at the shooting, it would be over a decade before an arrest was made and even longer before the man now believed to be the killer was discovered.
Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution crime reporter Joshua Sharpe’s The Man No One Believed: The Untold Story of the Georgia Church Murders (W. W. Norton) follows the winding route to justice for the Swains, including a wrongful conviction and subsequent efforts to free the innocent man and uncover the real killer. Part true crime, part cold-case investigation and part exoneration narrative, it’s an empathetic, engrossing and tightly researched account that often disregards the bigger picture.
Sharpe’s narrative basically follows chronological order, outlining each investigator’s reasoning and blind spots as they interpret the evidence. This approach helps avoid the sensationalism and narrative manipulation that are often hallmarks of the true crime genre. However, it also scatters the narrative focus, making it difficult at times to keep track of the players and action, and it breaks up discussions of the issues that affected the case — corruption, racism, greed, professional arrogance — before they fully develop.
The text makes an effort to maintain a tone of journalistic neutrality throughout the book while noting the oversights, errors and biases of the officials involved in the case. But Sharpe doesn’t discuss ways to hold those involved accountable either for their part in the botched investigation or in future cases, despite claiming a desire to hold power to account. Nor does he directly discuss what they mean, why they matter or how they connect to broader trends and norms. He also spends very little time considering wrongful conviction and exoneration outside of the Swain case — a surprise, given the book’s title. The authorial perspective often feels muddled and cagey, as Sharpe skirts the edge of argument without quite stepping into that territory. The result is a narrative heavy on subtext but missing a clear thesis about the systems that informed the response to the case.
This is not an issue when it comes to the book’s Camden County setting and people. Sharpe, a Waycross native who grew up less than an hour from Rising Daughter, shows a distinct familiarity with and appreciation for the region and population, giving crisp, intimate descriptions of both while generally avoiding sentimentality or moralizing. Sharpe’s attention to the Swains is particularly strong. He includes plenty of details about their history and anecdotes about their family and community life that establish the depth of their loss. He’s also good at putting readers in the shoes of investigators and suspects alike, presenting clear-eyed portrayals of sometimes-unsavory people without condemning them outright. His South Georgia setting gets the same treatment. “If you were just passing through, you might think Camden County was a forgotten corner of heaven,” he writes. “But if you stayed there long enough, you’d find rot at the roots.”
That rot, Sharpe suggests, shows in the “good old boy network” behind the region’s biggest companies and the Camden County Sheriff’s Office. In the 1970s and ’80s, Camden County was part of South Georgia’s so-called “Cocaine Lane,” and Bill Smith, the department’s brash, larger-than-life sheriff, “invented a new way to make his county’s pushers work for him” by taking advantage of a Reagan-era law that allowed police departments to spend seized drug assets.
With Smith in charge, the Sheriff’s Department was plagued with corruption rumors, and Sharpe implies that the Department had little incentive to end the steady flow of drugs and money through the region, informing the circumstances that led to the murders and their aftermath. This is plausible based on the facts as Sharpe lays them out, but he fails to adequately follow through, raising readers’ suspicions without addressing them.
For example, Sharpe mentions evidence that Dale Bundy, the cold case investigator Smith eventually assigned to the Swain case, latched on to the first potential suspect he came across in his investigation and ignored alternative possibilities. But Sharpe doesn’t describe this evidence or how this approach compared to norms within the Sheriff’s Department or elsewhere. He also notes that the investigator was a close friend of Smith’s but does not discuss how that might have affected his treatment of the investigation.
Discussions of racism’s influence on the case also suffer from this lack of follow-through. The book’s long time span — beginning in the 1980s and ending in the 2020s — lends itself to exploration of 40 years of changing attitudes toward policing and race relations. Early on, Sharpe summarizes the history of racial politics in Camden County and states that racial animus and White ignorance likely impacted the case. He peppers evidence of racism and privilege throughout the rest of the narrative. However, he neglects deeper exploration of the ways those factors might have impacted the case or changed over the years, and he never brings up systemic racism as a factor. This miss feels egregious, given the issue’s continuing dominance in the national conversation and the evolving ideas about racial justice over the decades since the murders.
Without a thesis or strong sense of perspective to give the narrative broader significance and help readers understand the bigger picture, it’s easy to close this book feeling like an expert on the Swain case but having no deeper understanding of the larger issues at play. Nevertheless, The Man No One Believed, populated with distinct characters and enough twists and turns to keep readers guessing, is worth the read.
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Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and an MA from the University College Dublin, both in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.
