By Two and Two Author:Jim Schutze As an author and journalist, Jim Schutze has a flair for opening closed cases to have the hidden truth. — By Two and Two is the true story of the lusty Betty Wilson and her good twin, the demure Peggy Lowe. — Betty, always ambitious, married a rich doctor who indulged her penchant for luxury - but not her appetite for desire. Peggy lived a h... more »apply married life and taught elementary school in a small Alabama town. Since childhood the women's epithets, the bad twin and the good twin, preceded them.
In 1993, their diametric lives were fused by calamity.
When Dr. Wilson, Betty's husband, was found bludgeoned to death, the twins were acused of conspiring in the murder. But why them? Was it because 1993 was an election year and the Huntsville D.A. needed a high-profile conviction? Or was it because James White, a wanderer Peggy befriended out of pity, said that the twins forced him to commit the murder in the name of their love triangle? Suddenly, the very system in which the twins held an unflagging faith threatened to betray them. A nightmare ensued.
The twins were tried separately. And those who watched the cases unravel - from the jurors to the press - were certain that they would meet identical, deserved ends: life in prison. After all, they were obviously guilty. Weren't they?
Penetrating and scandalous, By Two and Two tells of the old-fasbhioned roles that sex, race, and politics play as two juries in the deep South weigh one set of facts and deliver two different versions of justice. Here, Jim Schutze delivers a stunning expose of the flagrant affair carried on between justice and corruption in today's courts. To him, the twins' cases, more than anything, epitomize the danger of accepting the obvious - and the reward of investigating an elusive truth.« less