Later that night, Sheriff Taylor drove out to Lena Baker's house. Her mother answered the door, and Taylor calmly explained why he had come. She went to rouse her daughter. Lena Baker offered no resistance when he arrested her, Taylor would later say. In fact, she was so cooperative that he decided that he didn't need to question her right away. He opted to let her sleep off the effects of the booze for at least two days before he finally asked for her version of the events that led to Knight's death.

The tale she told was one of abuse and threats of violence, of being held "a slave woman", as one local newspaper described it without irony after her brief trial and speedy execution.

According to Baker's statement, which later served as the only testimony on her behalf at trial, the chain of events that led to Knight's death had begun a day earlier, on Saturday, April 29. "I was at home," Baker would later say. "I had not gone to bed but I was at home. Somebody knocked on the door, it was him."

The old man had obviously been drinking, Lena Baker said. "He was," as she would later put it, "pretty full," and Baker had learned from experience to steer clear of the belligerent mill man when he was drunk.

"I come here to ask you if you are going to the mill tonight," Knight began. As Baker would later explain, she had no desire to join the drunken man that night, but rather than risk his ire, she said, she tried to find some way to stall him. "I asked him, 'have you got anything to drink?'" she recalled. "He says 'I got some homebrew.'" He had a jug, a quart of the moonshine, she said, which after a few hours in Knight's possession had been reduced to nothing more than one good swig. Baker told Taylor she took one long draw from the jug, handed it back to Knight and said, "I'd rather have some whiskey," adding that she told Knight that if he gave her some coins she'd go to the colored café off Dawson Street to buy a bottle of hooch. "I was doing that to get away from him," she said, "because he was pretty full when he come to my house and I knowed how it would be for I have seen him that way more than one time."

All the same, Knight gave Baker fifty cents. She made her way to the tavern, but it was late and the place was closed, she recalled. Unsure what to do next, Baker said, she sat down on a porch swing outside the bar and waited until, she thought, boredom or the booze was sure to have taken care of Knight. "I thought maybe he had gone on, but when I got back he was standing somewhere around the house watching me 'cause when I got in the house he came and knocked on the door again."

It didn't matter to Knight that the lights were out and that Baker's three children had already been put to bed. Knight was adamant, she recalled. "I said, 'Mr. Knight, it is late, you go home and go to bed.'" Baker recounted. "And he said, 'I'll be damned if I am going home until you go where I want you to, you are going. I am not going to let you rest tonight.'"

Baker would later tell Taylor and the court that she knew she needed to escape. And she tried. As the pair slogged through a nearby cemetery, Baker broke free and fled. She hid in the underbrush and waited until he wandered off in search of her.

Confused and frightened, unwilling to go home because she was certain that Knight would find her there, Baker managed despite the lateness of the hour to find a bottle of whiskey which she bought with the fifty cents she had taken from Knight, and headed to the woods around the convict camp, where she fell asleep on the hard ground until morning.

It's not clear why, but when she awoke the next morning, the first place she went was Knight's mill. The way Baker explained it, her confusion led her to the conclusion that the mill would be the one place where Knight would not be. In all likelihood, she thought, he'd be at the rooming house where he lived, or perhaps he might even still be out hunting for her. The mill, she told herself, would be safe. But perhaps, there was more to it than that, Prof. Phillips speculates. Perhaps Lena Baker was still being torn in two directions, on the one hand by her fear of Knight and his brutishness and on the other by the comfort cold comfort though it was that she found with him and his liquor.

Whatever the reason, when she reached the mill, she found an angry Knight waiting for her.

"Lena, goddammit," he barked. "You are going in my mill." With that, she said, he pulled out the small pistol he had always worn strapped across his chest and trained it on her. "He made me go in there," she said.

For the next several hours, Lena Baker remained a prisoner in the old mill, she recalled. Even though she had a chance to escape when Knight left for a few hours to drive to Cairo with his son for an old-time religious service known as a "singing" -- Lena Baker stayed. In the clarity of hindsight, Phillips now says, her decision to do what Knight had told her to do is chilling evidence of just how deeply abused Baker must have been.

Lena Baker herself put it this way: "I knew he had attempted to keep me and (I) was afraid, so I stayed in there."

It was early evening when Knight returned. He had brought with him a bottle of R.C. Cola, some stew meat and a half pint of whiskey. "I remember eating the stew beef and drinking the drink," she recalled.

"I kept telling him that I wanted to leave. I wanted to get out of there," she recalled. "He said he would kill me before I got out of there."

Even now, 60 years later, the details of what transpired next remain sketchy. The way Lena Baker remembered the events, there was a struggle. "I said, 'whenever you let me out I am going to leave you and never see you anymore,'" Baker said

"I told you whenever you quit me or attempted to leave me what I will do," Knight sputtered back.

"He run his hand in his bosom and throwed his pistol on me and we got to tussling, I got the pistol," Baker would later testify. Baker claimed that during the struggle Knight reached for a piece of iron and that she feared he would use as a weapon. Even as she tried to piece the events together, Lena Baker could not remember whether she had pulled the trigger or whether Knight had. All she knew for certain was that for an instant, the mill echoed with the thunderous report of Knight's pistol and that he collapsed dead on the floor. "I believe he would have killed me if I did not do what I did," she said.