Few tears were shed in Cuthbert for Ernest Knight. Both Phillips and Vodicka would learn 60 years later that few, if any, people had anything good to say about the man, and, Phillips says, there was a sense that some in town were relieved to be rid of him. All the same, the fact that a white man had died at the hands of a black woman was, in those days, intolerable.

Lena Baker was charged with capital murder. From the beginning of her life, says Vodicka, Baker faced long odds. That certainly was the case at her trial.

The case was heard by Judge William "Two Gun" Worrill, a man who is still remembered in Cuthbert not for his judicial wisdom, but for his claim that he had once been a lawman in the Old West and that he had been in a dozen gunfights, killing seven. As he presided over his courtroom he kept a pair of pistols on the bench in plain view.

Justice, if it can be called that, says Vodicka, was swift. The jury of 12 white men began hearing testimony on the morning of August 14, 1944. They were home in time for dinner that night, having convicted Baker of murder.

Years later, Vodicka spoke with Dorsey Andrews, the last surviving juror. He was in his 20s when he voted along with the other men to send Lena Baker to the electric chair without a single witness having been called to testify on her behalf. And though Dorsey declined to discuss the case, saying only "I've done let it go by," Vodicka said he always had the feeling that Dorsey regretted his vote to convict a woman who, if the case were tried today, would most likely have been convicted of manslaughter at worst, or exonerated at best. "I sensed that he wanted to say that he had regrets," Vodicka said. "What he told me was, 'I was young. I was the youngest person on that jury, and I just went along. You have to understand. I just had to go along'."

In the days after Baker's conviction, her court-appointed attorney filed an appeal, but a short time later, he dropped Baker as a client and the court, finding that she had no counsel, simply dropped her appeal. At 11:45 a.m. on March 5, 1945, less than a year after Knight was killed, Lena Baker was executed for his murder.

Her last words were these: "What I done, I did in self-defense. I have nothing against anyone. I am ready to meet my God."

The only other words that marked Lena Baker's passing was a brief story in a local newspaper beneath the headline, "Baker Burns."