The Electric Festival: A Michael Wickham Mystery

By far the hottest ticket for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was for the Sunday night performance featuring Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Thousands of folk music fans had made the pilgrimage from many parts of the country to witness it including a twenty year old girl from western Maryland who had hitch-hiked and traveled by train to see and hear Dylan only to be brutally murdered within earshot of that historic performance. A suspect was identified, stood trial, was hastily convicted and sentenced to spend twenty-five years in a maximum security prison.

On the twentieth anniversary of the murder of young Mattie Shadwell a cryptic phone call to the Mike Wickham radio show set into motion an unsanctioned investigation of the two decades old homicide. Wickham's friend and Newport Police homicide detective Steve Carpenter heard the call awakening within him a long latent belief that the man now serving time was in fact innocent. A small band of similarly dedicated investigators poured over stacks of twenty year-old interrogation summaries and evidence reports slowly exposing the real story resulting in a cross-country pursuit of the actual murderer who had not only ended a young life but had stood by as another young person rotted in prison for over twenty years for the crime he himself had committed.