On Thursday evening, August 17, 1905, the idyllic New England town of Readfield, Maine was shaken by the murder of seventeen-year-old Mattie Hackett.

Mattie was the third child of Levi and Edith Hackett. A beloved student of the Maine Wesleyan Seminary & Female College at Kents Hill she was considered a hard worker, affable, learned, and pleasant. On that fated night she was strangled to death only three hundred feet from the barn where her father and a visiting stranger were tending livestock.

Over the next four months the investigators struggle to conclude whether the murder was committed by tramps passing through the town, a jealous woman, or some other unknown character, and by April the following year the county attorney is unable to secure an indictment.

Six years after the murder, an ambitious county attorney candidate promises if elected he will bring the perpetrator of the murder to justice. Elected to office the case is re-opened, re-investigated, subsequently resulting in the indictment and trial of Elsie Raymond.

In this nominally fictionalized tale, the author brings us through the fated evening, the ensuing days, weeks, months, and years through the trial of Elsie Raymond. Using in depth research, the author uses the actual facts and characters to take the reader to 1905 – 1912 Kennebec County, Maine to witness the events and experience the personal moments of those involved.