Last Ride

The Last Ride is the first book ever written about the murder of prominent Nashville citizen W. Haynie Gourley on May 24, 1968, and the heart-stopping, controversial trial that riveted the city of Nashville, Tennessee, and caused a sensation during the summer of 1969. Set primarily amid the racial turmoil following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, the book traces the circumstances leading up to the killing of the popular, self-made millionaire Chevrolet dealer, the extensive manhunt and police investigation, and the improbable grand jury indictment of a popular former college football star. The work follows the life of Haynie Gourley, from before an unspeakable tragedy at age eight leads to a lonely, impoverished childhood inCross Plains, Tennessee, to his 1915 arrival as a teenager in Nashville where itinerant salesman of men's made-to-order suits, to his months in the trenches of France during WWI, to his prominence in the city's automobile industry, and his rise in the society of wealthy Belle Meade, becoming a member of the exclusive Belle Meade Country Club. The story is told against the backdrop of the founding and growth of Nashville, the nascent Civil Rights movement, the racial climate at Vanderbilt University during the still-segregated 1960s, alongwith the social history of the charmed Gourley family. The story centers around the events of the morning of May 24, 1968. Haynie Gourley, owner and founder of a successful automobile dealership, Capitol Chevrolet Company, agrees to go for a ride with his forty-year-old business partner. The two return to the dealership 15 minutes later. Haynie, 72, is dead of three gunshot wounds - one the left ear, a second to the neck, and a third to the chest. The shocking murder of a much-beloved citizen sets off a year of speculation: Where is the mysterious Black killer who vanished after jumping into the back seat of Hayn