Welcome everyone to another episode of the most notorious podcast.

I'm Eric Rivenes. Thank you for joining me. I am very excited to have Lovejoy Boatler with me today.

He has had an interesting and varied career. He has worked in the Mississippi legislature,

he has worked on the Mississippi River as a deckhand, taught construction skills to disadvantaged

youth, and has taught music education in public schools among other things. And he is here to talk

about his book Crooked Snake, The Life and Times of Albert Leopard. Thank you so much for coming

on the show. Great to have you. Well, thank you. Yes. So some of this book is about you and your

experience as the victim of a kidnapping in 1968, but it primarily focuses on your kidnapper,

a man who was a murderer and prison escape artist. How did you first decide to put your

experience on paper? How did it expand into basically a biography of the man who kidnapped you

and what was the writing process like? Well, the process came about when I was in my early 40s

and I was doing some writing. I had written a couple of fiction manuscripts. I had an agent who

was interested in one of them, but I felt like it really wasn't going to go anywhere. And my wife

trying to be helpful said, oh, why don't you write about that day you were kidnapped? Well, I thought

it would be an interesting story, but it would be more of a short story. But I knew that my mother

in 1968 when I graduated from high school in that event occurred that she had met a scrapbook.

So I began, I thought about it for a while and decided I would look at the scrapbook. I don't

even think I read the articles in there when I was 18 years old, but I did find the scrapbook.

I began to read those articles about this one kidnapper who had abducted me that day

and it talked about his other escapes from parchment, penitentiary. In fact, there were six escapes

and all. It talked about people who had been kidnapped like me or robbed or tied up. The articles

told about law enforcement officers who were in the manhunts and convicts who had escaped with

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