For most of the state of Alabama, October of 1946 was a happy time.

The sweltering summer heat was beginning to break.

The Auburn Tigers' college football team started their season 3-0.

The Alabama Crimson Tide started 4-0, but then had an up and down ride for the rest of the year.

And even though the in-state rivals didn't play each other that year, they did agree to resume their annual game,

nicknamed the Iron Bowl the following year after a 40-year hiatus.

Also of note that October, the Tide beat Kentucky and its new head coach, Paul Bear Bryant.

Bear Bryant had finished his playing career at Alabama 10 years earlier in 1936,

and he was 12 years away from becoming the head coach at Alabama and an American sports legend.

In the country at large, 1946 was the first full year in the last 7 that the world was not at war.

But in East Central Alabama, along the Chattahoochi River, the times were not as happy.

In Phoenix City, there was about to be a sensational and divisive murder trial.

In mid-September 1946, Phoenix City Mayor Elmer Reese was reelected to a position on the 3-person city commission.

He won that election with the help of his friend Hoyt Shepard and Shepard's criminal machine.

During the victory celebration at Shepard's Southern Manor Club, a criminal boss from Columbus, Georgia,

directly across the Chattahoochi River, strolled in with his date.

Less than an hour later, the criminal boss, Fayette Liburn, was dead.

Fate, as he was called, was shot at least twice in a small gambling room near the main bar of the Southern Manor Club.

Witnesses said Hoyt Shepard and his younger brother, Grady, were the only two people in the room with Fayette Liburn,

and Hoyt was most likely the killer.

When the cops finally arrived, 15 minutes after the shooting, Hoyt was gone,

and Grady had a very thin story about how the shooting happened.

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