Take a half century into the past up the steps and in the door of the Greenville County Courthouse.

You walk down the hall and there's a series of offices.

And into the courtroom where Charles Wakefield Jr. stood trial in 1976

for the murders of Rufus and Frank Looper.

Right off to the right of it was the court reporter's office

where Liz Bobo and another woman whose name I can't remember

would sit and smoke cigarettes.

So when they opened the door, a cloud of smoke would come out like nothing. smoke the first aisle of the courtroom. There's room in there for 350 or 400 people.

Frank Epp's junior's father was the judge. The younger Frank practices today in smaller, more sterile court rooms.

And he gets nostalgic, just thinking about that room where his

dad sat on the bench. Honestly the courtrooms are smaller now and it's just

different I like big court rooms For some reason there's people that

design them that don't think big courtrooms are a thing but I like them and I think

you miss the whole flavor of the main courtroom in Greenville and how big it was

and how full it was the people and the interaction of it.

Judge Epp's son remembers all of his years at the courthouse and a woman named Mabel

who sat in the front row every day of court.

She'd sit there and hold out her hand and lawyers give her a quarter before they went up to the bench and some lawyers viewed it as a tax and some lawyers viewed it as a good luck charm.

Mabel was a fixture, a somebody in that courtroom, but not the only one.

The courthouse in those days was chock full of people every day

that there was court. There were people doing other court business. There were

people that just showed up. There was no internet. There were three channels on television.

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