S18 Ep31: With The Devil's Help: A True Story of Poverty, Mental Illness, & Murder w/Neal Wooten

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4.8 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2023

⏱️ 167 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

True Crime Tuesday presents With The Devil's Help: A True Story of Poverty, Mental Illness, and Murder with Author Neal Wooten!

Neal Wooten grew up in a tiny community atop Sand Mountain, Alabama, where everyone was white and everyone was poor. Prohibition was still embraced. If you wanted alcohol, you had to drive to Georgia or ask the bootlegger sitting next to you in church. Tent revivals, snake handlers, and sacred harp music were the norm, and everyone was welcome as long as you weren’t Black, brown, gay, atheist, Muslim, a damn Yankee, or a Tennessee Vol fan.

The Wooten's lived a secret existence in a shack in the woods with no running water, no insulation, and almost no electricity. Even the school bus and mail carrier wouldn’t go there. Neal’s family could hide where they were, but not what they were. They were poor white trash. Cops could see it. Teachers could see it. Everyone could see it.

Growing up, Neal was weaned on folklore legends of his grandfather—his quick wit, quick feet, and quick temper. He discovers how this volatile disposition led to a murder, a conviction, and ultimately to a daring prison escape and a closely guarded family secret.

Being followed by a black car with men in black suits was as normal to Neal as using an outhouse, carrying drinking water from a stream, and doing homework by the light of a kerosene lamp. And Neal’s father, having inherited the very same traits of his father, made sure the frigid mountain winters weren’t the most brutal thing his family faced. Neal joins TCT to talk a bit about his family history, life story, and lessons learned from that history!

Get Neal's book, "With The Devil's Help..." here: https://bit.ly/3FlrDxW

Check out Neal's Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100075785528528

PLUS AN ALL-NEW DUMB CRIMES/STUPID CRIMINALS WITH BEER CITY BRUISER!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome in to the best in True Crime Podcasting.
0:25.4	This is True Crime Tuesday.
0:26.4	I'm your host Tim Dennis.
0:28.2	I'm not an excellent show for you today folks.
0:30.0	I had the pleasure to sit down and read a book called
0:32.3	with the Devil's Help, a True Story of Poverty,
0:34.9	Mental Illness, and Murder by our guest today, Neil Wooten.
0:39.3	It's one of those stories folks where, you know, I think when
0:43.2	we're adults, we compare war stories with each other.
0:47.4	When we're kids, we talk about who had the worst upbringing.
0:51.6	You know, when we talk about, well, you know, when I was a kid,
0:54.0	the old man knocked me around like this,
0:56.4	when I was a kid, we were so poor we didn't have this.
1:00.8	Neil has the ultimate, you know what, when I was a kid,
1:03.6	not only did the old man knock me around, not only did we,
1:07.1	so poor we didn't have this, but he's got a murder story on top of it.
1:13.2	And I'm telling you the amount of knocking around in the amount of
1:16.4	poor comes to epic levels, but on top of it, there's a twist at the end
1:21.6	of the book, which of course I'm not going to tell you about that.
1:25.2	Bygosh will kind of wrench your heart twisted and also it's a little heartwarming as well.
1:30.9	Well, we're not going to talk about the end of the book.
1:33.8	Of course, it's the monster at the end of the book, but it's sort of
	...

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