Town note
The land was bought by B.B. Boon, a descendant of Colonel Ruben Holman Boon, who was said to be a relative of Daniel Boone.
about 0:05:21The story
In the autumn of 1985 Stacy Diane Pannell, eighteen, arrived at Northeast Mississippi State College in Boonville, Mississippi, on a band and drill team scholarship. She had graduated fourth in a class of eighty-three at Ripley High and had been crowned fairest of the fair in Tippah County in 1982. She chose the junior college to stay near her father, Wiki Pannell, a Vietnam veteran being treated for a brain tumour, and because band members had to live on campus she moved into Murphy Hall, a dormitory of 136 girls.
On Monday October 7 she went to classes and band practice, played an intramural softball game in which she hurt her knee, ate pizza with friends and returned to the dorm about 11:15 that night, drunk and limping. She woke around 12:30 as Pannell and other girls came home, and later went next door to talk.
She locked the hall door, washed her hands and placed a pillow over Pannell's head. She cut the window screen with a steak knife, pulled Pannell's underwear down to suggest rape, wiped the rifle and wrapped its barrel in a towel, then burned the cut screen and her T-shirt, flushed the debris and sprayed Amy Wheeler's perfume to hide the smoke.
In the dim light she saw Pannell's skin and blood on the pillow, with her underwear pulled down, and ran for help. Police found Pannell on her back, one leg on the floor, naked from the waist down and a pillow over her head, with severe injuries to the left side of her head and blood spatter up to nine feet away. Her jewellery and money were untouched. A bloodstained wooden drill rifle with a towel around the barrel lay on the floor, and an eight- to ten-inch section had been cut out of the window screen.
The case went cold. Fifteen investigators worked it, more than 400 students were interviewed and the FBI produced a profile, but there were no usable fingerprints and no leads beyond a local sex offender and a jealous college boyfriend who failed a lie detector question. Nearly a year on, the family considered a private detective and even a psychic. In 1987 Steve Rhodes, police chief of East Hazel Crest, Illinois, and a lecturer in neurolinguistic programming, was brought in.
She also wrote an eleven-page letter to Randy Price, a boyfriend of a week, describing the killing. The defence argued that she was too small to inflict the wounds and that she had been in a hypnotic trance since being hypnotised a year earlier.