“Everybody in this little mountain community knew that Timothy Carl Chandler had been arrested on child pornography charges. It was in the newspaper and all over the TV news. Two of Chandler’s neighbors decided to do something about it, police say. They’re accused of trying to scare him off by setting fire to his tiny house tucked away in a hardscrabble Appalachian hollow. Chandler, 53, escaped from the flames. But his wife was killed in what authorities are calling an example of vigilante justice. ‘I really wish it wasn’t me who got out,’ Chandler told Knoxville television station WBIR. ‘I wish it was her. She didn’t deserve that.’ Robert ‘Bobby’ Bell, a 37-year-old construction worker, and Gary Lamar Sellers, a 39-year-old coal-mining equipment mechanic, are jailed on $1 million bond, charged with first-degree murder and arson. After losing all his possessions in the Sept. 2 fire, Chandler was living in a Knoxville homeless shelter. His attorney, public defender Larry Bryant, said Chandler expects to enter a plea next month to charges he downloaded more than 100 pornographic pictures of young girls. His mother-in-law found some of the pictures on a disk he had given her to copy computer programs in May. She tipped off police, and Chandler was arrested Aug. 20. Released on $100,000 bond, he came home a few days before the fire. Sellers and Bell told police they did not intend for anyone to die. They just wanted to get Timothy Chandler out of the neighborhood because he was ‘a pervert,’ Chief Deputy Bill Lane said. Sellers admitted driving the pickup truck used that night, but he claimed Bell set the fire, according to an affidavit. After lighting the blaze, the pair ‘drove to a close location where both men watched the residence burn.’” — AOL News (US)

(Thanks to Angela for the link.)

If you harbor any desires to become a Southern Gothic writer, here is a great story to test your inner Faulkner. The stage for your novel is a picturesque mountain community: “The Chandlers and both suspects all lived on Butler Lane, a twisting one-lane country road that runs past small fields, weathered houses, outbuildings and trailers, and rusting farm machinery. Homes are clustered so closely together that neighbors can keep an eye on each other from their back porch swings.” Your plot can veer from illicit sexual desires — pedophilia and, since it’s a secluded mountain town, incest — to murder. Your characters may be plebeian but the thematic potentials are great. You can write about how “bad” people become victims of others with “good” intentions. You can ironize about the way in which a pedophile was stigmatized for sexual impulses in a part of the country where, historically, it has not been unknown for adolescents to be offered in marriage.

If you’re both talented and lucky, you could write a bestseller, sell the film rights, and maybe even sign George Clooney — who grew up a few hours away in Kentucky — to play the lead. Meanwhile the sad-sack characters who really lived this melodrama can play it out to its dreary conclusion. Here’s the guy who started it all by downloading kiddie porn. Here’s the remains of his house. It’s hard to say which looks sadder. The guy is in a homeless shelter, at least until he goes to court on the child pornography charge. Surely he’ll plea-bargain: he has nowhere to live, so he might as well plead guilty and spend a few months recuperating in jail while he figures out what to do with his life. Meanwhile the do-gooder arsonists, who are portraying their murder as an “unfortunate accident,” will spend a few years in jail. There have been worse acts of vigilantism against “perverts,” but perhaps in jail these guys will experience a few acts of perversion against vigilantes.

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