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This is the fourth Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.
Leonard Smiley Bigham Sr. established a plantation on the Great Pee Dee River near Pamplico, South Carolina, in the mid-1800s. He was a violent, ruthless tyrant suspected of murdering nine people, but he never served any prison time. He taught his son, Leonard Smiley Bigham Jr., how to succeed by cheating, beating, and killing other people.
Bigham Jr. learned well. He allegedly poisoned his father by giving him a glass of cyanide-laced milk in 1879 so he could take over the plantation, and in 1887 he became Florence County’s first state senator. Unfortunately for Junior, his wife, Dora, used the same poisoned-milk trick to knock him off.
Before she murdered her husband, Dora bore him five children, who carried on the family tradition of mayhem and murder, recounted in J. A. Zeigler’s The Last of the Bighams. All in all, the Bigham clan was linked to nearly 20 murders, and they may have killed even more people. Anyone who got in their way, or merely irritated them, had a good chance of being killed, either in a fit of rage or in a coolly planned assassination.
Zeigler, a newspaperman at the Florence Morning News, self-published The Last of the Bighams, subtitled “With illustrations from the album of a strange family who by their own misdeeds have become extinct.” It is at times awkwardly written and riddled with typos (which I’ve kept), but it’s a fascinating page-turner about an evil family with an unbelievable streak of luck in avoiding prison. Zeigler rushed the book out after the sentencing. It’s hastily written, but Zeigler is a colorful, opinionated, and often funny storyteller.
The Bighams committed horrific acts of violence as thoughtlessly as most people make their morning coffee. And they were equal-opportunity murderers, as happy to kill people inside the family as outsiders. The book’s dramatic peak describes a massacre reminiscent of the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones. It concludes with the multiple trials of the murderer, who almost escaped the consequences of his horrendous crimes.
I won’t spoil the story by telling you who the murderer was. But because the book ends with his sentencing, you might want to find out his ultimate fate, which you can do easily with a Google search.
Download the Book Freak Edition
This is the fifth book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club, a paid subscriber benefit. Every month, I take an interesting, obscure public-domain book and turn it into an EPUB and PDF ebook, with a short introduction.
The link to the Deep Cuts edition of The Last of the Bighams is below.
If you’re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5/month or $45/year). Join the club here. And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.org, and I’ll comp you...
11/6/26
