Shortly after noon on Sunday, February 2nd, 2003, Lanny Tucker of Greensburg, Ky., was escorted into the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women in Pewee Valley, Kentucky.
He was not alone. Nine other residents of Greensburg accompanied him. They were there to present a play, Highway to Heaven, which Tucker had written. Inside a chapel packed with prisoners, the amateur actors performed under the watchful eyes of armed guards.
Highway to Heaven was a highlight of 26 plays written by Tucker from 1994 until 2015. These plays were a mixture of religious and historical fiction. Nine were performed in the historical courthouse on the Greensburg Square. Fondly referred to locally as the Old Courthouse, the building was completed in 1804.
The play Deeds of Murder was based upon a local robbery and murder which occurred in 1838. This play featured a trial in the same building as the original trial. One prop was a hanging gallows, still in working condition. As the condemned man stood waiting, the trap door sprung open. The audience held their breath as the squeaking door swung back and forth.
In 2016, Tucker turned his full attention to books. The first result was Harp’s Head. In this historical fiction novel, Micajah Harp and Wiley Harp, called Big Harp and Little Harp, are the country’s first recorded serial killers .They are known to have murdered at least 30 people in 1779.
After the two separated, Little Harp was caught and hanged. Big Harp was eventually caught in western Kentucky, shot dead, and decapitated. His head was displayed on a pike at a crossroads, twenty miles south of Henderson, Kentucky. For more than sixty years, the site was identified on Kentucky maps as Harp’s Head.
Tucker’s book takes place during the Civil War in Greensburg. In addition to the mayhem of war, and in the midst of people flocking to town to attend a scheduled hanging, dead bodies of residents are being found in creeks, their chests split open and filled with rocks—the same way Big Harp had left his victims sixty years earlier.
One man who was a member of the 1799 posse is still living (a flashback sequence depicts the actual events). He was a witness to Big Harp’s death, his beheading. And he knows what has to be done to kill Big Harp again.
Tucker has previously written two books pertaining to Green County history, History Among Us in 2007 and Osceola – the Town the River Claimed in 2010. History of Green County, Kentucky, is his third work about his native county.
Recommended Article: Lanny Tucker – My Love of History
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