Coweta County is a county located in the west central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is part of Metro Atlanta. As of the 2020 census, the population was 146,158. The county seat is Newnan.
Newnan is a city in Metro Atlanta and the county seat of Coweta County, Georgia, about 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Atlanta. Its population was 42,549 at the 2020 census, up from 33,039 in 2010.
Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, was an American outlaw and gunfighter of the Old West who is alleged to have killed 21 men before he was shot and killed at the age of 21. He is also known for his involvement in New Mexico's Lincoln County War, during which he allegedly committed three murders.
Sam Hose was an African American man who was tortured and murdered by a white lynch mob in Coweta County, Georgia, after being accused of rape by the mob.
John Peters Ringo, known as Johnny Ringo, was an American Old West outlaw loosely associated with the Cochise County Cowboys in frontier boomtown Tombstone, Arizona Territory. He took part in the Mason County War in Texas during which he committed his first murder. He was arrested and charged with murder. He was affiliated with Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan, Ike Clanton, and Frank Stilwell during 1881–1882. He got into a confrontation in Tombstone with Doc Holliday and was suspected by Wyatt Earp of having taken part in the attempted murder of Virgil Earp and the ambush and death of Morgan Earp. Ringo was found dead with a bullet wound to his temple which was ruled a suicide. Modern writers have advanced various theories attributing his death to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Frank Leslie or Michael O'Rourke.
William Brocius, better known as Curly Bill Brocius, was an American gunman, rustler and an outlaw Cowboy in the Cochise County area of the Arizona Territory during the late 1870s and early 1880s. His name is likely an alias or nickname, and some evidence links him to another outlaw named William "Curly Bill" Bresnaham, who was convicted of an 1878 attempted robbery and murder in El Paso, Texas.
William Yates Atkinson, was the 55th Governor of Georgia from 1894 to 1898.
Mayhayley Lancaster was an American lawyer, political activist, midwife and teacher best known for having participated in two of Georgia's most high-profile murder trials, involving defendants Leo Frank in Marietta and John Wallace in Coweta County. She was involved in Leo Frank's defense and in the Wallace case as a witness for the prosecution.
On May 16, 1918, a plantation owner was murdered, prompting a manhunt which resulted in a series of lynchings in May 1918 in southern Georgia, United States. White people killed at least 13 black people during the next two weeks. Among those killed were Hazel "Hayes" Turner and his wife, Mary Turner. Hayes was killed on May 18, and the next day, his pregnant wife Mary was strung up by her feet, doused with gasoline and oil then set on fire. Mary's unborn child was cut from her abdomen and stomped to death. Her body was then repeatedly shot. No one was ever convicted of her lynching.
Gary Nelson was an American television and film director. He directed many television series, including Get Smart, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Patty Duke Show, Gilligan's Island and Happy Days. In addition, Nelson directed five feature films, including Disney's Freaky Friday (1976), and many television movies, including Murder in Coweta County starring Johnny Cash and Andy Griffith.
Feuds in the United States deals with the phenomena of historic blood feuding in the United States. These feuds have been numerous and some became quite vicious. Often, a conflict which may have started out as a rivalry between two individuals or families became further escalated into a clan-wide feud or a range war, involving dozens—or even hundreds—of participants. Below are listed some of the most notable blood feuds in United States history, most of which occurred in the Old West.
Rangers of Fortune is a 1940 American Western film directed by Sam Wood. The plot revolves around three heroes, played by Fred MacMurray, Albert Dekker, and Gilbert Roland, as they battle a ruthless land baron who is intent on driving out small ranchers and settlers. Patricia Morison co-stars.
The Bisbee massacre occurred in Bisbee, Arizona, on December 8, 1883, when six outlaws who were part of the Cochise County Cowboys robbed a general store. Believing the general store's safe contained a mining payroll of $7,000, they timed the robbery incorrectly and were only able to steal between $800 and $3,000, along with a gold watch and jewelry. During the robbery, members of the gang killed five people, including a lawman and a pregnant woman. Six men were convicted of the robbery and murders. John Heath, who was accused of organizing the robbery, was tried separately and sentenced to life in prison. The other five men were convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.
Margaret Anne Barnes was an American writer born in Newnan, Georgia.
The lynching of Marie Thompson of Shepherdsville took place in the early morning on June 15, 1904, in Lebanon Junction, Bullitt County, Kentucky, for her killing of John Irvin, a white landowner. The day before Thompson had attempted to defend her son from being beaten by Irvin in a dispute; he ordered her off the land. As she was walking away from him, he attacked her with a knife and she killed him in self-defense with a razor. She was arrested and put in the county jail.
On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.
The Jenkins County riot of 1919 took place on Sunday, April 13, 1919, two white police officers were killed at a traffic stop. In response, several buildings were burned in the black community and at least four people were killed.
The lynching of Paul Reed and Will Cato occurred in Statesboro, Georgia on August 16, 1904. Five members of a white farm family, the Hodges, had been murdered and their house burned to hide the crime. Paul Reed and Will Cato, who were African-American, were tried and convicted for the murders. Despite militia having been brought in from Savannah to protect them, the two men were taken by a mob from the courthouse immediately after their trials, chained to a tree stump, and burned. In the immediate aftermath, four more African-Americans were shot, three of them dying, and others were flogged.
A series of George Floyd protests took place in Georgia, United States, following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. 11 consecutive days of protests and rallies occurred in Atlanta through June 8, 2020. Through July 2020, protests occurred in twenty various cities and communities in the state.
Murder in Coweta County is a 1983 American made-for-television drama film starring Johnny Cash and Andy Griffith. It originally aired on February 15, 1983 on CBS. It is based on actual events of a murder in Coweta County in April 1948 committed in Coweta County in the U.S. state of Georgia.
