Chapter one: Face to face
To get to Angola State Prison from Baton Rouge, Louisiana a distance of fifty-six miles you go north on Highway 61, then take a hard left on Highway 66. Or you can get there by committing the most serious of crimes.

For years I had wondered about Kevan Brumfield. He had confessed to killing my mother, Baton Rouge police corporal Betty Smothers, in the early morning of January 7, 1993, in an ambush at a local bank. Two years later a jury deliberated a little more than sixty minutes and decided that Brumfield should die for murdering Mom in the fatal attempted robbery.